Belarus is a small Eastern-European country that borders Russia. This former Soviet Bloc state is known for its breathtaking architecture, turbulent politics, and now for its effort to outlaw most of the Internet. A new law set to go into effect on January 6th would make it illegal for citizens and residents of Belarus to access domains or services based outside the nation.
Sometimes talking it out just doesn’t work. Even though virtually all of the major tech companies and publications are up in arms about the over-reaching and Internet-choking effects of SOPA, the proposed act still has a lot of proponents on Capitol Hill. (ReadWriteWeb suggests following the money to figure out why.) But the technorati isn’t entirely helpless; in fact, some of the biggest websites around are tossing around the possibility of a coordinated blackout to drive the point home. No Google searches, no Facebook Likes and no Paypal transfers would certainly attract attention from even non-geeks.
New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman this week announced a $553 million multi-state settlement with seven major technology corporations accused of illegally conspiring with each other to artificially inflate prices for liquid crystal display (LCD) screens used in a variety of consumer and business applications, including televisions, computer monitors, and laptop computers.
The torrent watching website YouHaveDownloaded.com is still astounding us with its hypocrisy-revealing powers. A new search of the site, which tracks IP addresses pulling copyrighted material from a few public BitTorrent trackers, confirms that the U.S. House of Representatives is quite the hotbed of piracy at the same time it’s working to pass the much-maligned Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). 
For about four years, technology blogger Noah Kravitz worked for PhoneDog, a mobile phone website. During that time, he also tweeted under the handle @PhoneDog_Noah. A little over a year ago, Kravitz left PhoneDog and changed his handle to @noahkravitz. At the time he had 17,000 followers. Now PhoneDog is suing, claiming that Kravitz absconded with its Twitter subscribers despite the account belonging to Kravitz.
Apple on Tuesday was fined 900,000 euros (about $1.2 million) by Italy's Antitrust Authority following an investigation into complaints of "unfair commercial practices" relating to its retail stores. The company's first retail store opened in Italy in 2006 in Ponte di Nona, and now there are nine stores in all located in various parts of the country.
The movie studio the made the Best Picture-winning film “The Hurt Locker” made some waves nearly two years ago when it started filing mass lawsuits against people it claims pirated the film. The goal was to extort settlements from defendants, not to go to court. The case has come to an unsatisfying end for Voltage Pictures as it could not subpoena records fast enough to match names to IP addresses. Although the case is over, some individuals are still being harassed by lawyers for Voltage. 
Anybody who knows anything about tech knows that the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act sucks and would break the Internet, to put it in a nutshell. That’s why so many geeks find Go Daddy’s support for the act …disappointing (to say the least). We told you yesterday that Go Daddy was facing a boycott slash mass exodus from irate techies for the company’s vocal SOPA support, and apparently, the prospect of losing tons of domain registrations makes businessmen reconsider their political positions quickly. Today, Go Daddy announced it was withdrawing its support for SOPA.
Shares of Rambus stock rallied on Thursday after the technology licensing company announced it signed a patent licensing deal with Broadcom, which manufacturers networking and communication integrated circuits for data, voice, and video applications. The agreement absolves Broadcom from any and all previous patent claims made by Rambus.
As the U.S. House pledges to continue pushing for the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) next year, companies supporting the legislation are increasingly coming under fire. Old media like the movie and TV industries are obviously in favor of it, but most tech firms are opposed. One internet heavyweight that is in favor of SOPA is domain registrar GoDaddy. Now that everyone has caught wind of that, many are proposing a "Move Your Domain Away From GoDaddy Day."
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