RIAA decides to stop piracy lawsuits

In today's podcast: RIAA decides to stop piracy lawsuits; Qimonda gets bailout package; and Lenovo offers laptop with two screens.
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In a surprise about-face, the Recording Industry Association of America said Friday that it will no longer pursue its controversial legal strategy of filing large numbers of lawsuits against individuals for alleged music piracy. But the trade group isn't throwing in the towel on its antipiracy campaign. In a brief document explaining its decision, the RIAA said it now plans to work more closely with ISPs to identify alleged copyright infringers and try to persuade them to stop. Under the so-called graduated response program, the RIAA would notify participating ISPs when it discovers customers of theirs that are engaging in what it claims are illegal downloading activities.

The global bailout of DRAM chip makers moved forward on Sunday, with Qimonda announcing a [euro]325 million, or US$452.3 million, financing deal with three parties; the German state of Saxony, a financial institution in Portugal, and majority shareholder Infineon Technologies. The financial package, which includes a loan of [euro]150 million from the state of Saxony, a [euro]100 million loan from an unnamed financial institution in Portugal and a [euro]75 million loan from Infineon, is aimed at giving Qimonda a chance to revamp its finances and finish ramping up new production technology to volume levels.

Lenovo Group Friday announced the release of a ThinkPad laptop that takes the "desktop replacement" category of notebook PCs to a new level. The ThinkPad W700ds appears to be the first laptop ever to sport two LCD screens -- a 17-inch primary and a 10.6-inch secondary screen. The souped-up "mobile workstation," as Lenovo calls it, also comes with customers' choice of quad-core Intel Core 2 processors and Nvidia Quadro mobile graphics CPU with as many as 128 cores. It also comes with as much as 8GB of DDR3 memory and a pair of hard drive/solid-state drive bays for up to 960GB of storage.

Shanghai police have detained a woman, identified only by her surname Huang, for allegedly filming herself having sex and then posting the video on the Internet, where it became a sensation among Chinese Internet users. Shanghai police said Huang's video, called 'East Building Kappa Girl,' first appeared online sometime before the end of October and spread quickly among Chinese Internet users. The name of the video is an apparent reference to the sportswear section of a Shanghai department store where Huang worked. Huang hoped to capitalize on her notoriety by selling interviews and advertising space on her blog. For example, Huang offered to give interviews for 30,000 yuan, or US$4,364,

...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.