1. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals said that the world‘s largest software maker was liable for the unauthorized distribution of codec technology, used to compress speech signals into data, in copies of Windows overseas.

2. AT&T lawyers said that the ruling only protected its patent, which covers a program with a speech codec‘‘ that digitizes speech. Congress‘s congressional authority is to protect the rights of U.S. inventors, not U.S. infringers,‘‘ they said.

3. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the world‘s largest software maker was liable for the unauthorized distribution of codec technology, used to compress speech signals into data, in copies of Windows overseas.

4. The picture is generally quite watchable, but it is soft and exhibits some occasionally noticeable video–processing glitches. (Geeks, take note: the movies are streamed with the same VC–1 codec used on Blu–ray Discs and Xbox Live Marketplace‘s video downloads.) We watched video on TVs ranging in size from 1' inches to 50 inches.

5. "PlaysForSure is still a program we‘re going to invest in, we still have a lot of partners there, and for a class of consumers who want to have a handcrafted media experience and maximise their choice, we have an answer," he told the Engadget blog (tinyurl.com/ksgqd). "There‘s another class of consumers that just want digital media, and they just want to be able to go to one store and have it all just plain, dead simple, and don‘t want to know what a codec is." Vendors who had lined up behind PlaysForSure believing it was that simple solution – among them Napster, MTV‘s Urge, Creative and Samsung – may have been surprised.