If the court found Grokster liable for the infringing practices of its users, it could have a chilling effect on other inventors, Breyer and several other justices said. "There?s never evidence at the time when the guy?s sitting in his garage figuring out how to invent the iPod," said Justice David Souter in open court Tuesday.

Supreme Court justices questioned on Tuesday whether the recording industry?s attempts to shut down online file-sharing networks would deter inventors from developing new products like Apple?s iPod music player.

Sony is to make its top 500 films available digitally in the next year. Michael Arrieta, senior vice president of Sony Pictures, said at a US Digital Hollywood conference that it wanted to create an "iTunes" for films. 

Films will be put onto flash memory for mobiles over the next year, said Mr Arrieta, and it will develop its digital download services for films. Movie studios are keen to stop illegal file-sharing on peer-to-peer nets and cash in on digital the download market.

The father of the internet gave an after dinner speech at F2C, persevering through thunderous applause and the occasional comment to describe the next step in the process of evolution of his baby.

Vint Cerf?s Wednesday evening at the Freedom to Connect dinner concerned where the Internet should go in the future. Having designed TCP/IP, the protocol that ties it all together, he is the person to ask about the Internet?s future.

Waltham-based Peppercoin has landed a deal to provide Wurld Media with its Peppercoin Small Transaction Suite payments software to allow Wurld Media to sell legal digital content through Peer Impact, its peer-to-peer (P2P) network.

Using Peppercoin?s software will allow Wurld Media to accept credit and debit cards for small payments, such as individual media downloads. No financial details of the deal were disclosed.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court prodded and probed but rarely showed its hand today in the long-running legal battle between content owners and technology developers.

In questions from the bench, the justices pushed the entertainment industry throughout the morning about its copyright lawsuits stifling innovation while seriously questioning the business models of P2P companies such as Grokster and Morpheus.

It happened years ago. The "KA" appeared, and everyone embraced it. They hugged that "KA" with all their might, hoping it might correct a collapsing technology scene. Then, when the "KA" grew a sore, they dumped it.

The "KA" or killer app was Napster - and on a larger scale P2P software. P2P file-trading started to thrive around the same time that the Nasdaq started to dive. Intel saw P2P as a way to sell more processors and publicly cheered the technology. Sun Microsystems followed suit with the JXTA P2P protocols. A host of smaller software companies crafted flimsy business models around the P2P idea. These players recognized that the time to whine about not having a killer app had passed - one was gyrating right in front of them.

eXeem version 0.23 has been released. This version should fix the slow search and the node problem. For those who were experiencing 5 kB/s limit, even when they were not blocking ads, this should now also be fixed now.

It?s the dilemma of downloading: The guy in the next cubicle is using office bandwidth to download the new J.Lo album using Grokster. But then your mother sends you newspaper clippings of all of those nice-looking people getting arrested for file sharing. You want to have the records without having a record. So, there you are?caught between your greed and a guilt complex.

From its inception, the Internet has thrived on openness and competition. It?s those forces that have allowed it to develop into a hotbed of innovation and emerge as the most powerful communications and commerce medium the world has ever known.

Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear, back to back, two cases whose outcomes will determine whether the Internet continues on this path or veers in a very different direction.

After giving the industry big headaches, icons of file sharing have turned new leaf or gone on to disrupt other businesses.
The mere mention of the early file-sharing icons -- Shawn Fanning, Niklas Zennstr?m or Wayne Rosso -- used to be enough to send top recording industry executives and artists into a tirade.

But times have changed in just a matter of years. All three have moved on. Two of them head companies that offer solutions to online piracy, while one has gone on to disrupt another industry.