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According to a new study (PDF) by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Harvard) and Koleman Strumpf (University of Kansas), file sharing and weaker copyright protections generally benefit societies more than they hurt them. Among other things, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf argue that file sharing has done nothing to deter the production of books, music, and films. The two economists argue that weaker copyright is desirable, as long as it doesn't "lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies to produce new works."

Right after Microsoft launched Bing, we already saw some indications that users were quickly warming up to this new search engine. Just a few days after its launch, Bing had already passed Yahoo as the #2 search engine in the U.S. according to StatCounter. On StatCounter, Bing is now back in the #3 position, though with almost double the market share that Microsoft's Live Search ever had. According to the latest data from comScore, however, Bing's daily 'searcher penetration' has slowly moved up in the last three weeks since the launch and is now at 16.7%.

MLB.com's already wildly successful iPhone app will begin streaming live video of baseball games today. Baseball fans are excited, but there's plenty of reason for even non-sports fans to pay attention to the way the application works. With a $10 price tag that sports fans are apparently happy to pay, this could provide a great model for other struggling media to find an important new revenue stream - and not just because it charges for content.

The emphasis on statistics, the extensive reporting infrastructure that baseball already has built out and the "wow factor" of the iPhone's interface are all things that other established media outlets have an opportunity to emulate.

Socialcast, the enterprise communication and collaboration platform oft-compared to Friendfeed, is making its basic service completely free, with no limit on users and administration capabilities.

This news marks a tidal shift in strategy for the company, since previously only a 10-user version was free, and was $1 per user per month after that. As of today, however, Socialcast will divest itself of subscriptions altogether, making a clean break with the model that competitors Present.ly and Yammer have long used.

Jammie Thomas vs. Capitol is probably the most infamous and longest running illegal file sharing case in the U.S., and while a judge declared a mistrial last September, the two parties met once again this week to begin Thomas' retrial. In almost every other file sharing case, the defendants settled with the RIAA out of court, but when Jammie Thomas was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs on the once incredibly popular Kazaa P2P network in February 2005, she decided to fight back. Since then, the two parties have gone through a trial, conviction, a mistrial, and now the retrial of Thomas is well under way and just entered its second day.

In order to compete with the iPhone, you not only have to have a multi-touch interface and a slew of apps, you also have to offer the music and media that the iPhone provides thanks to its ability to sync with iTunes. For Google's Android mobile OS, the music comes courtesy of Amazon's MP3 Store which is preloaded on G1 phones. But more recently, Palm seemingly trumped Android when they revealed how their new Pre smartphone would bring music to the device: it pretends to be an iPod. Apple surely couldn't have been happy about that news and today, they're letting the world know. The Cupertino-based company has just issued a thinly veiled threat to owners of "unsupported third-party digital media players," stating that the players may not work with newer versions of iTunes. Yep, Palm Pre, they're looking at you.

"Real-time" - as in the "real-time web" - has certainly become the buzzword du jour. It's even possible that the move of web services to support a real-time, immediate flow of information is what will ultimately define the next version of the web...if you're someone who likes to attach version numbers to something that's in as much constant change as today's Internet, that is. Still, it's easy to see the benefits of real-time in action, especially when it comes to disseminating news...as was apparent when the immediacy of Twitter trumped CNN's coverage of the Iranian elections and subsequent riots.

Yet exactly how a company should integrate "real-time" into their service is something that's not always easy to grasp. It's clear that Facebook, for one, is still trying to figure it out.

On Monday, Wired held its first-ever business conference, titled "Disruptive By Design." A stellar cast was on stage and, perhaps more interestingly, in the audience as well. The audience had people you would normally see on stage, like Mary Meeker and Tim O'Reilly. Conde Nast, the new owner of Wired, seems to be recognizing that the old prophecy (long known to readers here) "the geek shall inherit the earth" has finally come to pass. This event was about geeky tech stuff really changing the world.

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

There are many books and countless blog posts about pitching (to both customers and investors). All we can hope to do here is, (1) put the pitch into some perspective, and (2) abstract the few key things that will help you when you are on stage. Most entrepreneurs are passionate about a particular market or technology, and putting a sales hat on does not come naturally to them. That is okay. Substance matters way more. But you can ruin a great opportunity if you mess up your pitch.

A new service called Sub.DiggerPlus vastly improves the user experience for social news mega-site Digg and its social networking features. The service shows a Digg user's friends' link submissions in an attractive slideshow of live pages inside a frame. Digg's own view of friends' submissions is cluttered with extra pageviews and not a lot of fun to use. Sub.DiggerPlus could make users want to make more friends and increase small group engagement with Digg, something the social networking feature of the site has always aimed for but never really delivered. So what's the catch?