The 34-page ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson was a blow to recording companies and movie studios who had sought to stem the illegal copying and distribution of their copyright works.

The decision, if it survives appeal, essentially absolves Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc. of liability. Grokster distributes file-sharing software by that name, and StreamCast distributes Morpheus. The ruling does not apply to a third and more popular service, Kazaa from Sharman Networks Ltd.

Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, had planned to talk about the social implications of millions of cell phones and peer-to-peer connected PCs, but switched topics at the last minute to deliver a more urgent message to the hundreds of technologists in the conference audience.

He told the assembled programmers and developers to lobby politically for their right to innovate, but also to figure out ways to move around political and legislative barriers.

"What you know that they don't is that you can build technologies that will be as astonishing in a few years as wireless and the Internet is now," he said. "Defend your freedom to innovate."

I was struck by the MPAA's view, bluntly expressed by Brad, that the role for analog outputs was to support "legacy" equipment. Apparently, all future innovation will have to rely on the DRM-hobbled digital outputs. This is a major change from the status quo that has given us innovations like the VCR, where analog outputs not only supported legacy devices, but were generally available to support innovative products not yet imagined.

Edelman and the ACLU tried to force Judge Sterns into confronting the Constitutional issue, but he ducked it except for the statement that "there is no plausible constitutional [sic] interest that Edelman can assert that outweighs N2H2's right to protect its copyrighted property from an invasive and destructive trespass . . . ."

This is the only sentence in the entire opinion which goes to the underlying merits of the ACLU's claim that the relevant part of the DMCA is unconstitutional, but what does this mean in serious legal terms? Honestly, I have no idea. It barely makes sense.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has opposed the DMCA as being overly restrictive on free speech and the fair-use rights of consumers, said Rocci was one of the first people to be sent to prison for violating the DMCA.

He was charged with importing and selling about 450 Enigmah "mod" chips, after-market processors designed to be attached to the Xbox's motherboard and circumvent its security measures.

Rocci had faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $500,000.

Under pressure from powerful religious parties, Owais Leghari, the information technology minister, last month ordered the Pakistan Telecommunications Co. Ltd. to filter porn sites. Filtering began 10 days ago, said Ather Javed Sufi, a company spokesman.

He said 1,800 sites had been blocked by Sunday. The company regulates private Internet service providers who use its lines.

The US has not yet been targeted, because reports indicate that American consumers are far less tolerant of the system.

The record companies, on the other hand, love the idea and most major labels are using the technology.