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Fourteen news organizations, including The Associated Press and The New York Times Co., are urging a federal appeals court to allow online streaming of a hearing in a music downloading lawsuit the recording industry filed against a Boston University graduate student.

The brief filed Thursday in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals argues that allowing webcasting of the Feb. 24 hearing is in the public interest, and is in keeping with camera access already granted in the courts.

The Recording Industry Association of America is appealing a Boston judge’s decision to allow the webcast, which it says goes against federal court guidelines on cameras and threatens its ability to get a fair trial.

“It is hard to imagine a hearing more deserving of public scrutiny through the same technological medium that is at the heart of this litigation,” the news organizations said in their brief to the appeals court.

The copyright infringement lawsuit is part an effort by the RIAA to stop online music sharing. Since 2003, it has filed civil lawsuits against about 35,000 people who allegedly swapped songs online.

Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor representing Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum, is challenging the constitutionality of the lawsuits.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner approved Nesson’s request to allow a courtroom video service to transmit the hearing to Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which would stream it unedited on its Web site with free access. Gertner has said the RIAA also can subscribe to the video feed and stream it on a Web site of its choosing under the same conditions.

New organizations argued in their brief there was “nothing inherently harmful” in camera access to oral arguments, and countered the RIAA’s claim that online streaming could be manipulated, saying the potential to edit video is no different from the potential to edit transcripts or a reporter’s own notes. The news groups said the webcast would allow for more accurate reporting.

The news groups filing the brief also included Courtroom Television Network, Dow Jones & Co., Gannett Co. Inc., The Hearst Corp., Incisive Media, National Public Radio, NBC Universal Inc., Radio-Television News Directors Association, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, The E.W. Scripps Co., Tribune Co., and Washington Post Digital.

Irish Internet provider Eircom has agreed to disconnect users who download music illegally from the Web in a settlement with four major record companies that Irish media said was the first of its kind in the world.

The record companies — EMI, Sony, Universal and Warner — had wanted Eircom to install software from a U.S. firm to detect the “fingerprint” of copyrighted music files being sent on its network.

Eircom, which feared the software would have interfered with its broadband service and could break privacy laws, instead pledged to disconnect users who continue to download illegally after two warnings.

As part of the settlement reached after proceedings in an Irish court on Wednesday, the companies agreed to supply Eircom with the IP addresses of people they detect illegally uploading or downloading copyrighted works on a “peer-to-peer” basis.

Peer-to-peer sites like Napster, which allow anyone to share songs for free on the Web, became a headache for the music industry as the Internet gained popularity in the late 1990s.

The industry successfully beat Napster’s song-swap service in court but music piracy continued to cripple the business, sending CD sales plummeting.

“High Court proceedings … have been settled on an amicable basis with both sides expressing satisfaction with the outcome,” Eircom said in a joint statement with the record companies.

“The record companies have agreed that they will take all necessary steps to put similar agreements in place with all other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Ireland,” said Eircom, which is majority owned by Australia’s Babcock & Brown Capital and ranks itself as Ireland’s biggest telecommunications supplier.

The head of the Irish Recorded Music Association said he was happy with the settlement.

“It’s something we’ve had to work together to make sure this got to a stage where we can deal with what is an enormous difficulty within the Irish and worldwide record business,” Willie Kavanagh, who is also managing director of EMI Ireland, told state television RTE.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last month abandoned mass lawsuits against Internet users who steal music and will instead work with Internet Service Providers to discourage piracy.

The RIAA, which represents major U.S. record labels, said it would have the ISPs send warning notices to users who illegally download music files.

Sonatype is introducing on Thursday an enhanced, commercial version of its Nexus repository manager for the open-source Apache Maven software build manager.

Serving as a GUI for Maven, Nexus Professional adds capabilities for security, authentication, procurement management, and staging and promotion, Sonatype said. Software development teams can control software components and external dependencies in the software development cycle.

[ For perspectives on code maintenance, see "Avoiding the high cost of bad code." ]

“What Maven offers is a repository that keeps track of all the components and their descriptions, and now it becomes very simple to build software from these components,” said Mark de Visser, Sonatype CEO.?? “What is needed once people become invested in Maven is a toolset that helps them manage the artifacts, the components that they put in the repository.”

An LDAP authentication realm in Nexus Professional authenticates users against an LDAP server and maps roles to LDAP groups. Users also can augment LDAP group membership with Nexus-specific user-role mapping, according to Sonatype.

Procurement capabilities provide control over what artifacts are allowed into a repository from external and internal sources. This provides an additional layer of security and management for code, Sonatype said.

Staging enables development of a staging repository to manage artifact promotion from the staging repository to the release repository. This serves as a workflow for managing software releases.

Features maintained from the open-source Nexus repository manager include a rich UI for managing repositories, role-based access control, a REST-based service architecture boosting integration patterns, and full indexing and searching.??

Nexus Professional is applicable to Java, Ruby, and Eclipse development. Microsoft Windows development capabilities are not yet supported, but the product is moving in that direction, DeVisser said.

Available now, Nexus Professional costs $2,995 per server pear year.

Intel Corp. appears to be playing it safe with an ugly first-quarter forecast.

The chip maker reported Thursday that profit plunged 90 percent and sales slipped 23 percent during the last three months of the year, matching analysts’ subdued estimates.

Wall Street was braced for the bad news: Intel had lowered its fourth-quarter guidance twice, including once just last week, warning that weaker-than-expected PC demand was hammering down demand for its microprocessors.

So what about 2009? Intel said it doesn’t know when demand will pick back up, so the Santa Clara-based company set the bar low and offered first-quarter guidance at the low end of what analysts were expecting.

Intel said it 2009 sales will likely be around $7 billion, which translates to a decline of more than 25 percent from the first quarter of 2008. Gross profit margin should also sink sharply, falling from more than 50 percent of sales to the low-40 percent range, it said.

Gross profit is a key measure of how well a company is controlling its costs, but falling demand, heavy investment in factory upgrades and big costs for running factories at less than full throttle will all take their toll on Intel’s bottom line.

Intel said the financial crisis has made it so difficult to predict revenue that the company wouldn’t offer a precise estimate. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters were expecting $7.3 billion in sales, on average, but estimates ranged from $6.6 billion to as high as $9.3 billion.

The profit forecast was below many estimates, but was good enough to send Intel’s shares up 3.8 percent in after-hours trading.

“I don’t think they’re good numbers, but they’re good numbers to start from,” said Cody Acree, senior semiconductor analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. “We all knew they would be bad, and that they’d come down, but they’ve set a base to work from.”

Intel’s Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith said in an interview that computer-makers’ inventory levels fell in the fourth quarter and continued falling into the first quarter, which means they’re not buying as many new chips. He said Intel’s product lineup positions the company well to take advantage when demand starts rising again, but Smith cautioned that no one knows yet when that might be.

“It’s very difficult to precisely call when we’ll hit the bottom,” he said.

In the fourth quarter, Intel’s net income was $234 million, or 4 cents per share, compared with $2.3 billion, or 38 cents per share, in the year-ago period.

Profits were squeezed by a freeze in information-technology spending and a shift toward low-margin processors for a class of little laptops known as “netbooks.” A big reason for the severity of the fourth-quarter drop, though, was a $1 billion writedown of the value of Intel’s investment in Internet provider Clearwire Corp.

Clearwire specializes in a new type of wireless broadband technology called WiMax that Intel is building into its chips, and has stumbled on fears the credit crunch will derail its ambitious network buildout plans.

Intel’s sales were $8.2 billion, a 23 percent shortfall from last year.

For all of 2008, Intel earned $5.3 billion, 24 percent lower than a year ago, on sales of $37.6 billion, a 2 percent decline.

PC demand is sinking fast, which takes its toll on Intel because Intel owns 80 percent of the market for microprocessors, the brains of personal computers. Market research firms IDC and Gartner Inc. reported this week that PC sales growth in the fourth quarter was the worst it’s been in six years, with the slump expected to drag out until possibly 2010.

Bobby Burleson, managing director of equity research for Canaccord Adams, called Intel’s profit forecast disappointing, but said it likely indicates that Intel has “come clean with what sounds like a worst-case scenario for this year.”

One area where Intel shines is controlling its manufacturing costs, where it enjoys a big advantage over smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Intel’s quicker transition than AMD to 45-nanometer manufacturing technology, which shrinks the size of the chips’ circuitry, has made each chip cheaper to produce. That has helped cushion the blow of falling sales.

AMD — which has lost billions of dollars over the past two years, recently changed CEOs, and is spinning off its factories to save money — warned that its fourth-quarter sales will likely come in 33 percent lower than last year. AMD reports quarterly results Jan. 22.

During the regular trading session before the earnings report, Intel stock rose 21 cents, 1.6 percent, to close at $13.29. The shares hit $13.85 in after-hours trading.