According to a report on The Wall Street Journal, the Department of Justice has taken notice of eBook publishing and pricing. Federal prosecutors have sent letters to Apple, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins, stating that the Department of Justice is seeking a case for collusion and price-fixing. Aside from potentially reading about a possibly long legal battle, what consumers could expect from this is, intriguingly, lower eBook prices.

Careful readers will recall the news that Oklahoma was considering levying a 1% tax on all “violent” video games. According to the bill’s sponsor, Will Fourkiller (D, pictured left), money raised by the bill would fight childhood obesity by providing outdoor education and also fund efforts to prevent bullying. The bill was defeated in a 5-6 vote in the Oklahoma House Appropriations and Budget Subcommittee on Revenue and Taxation last week.

Despite recent evidence that throttling doesn’t seem to improve network performance, companies are still tightening their grip on your bandwidth. However, a recent court case could make data providers a little nervous. California judge Judge Russell Nadel has ruled in favor of Matt Spaccarelli over AT&T regarding Spaccarelli’s claims that AT&T was throttling his iPhone’s data connection. He walked away with a cool $850, which might only be just the beginning.

On February 21, Korean National Police Agency teamed up with Rovio Entertainment to create a campaign in which Rovio’s iconic Angry Birds can be used as a sort of anger management in a campaign that aims to prevent violence in schools. That’s right, Korea thinks that a video game — even one with the word “Angry” in the title — can actually help prevent violence. I wish I could say more of my own countrymen were equally enlightened.

Picking on the fact that “Happy Birthday” is not in the public domain is a pretty popular fact on which to poke fun, especially considering its popularity and age, and how deeply embedded into society the song is. Even Aaron Sorkin picks on it. Barats & Bereta, creators of digital shorts put up on the YouTubes, have come up with a solution to the age-old problem of “Happy Birthday” not being public domain. Granted, there are many ways around the issue to begin with, but this is an amusing one that’s about “an Egyptian river god who finds a place to sleep atop two sheep and a deer named Harrison, who also happen to be governors of Algiers before the French conquest in 1830.” So, you know. Watch it.

Leigh Van Bryan, a bar manager from Coventry, England, was planning on having a very good time during his trip to these United States last week. In a series of tweets, he announced his intention to party his ever-loving brain out while in the U.S.. His words were, perhaps, a little a crude, but Van Bryan could not possibly have imagined the furor his flippant tweets would earn him. When his plane landed at the Los Angeles International Airport, Van Bryan and his companion Emily Bunting were arrested. For tweeting.

The anti-piracy group BREIN won a victory in the Dutch courts recently, which resulted in the courts ordering the two largest ISPs in the Netherlands, Ziggo and XS4ALL, to block users from accessing the venerable Torrent sharing site Pirate Bay. Hot on the heels of their victory, BREIN requested that ISPs KPN and T-Mobile follow suit. Instead of bowing to their whim, both have declared that they will not block the site and have voiced displeasure at the tactics being used by the anti-piracy group. 

Twitter has gained something of a reputation as being a tool for social change, after its prominence in the disputed Iranian elections in 2009, the Arab Spring of 2011, and as a growing piece of the political discussion in this country. Key to this has been Twitter’s universality; a Tweet from Tehran or Cairo can appear to anyone around the world. Now, Twitter has announced new changes that will allow them to hide tweets in countries with differing interpretations of “freedom of expression.” Yeah, that pretty much sounds like censorship.

The U.S. Supreme Court gave a unanimous ruling today in the case of Antoine Jones, who received a conviction of life in prison after evidence from a GPS tracking device in his car connected him to a house full of money and drugs. That conviction was overturned by a lower cour, and the Supreme Court agreed. The court ruled that GPS devices constitute a search, and as such require a search warrant before being used in an investigation. For those of us concerned about being digitally tailed by the cops, this is a pretty big win.

MegaUpload.com is down, and reports from the Associated Press say that is because the federal government took it down. The federal government has taken down MegaUpload. Yeah. Of course, this takedown comes hand-in-hand with an indictment and charges of piracy. Charges of piracy on the order of $500 million in cost to copyright holders. Intentional or not, the proximity to the SOPA blackouts is probably worth noting.