Microsoft has announced that it has launched a preview of Skype for Outlook.com starting in the UK. The service will be made available in the U.S. in the next few weeks prior to being released to the rest of the world. Read More

Google has announced that the Acer, HP and Samsung Chromebooks will be rolling out in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. In the U.S., the Samsung Chromebook is at the top of Amazon’s best-selling laptop list for the last 149 days, since the time of its launch. Read More

Apple® today announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded more than 25 billion songs from the iTunes Store® (www.itunes.com), making it the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store. Read More

Liberty Global, Inc. and Virgin Media Inc. today announced that they have entered into an agreement, subject to shareholder approvals, pursuant to which Liberty Global will acquire Virgin Media in a stock and cash merger valued at approximately $23.3 billion. Read More

After 3 years, German YouTube viewers are still unable to watch certain music videos due to a copyright dispute. GEMA, Germany's music royalties authority, declared today that they broke their negotiations with YouTube, claiming that YouTube has violated their copyright laws. Read More

Los Angeles – Following the election of a member of Sweden’s Pirate Party to the European Parliament, Germany’s PiratenPartei has gained its own seat in the German Federal Parliament, TorrentFreak reported. Citing "concerns about Internet censorship," Jorg Tauss — who has been a member of Germany’s parliament since 1994 — left the Social Democrats Party to join the German Pirate Party.

  Related Links:

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-enters-the-german-parliament-090621/

Los Angeles – Rapidshare, a free file-hosting service that has come under fire for hosting pre-release copyrighted material, has begun sharing personal information of its users in Germany with authorities there, resulting in at least one uploader’s home being raided so far, TorrentFreak reported.

Among other albums, Metallica’s "Death Magnetic" was made available on Radipshare by an anonymous user on the day before its official release.

TorrentFreak cited the German local Gulli, which reported that copyright holders there are citing the law they have used to compel ISPs to [...].