File-sharing sites haven t had a great year, especially in court, but on Wednesday they received a smidgen of good news.

The Motion Picture Association of America asked a federal court to rule that Isohunt was liable for copyright violations committed by its users, but the judge in the case was unconvinced. In his order, U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson said the studios had yet to prove that the Isohunt s users had broken U.S. law.

Lawyers for the MPAA, the trade group representing the six major Hollywood film studios, are trying to convince the judge that Isohunt encouraged and contributed to the infringing activity of users. Wilson gave the MPAA until Sept. 15 to file a brief that convinces him direct infringement at the site was committed by those in the U.S. Apparently, Wilson has questions about whether U.S. residents have pirated content using Isohunt.

United States copyright laws do not reach acts of infringement that take place entirely abroad, Wilson, wrote in his order.

A spokeswoman for the MPAA did not immediately have a response.

The significance of the judge s order, at least from the point of view of Ira Rothken, Isohunt s attorney, is that MPAA s investigators have struggled to draw specific examples of infringement occurring in the U.S.

On the heels of Sony reducing the price of its PlayStation 3 and announcing the PlayStation 3 Slim, Microsoft announced Thursday that it too will be dropping the price of its console.

Starting Friday, the Xbox 360 Elite will be priced at $299, $100 cheaper than its current price. The Xbox 360 Pro, which currently retails for $299 will be priced at $249 starting Friday. Once retailers sell through their entire stock of Xbox 360 Pro units, that SKU will no longer be offered by the hardware maker.

Going forward, Microsoft will offer only the $299 Xbox 360 Elite with its 120GB hard drive, and the $199 Xbox 360 Arcade which comes bundled with five games and a 256MB memory unit.

Sirius XM Radio unveiled a dock on Wednesday that lets iPhone users listen to premium satellite radio programing, including shock jock Howard Stern, a feature missing from previous iPhone software.

The $120 XM SkyDock turns Apple Inc’s iPhone or iPod Touch into a satellite radio receiver.

The dock, which will go on sale in the next few months, is powered through a car’s cigarette adapter. It comes with technology that eases installation by tapping into the car’s radio system. It also allows users to flag songs they hear and buy them via Apple’s iTunes software.

LendingTree, which allows prospective borrowers to get quick offers from multiple lenders, claims Google is about to get into the same business.

A LendingTree lawsuit against a separate technology provider claims that it has learned Google plans to launch such a service later this month or in early September. The lawsuit claims that LendingTree has received screen shots - pictures of a computer screen - showing a trial version of Google’s service that indicate Google will give customers loan offers and contact information for lenders.

Google Inc. issued a written statement Wednesday saying it is “working on a small ad unit test” involving a limited number of mortgage-related searches.

“We have a number of experiments going on at any one time, but we don’t speculate on future product development,” the company said.

Google has made several moves that lead it away from its core business of selling ads alongside Internet search results. Last month it altered its popular Google Maps page to highlight its real estate search tools.

Other experiments have included an operating system for mobile devices, and Google Voice, which gives people an additional phone number that’s not tied to any one phone line. Earlier this year it unveiled a PowerMeter that homeowners can use to track energy use.

A Google move into the lending referral business would be one more step away from its core business, said Rob Enderle, an analyst for the Enderle Group.

“It could represent a solid threat to LendingTree, and a distraction for Google,” Enderle said.

Mininova has lost its civil dispute with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringement, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

People who repeatedly download copyright-protected films and music could have their Internet connection cut off under proposed laws the British government unveiled Tuesday to tackle illegal file-sharing.

Treasury Minister Stephen Timms said that previous plans, which would only have restricted users’ broadband speed, did not go far enough. That potential punishment remains under the new proposal, but is accompanied by the possibility of blocking offenders’ access to download sites as well as banning them from the Internet altogether.

The Nokia Booklet 3G is a Windows-based, netbook-style device that packs and Intel Atom processor and weighs 1.25 kilograms.

The Booklet’s aluminium body houses a 10-inch glass screen (HD Ready), an SD card reader, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G, HSDPA (3.5G), Wi-Fi, an HDMI port for HD video out and a front facing camera for video calling. According to Nokia the Booklet will provide 12 hours of battery life, which means you have plenty of time to browse the Web, navigate home and make a few video calls.

Apple announced that Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard® users for $29.

Following the earlier court defeat for Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter and the pending civil action taken by several Hollywood studios, the Swedish authorities have now ordered The Pirate Bay to be disconnected from the Internet. The site’s bandwidth suppliers have been threatened with a large fine. The site is completely offline.

As expected, The Pirate Bay site relocated and is back online (DNS still has to update for some people). A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that they “got a new connection to the net.” The tracker is still down and is expected to be fully operational tomorrow morning, we were told. Ever since their servers were raided back in 2006 they were prepared for takedown attempts like this.

Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Interoperability team is introducing on Friday an open source project to bridge PHP and Microsoft’s .Net programming model, Microsoft representatives said.

The company’s PHP Toolkit for ADO.Net Data Services uses REST as a bridge between Microsoft’s software platform and the popular PHP scripting language, said Peter Galli, Microsoft open source community manager, in a blog entry. With the kit, developed by Persistent Systems, PHP developers can more easily take advantage of ADO.Net Data Services, which are a set of features in the .Net Framework for building and consuming data services from the Web. The services previously were referred to as Project Astoria.

The services “expose a wide range of data sources through a RESTful service interface,” Galli said. Full support for ADO.NET Data Services is offered in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 platform.

At design time, the PHP toolkit generates proxy classes based on metadata exposed by ADO.Net Data Services. Developers can call from their code these classes at runtime, for programming against ADO.Net Data Services using local PHP classes.

“Using RESTful services over HTTP, the communication between the PHP application and ADO.Net Data Services is taken care of by the PHP proxy classes and the toolkit libraries, but of course you can look at (or edit) this code,” said Claudio Caldato, Senior Program Manager for Microsoft’s Interoperability Technical Strategy team

U.S. researchers said on Thursday they have found a way to make large-scale flexible display screens that can be stretched to fit the contours of a bus yet are transparent enough so riders can see out windows.

The thin, light screens might be used to make brake light indicators that follow the contours of a car, or health monitors or imaging devices that wrap around a patient like a blanket, said John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose study appears in the journal Science.

He said the large display screens combine the scale and durability of light-emitting diodes, or LED technology, used to make flat, lighted billboards, with the flexibility of screens made using organic — carbon-containing — materials.

Google has enhanced Google Insights for Search, its search term data analysis tool, to help users see into the future.

Now available in 39 languages, Google Insights for Search includes a new forecasting feature that can extrapolate a search term’s future popularity based on its past performance.

For search terms with a lot of historical data, Google Insights for Search can project a likely trend. It’s not a perfect prediction of what’s to come, but it may be useful in certain circumstances.

Google has also added an animated map that allows users to see how search query volume changes over time in specific geographic regions.

Graphs generated using Google Insights for Search can be presented on any Web page or iGoogle page using an embeddable gadget. This is particularly use for tracking the ebb and flow of online discussion about a particular topic.