The Recording Industry Association of America came out as the victor in its legal battle against Usenet.com.

Late yesterday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Harold Baer of the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of the record companies listed in the federal lawsuit against newsgroup provider Usenet.com.

According to court documents (PDF warning), the Usenet service is guilty of direct infringement, inducement of infringement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement. The ruling also said that Usenet.com cannot claim protection under the 1984 Sony Betamax decision which states that companies selling devices cannot be held liable for infringement despite the actions of the buyer.

In addition to the Sony Betamax decision, Usenet.com attempted to find refuge under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 'safe harbor provision' that keeps internet service providers from taking the blame for illegal activities conducted by subscribers. However, the DMCA plea was denied, leaving Usenet.com wide open for prosecution. As reported by CNET, Baer said that Usenet.com failed to understand the difference between Sony selling a Betamax and terminating a relationship with the end-user, and Usenet.com keeping a relationship open with the end-user while also retaining some control over the service.

The RIAA's lawsuit against Usenet.com began back in October 2007, and accused the company behind the newsgroup service of enticing potential subscribers with copyrighted music, and enabling them to download the illegal files via one of its subscription plans. Recently Usenet has been a hot topic for many organizations as of late, and several internet service providers have discontinued newsgroup access to subscribers because of their inability to police child pornography. Because of Usenet's overall worldwide network structure, the RIAA has had trouble tracking down pirated music sources despite its success with peer-to-peer networks.

But now the RIAA celebrates a small victory. 'This decision is another example of courts recognizing the value of copyrighted music and taking action against companies and individuals who are engaging in wide scale infringement,' said Steven M. Marks, the RIAA's executive vice president & general counsel. 'We hope that other bad actors who are engaging in similar activity will take note of this decisive opinion.'

Looking back over the last few years, it seems that RIAA's victorious outcome was inevitable. Usenet.com tactics were questionable, with the judge issuing several counts of discovery misconduct. According to evidence provided by the RIAA, Usenet.com intentionally destroyed evidence on seven hard drives, sent many employees to Europe in order to avoid depositions, and even provided false information. Obviously, the Fargo, North Dakota newsgroup service was clearly hiding something.

The court documents go into further detail, labeling the music companies behind the lawsuit:

This action arises out of allegations of widespread infringement of copyrights in sound recordings owned by Plaintiffs Arista Records LLC; Atlantic Recordings Corporation; BMG Music; Capitol Records, LLC; Caroline Records; Elektra Entertainment Group Inc.; Interscope Records; LaFace Records LLC; Maverick Recording Company; Sony BMG Music Entertainment; UMG Recordings, Inc; Virgin Records America, Inc.; Warner Bros. Records Inc; and Zomba Recording LLC (“Plaintiffs”), copies of which are available for download by accessing a network of computers called the USENET through services provided by Defendants Usenet.com, Inc. (“UCI”), Sierra Corporate Design, Inc. (“Sierra”), and spearheaded by their director and sole  shareholder, Gerald Reynolds (“Reynolds”) (collectively, “Defendants”).  Specifically, Plaintiffs brought this action alleging (1) direct infringement of the Plaintiffs’ exclusive right of distribution under 17 U.S.C. § 106(3); (2) inducement of copyright infringement; (3) contributory copyright infringement; and (4) vicarious copyright infringement.

Yesterday's ruling could spell trouble for other Usenet newsgroup providers. As previously mentioned, ISPs are quickly shutting down access to the twenty-year-old Usenet network, leaving consumers no other choice but to choose external subscription services such as Usenet.com.

3GS is stronger, faster -- but will developers want to make games for it?

The Apple iPhone 3GS doesn't differ greatly from its predecessor, at least not in current functionality. In fact, the 3GS looks almost identical to the 3G model from the exterior. Internally, though, it's an entirely more capable set of hardware.

While the faster chips inside the 3GS won't make your Twitter app any prettier, the upgraded hardware truly shines in games. The 3GS is far more capable in rendering graphics thanks to its new processor and graphics chip. This, however, leaves game developers with a bit of a dilemma.

Naturally, developers like to make games for the largest install base thanks to the audience and the wallets that each member carries. It's a business decision, of course, as there’s no doubt that the added power of the 3GS gives developers a lot more room to play with.

John Carmack, lead programmer at id Software, expressed concerns that the improved capabilities of the latest iPhone model will segment the market into the haves and have-nots.

Inevitably, software advances along with hardware, with one growing in features and the other getting more powerful to support the entire system.

"One, the worry is--and it's still not clear that this will be a problem, [but] left to their own, OS and software companies, whether it's Apple or Microsoft, they tend to just put more and more features into each release," Carmack said to Shacknews in an interview. "And for a given hardware platform, it just gets slower and slower with each new OS update."

As with how it works in many computer systems, more computing power is added to support new software features – which explains the iPhone 3GS. Carmack, normally one to embrace the growth of computing power, said that such an approach is wrong for the iPhone.

"We are trying very, very hard to convince Apple that this not the direction they should be going on the iPhone, because we expect that every time somebody upgrades an iPhone to a 2G to a 3G to a 3GS, the old device becomes an iPod for somebody else, and we think that they stay in play there," Carmack said, adding that he’s more excited "to see Apple have 50 million baseline spec systems out there than the latest and greatest hardware."

That’s not to say that he's not interested in doing new and cool things with the hardware. In fact, he proclaims, "now I am very excited about what I can do from a hardware and graphics standpoint with the 3GS. With vertex fragment shaders and OpenGL 2.0, I'm pretty convinced that I can actually run the MegaTexture id Tech 5 content creation pipeline on there. And I'm not sure what game I want to do that with yet, but the combination of seeing people download 700mb files of Myst on there, and the new capabilities, I could do some mind-blowingly cool stuff on there."

As with the introduction of a new gaming platform, there is always the difficult transition period between generations. Perhaps the difficulties developers are facing with the iPhone is that the next one is here just two years after the original launched, which is a much shorter lifecycle as compared to both consoles and handheld systems.

Now you'll have more choice.

When it comes to console peripherals, few are really as good as the ones of the first party variety. Sure, third party controllers may add programmable features and other functions, but invariably the ones made by the platform holder are the ones people know best.

Part of the reason behind that is because the platform holder has full access to the entire system and its protocols. Whenever there's a change or upgrade to the system software, testing is done first and foremost with the first party accessories.

This may unfairly put third party manufacturers at a disadvantage, but this week Sony announced the expansion of the "Official License Program" to peripheral manufacturers in worldwide. This means that peripheral and accessory manufacturers will "gain access to technical documentations necessary for designing and creating variety of licensed products for PlayStation platforms" including PS3, PS2 and PSP.

Hopefully this will usher in a greater selection of peripherals that will behave (especially when it comes to wireless protocols, even if it is Bluetooth) the same as Sony-made products. This will become even more important once the PlayStation Motion Controller is released and the third party versions follow.

Companies who qualify for the program will be able to brand its products with an "Official Licensed Product" logo, which means that the peripheral should work flawlessly and that Sony will get a cut from its sale.