Judge to consider allowing sales of RealDVD

In today's podcast: Judge to consider allowing sales of RealDVD; Microsoft cuts off access to Messenger in five countries; and number of tech jobs declines in the US.

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A U.S. judge is now considering whether to permit sales of RealDVD, after testimony on a pretrial injunction ended Thursday. That injunction has prevented RealNetworks from selling its DVD software since late September. Judge Marilyn Patel, who also presided over the Napster case in 2001, will decide whether to keep RealDVD off the market pending the outcome of a lawsuit brought by the movie industry. Plaintiffs' lawyers claim the software can be used to make illegal copies of films and that it violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's prohibition on anti-circumvention technology. The case has pitted the technology industry against the major movie studios in a fight over who gets to control how digital movies are used.

Microsoft has stopped offering its Windows Live Messenger service to users in five countries that are subject to U.S. sanctions, the company confirmed Friday. People in Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea no longer have access to Microsoft's free, Web-based instant-messaging service. The U.S. considers each of those countries to be hostile or threatening in some way to its national interests. Microsoft wouldn't comment on why it chose to shut down the service at this time, or how long people in those countries had been able to access Windows Live Messenger. Microsoft said it does not currently do business with those countries.

The number of IT workers in the U.S. has declined steadily since December, a trend that wasn't helped by Hewlett Packard Co.'s announcement last week that it is cutting 6,000 employees. The number of U.S. technology workers peaked last November at 4.058 million, according to the TechServe Alliance (formerly the National Association of Computer Consultants), which analyzes federal labor data on IT-related occupations. By the end of April, the number had declined to 3.87 million, the alliance said. IT recruiters are mostly optimistic that the end of the decline is in sight, though most agree that the IT labor force will continue to shrink through the summer, typically a period of slower hiring because of vacations.

The University of Michigan has become the first library to amend its book scanning deal with Google, following a proposed settlement that Google reached last year with authors and publishers that sued it. As part of the amended deal, other institutions can pay a subscription to access the University of Michigan's digitized books. Since Google will set those fees, the University of Michigan will be able to challenge the fee and the parties will settle any disagreements in arbitration. The agreement follows the proposed settlement deal reached in October between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, which sued Google for copyright violation for scanning books without always getting permission from the copyright owners of the books.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.