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On December 13, 2006, the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the August 8, 2005 grant of summary judgment in favor of AudioQuest, finding that the district court had correctly terminated Monster Cable's January 5, 2004 assertion that AudioQuest's Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) willfully infringed upon Monster's Bias Circuit System (BCS) patent (US Patent No.5,307,416 for Audio Interconnect & Speaker Cable, "Bias Circuit System").

We've written frequently about the lawsuits brought by the recording industry against alleged downloaders, but here's an interesting fact: None of the cases has actually gone to trial yet. Many have been dropped by the labels when it appeared they had targeted the wrong defendants; even more have been settled by defendants intimidated by the $750-per-song damages claimed by the labels. Now an attorney is vigorously seeking a trial—and one of his big arguments is that the labels' math doesn't add up.

HD DVDs and Blu-Ray discs came to market with a digital rights management (DRM) content encryption system called Advanced">http://www.aacsla.com/home">Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Supposedly, AACS was intended to permit greater flexibility than conventional DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) DRM, since it was touted as allowing purchasers, say, to load DVDs onto their media servers or burn downloaded HD purchases to disc.

"Fellas I'm ready to get up and do my thing. I want to get into it man, you know. Like a, like a sex machine man. Moving. Doing it you know. Can I count it off. One!! Two!! Three!!"—"Get Up (I feel like being a) Sex Machine."

For 2007, Home Entertainment Show makes a return engagement to New York City—one of the most popular destinations ever for this event! The venue is the elegant and gracious Grand Hyatt New York Hotel, where the consumer-electronics industry and music lovers alike will descend on May 11–13, 2007 to see and hear the latest high-end home audio and video entertainment products, gaming consoles, imaging products, and more.

Two days after reaching $1.5 million settlements with the states of Texas and California over its knuckleheaded attempt to prevent "unauthorized" use of its CDs, Sony BMG agreed to pay another $4.25 million to an additional 39 states and the District of Columbia in what has become known as "the rootkit debacle."

In an enterprising attempt to serve music lovers via the Internet, Universal Classics has launched Decca">http://www.decca.com/deccaconcerts">Decca Concerts. An unprecedented partnership between the label and some of the world's better-known symphony orchestras, the website gives classical music lovers the ability to download very recent live orchestral performances "from the world's most important musical cities." The performances are generally no more than 10 days old, depending on how much postproduction editing is needed.