AT&T defended its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA before a U.S. Senate committee this morning, saying the combined company will deliver high-speed wireless services to 97 percent of Americans and provide consumer benefits such as fewer dropped calls. “The combination of AT&T and T-Mobile could not possibly derail the powerful forces of competition in one …

A newly launched peer-to-peer trade association has offered to sit down and negotiate with music industry lawyers, while it simultaneously denounced its adversaries as obsolete and “tyrannosaurical.” P2P United, a group of six peer-to-peer businesses, held a coming-out event Monday in Washington, D.C. The lobbying effort is designed to demonstrate to the U.S. Congress that peer-to-peer companies are legitimate enterprises …

It must be a good time to be at the helm of the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA, the primary trade association for the American recording industry with a $27.7 million annual budget, is enjoying a string of recent political and legal victories. In last year’s Grokster case, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned a lower court’s ruling …

A hotly contested wrangle in Congress over how to outlaw file-swapping networks just took a new twist. The U.S. Copyright Office has drafted a new version of the Induce Act that it believes will ban networks like Kazaa and Morpheus while not putting hardware such as portable hard drives and MP3 players on the wrong side of the law. The …

ASPEN, Colo.–Electronics manufacturers and some Internet providers are mounting a counterattack to a copyright bill intended to ban peer-to-peer networks and that could also imperil devices like Apple Computer’s iPod. That measure, called the Induce Act, has been widely panned by the technology industry. Now some groups, including SBC Communications, Verizon Communications and the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), are fighting …

Popular file-trading networks such as Kazaa and Morpheus would be outlawed under a new bill that enjoys broad support from top Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate. Their legislation says “whoever intentionally induces any violation” of copyright law would be legally liable for those violations, a prohibition that would effectively ban file-swapping networks and could also imperil some consumer …

A federal judge has handed a preliminary victory to the recording industry by granting its request to unmask anonymous file swappers accused of copyright infringement. U.S. District Judge Denny Chin ruled Monday that Cablevision, which provides broadband Internet access in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York, can be required to divulge the identities of its subscribers sued over copyright violations. …

The chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary said Thursday that a ban on file-trading networks is urgently required but agreed to work with tech companies concerned that devices like Apple Computer’s iPod would be imperiled. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he intended to move ahead with the highly controversial Induce Act despite objections from dozens of Internet …

In a move that’s alarming technology firms, the U.S. Copyright Office is about to endorse new legislation that would outlaw peer-to-peer networks and possibly some consumer electronics devices that could be used for copyright piracy. Marybeth Peters, the U.S. Register of Copyrights, is planning to announce her support for the measure at a Senate hearing on Thursday. The Induce Act, …

The U.S. Senate on Friday overwhelmingly approved a controversial proposal that would let federal prosecutors file civil lawsuits against suspected copyright infringers, with fines reaching tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The so-called Pirate Act has raised alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer companies, who have been eyeing the recording industry’s lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer …