Ailing Jobs dragged to court

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was ordered by a US judge to testify in an anti-trust lawsuit that alleges the company prevented music files sold by competitors from playing on its iPods, states The Washington Post.

Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple since January, can be deposed for no more than two hours, according to the court order issued by US magistrate judge Howard R Lloyd, in San Jose.

The court ruled that Jobs has “unique, non-repetitive, firsthand knowledge” of the issues and must testify. The magistrate denied requests from the plaintiffs to question Jobs on other matters related to the case.

An agreement between Google and publishers over the Web firm's publication of books online has been blocked by a US court, reports the BBC.

The Web giant has scanned millions of books and made them available online via its eBooks platform. Google had negotiated the deal to settle a six-year-old class action suit claiming infringement of copyright.

But the New York court said the deal would "simply go too far", giving Google an unfair competitive advantage.

Mozilla released version 4.0 of its popular open source Web browser Firefox yesterday, reveals Computing.co.uk.

However, Mozilla also had to release an update at the weekend to patch two issues, which Mozilla director Mike Beltzner said "have caused us to take two very small, very isolated fixes in order to better protect Firefox 4 users".

The release comes a week after archrival Microsoft unveiled Internet Explorer 9.0, and two weeks after Google released version 10 of its Chrome browser.

TalkTalk and BT will head to the High Court today in the hope of overturning the Digital Economy Act after months of heated debate between Internet service providers, rights holders and the UK government, notes V3.co.uk.

The Act was passed in the wash-ups ahead of the general election last April, but was subsequently challenged by the two firms over several issues including a belief that it is incompatible with wider EU law.

This challenge was upheld in November and is now subject to a judicial review that will run from 23 to 25 March.