Pirate Bay Prosecutor Håkan Roswall gave his closing arguments on Monday, saying that the website's four founders built it for the purpose of promoting copyright infringement, and got rich selling ad revenue on the site. While Roswall conceded that that no pirated material technically passed through Pirate Bay's servers, he compared the Pirate Bay's position as a facilitator to past prosecutions of criminal accomplices. Roswall ended his argument by demanding one year in jail for each of the defendants, half of the maximum term. He also asked for fines amounting to The Pirate Bay's gross income from advertising revenue on …

Hollywood can no longer count on DVD sales to be the cash cow it's been in the past, says VentureBeat's MG Siegler. He points out that DVD and Blu-Ray sales "fell off a cliff" in the fourth quarter, which is traditionally the strongest of the year for sales. Meanwhile, movie rentals have remained firm, suggesting perhaps that people are waiting until the shift from DVD to Blu-Ray occurs in a more "meaningful way." That may be one reason, and the recession may be another, but Siegler thinks consumers have stopped buying DVDs thanks to a "larger, and undoubtedly more troubling …

As expected, President Barack Obama on Friday nominated Federal Trade Commissioner Jon Leibowitz as chairman of the federal agency. ClickZ's Kate Kay says the move, if approved by Congress, would have repercussions for the online advertising industry. In a recent address, the FTC Commissioner warned that, "a day of reckoning may be fast approaching" for online advertising. In a statement issued earlier this month along with the agency's revised behavioral advertising principles, Leibowitz said, "The jury is still out about whether (self-regulation) alone will effectively balance companies' marketing and data collection practices with consumers' privacy interests." Leibowitz has refused to …

Microsoft is testing its new search product, codenamed "Kumo." VentureBeat's MG Siegler hopes the long-awaited upgrade to Live Search "performs better than it looks." Reviewing the screen shots obtained by Kara Swisher, who broke the story, Siegler says Kumo looks "like a product that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Who picked this color scheme? Blue, light orange and gray? This looks like the ugly Cleveland Cavaliers' basketball uniforms from the 1990s." In an email to Microsoft staff announcing the test, Satya Nadella, the Senior Vice President in charge of research …

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has a plan to put all cable programming on the Web in places like Hulu, MySpace, Yahoo TV and even YouTube, Ad Age reports. Of course, there's a catch. To get it, you'll have to prove you subscribe to pay TV. "If you want to watch your favorite TV network or shows through broadband on any device -- PCs or mobile -- you can do it as long as you subscribe to any multichannel provider," Bewkes said. "It's a natural extension of the existing model." Dubbed "TV Anywhere," the initiative is intended to be an …