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Score one for Hollywood. RealNetworks agreed this week to settle lawsuits with major movie and TV studios for its RealDVD product, which allows users to copy DVDs onto hard drives.

As part of the settlement, RealNetworks will pay the studios $4.5 million to cover legal costs. In its announcement, RealNetworks said all parties have agree to the "terms of a permanent injunction that will prohibit RealNetworks from distributing or supporting RealDVD or any other technology that enables the duplication of copyrighted content protected by the Content Scramble System, ArccOS or RipGuard."

Score one for Hollywood. RealNetworks agreed this week to settle lawsuits with major movie and TV studios for its RealDVD product, which allows users to copy DVDs onto hard drives.

As part of the settlement, RealNetworks will pay the studios $4.5 million to cover legal costs. In its announcement, RealNetworks said all parties have agreed to the "terms of a permanent injunction that will prohibit RealNetworks from distributing or supporting RealDVD or any other technology that enables the duplication of copyrighted content protected by the Content Scramble System, ArccOS or RipGuard."

Nokia is making Skype available for the Symbian platform. A joint announcement Wednesday by the world's largest handset maker and the maker of the most popular VoIP calling software means that owners of select Nokia devices will be able to make phone calls over Wi-Fi or a mobile data connection at a fraction of the cost for normal calls.

Some owners of Windows 7 machines are complaining that the newest Microsoft operating system may be causing battery problems. Microsoft said it's investigating the issue.

On the Microsoft support site and elsewhere, there are a variety of battery-related complaints, and many commenters believe the cause is Windows 7.

'Related to System Firmware'

The problems include batteries that are prematurely drained or reported to be so, batteries unable to hold a charge, warning lights indicating a battery needs to be replaced before it should need to, and more.

Mozilla released an update Thursday to its popular Firefox browser. According to the Mozilla Foundation, the new version 3.6 -- the latest of what it unabashedly calls "The World's Best Browser" -- offers better performance, better security, and HTML5 support.

This is the first update to the free browser since early summer. Other new features include "browser skins" called Personas, and support for full-screen video and the open-source Web Open Font Format (WOFF).

Windows, Mac, Linux

Androids and Palms are coming to AT&T's mobile-devices lineup, as the company announced it will offer five new devices based on Google's open-source operating system and two devices that use Palm's webOS. The announcement was seen by observers as hedging bets against the day when AT&T might lose its exclusive U.S. contract for Apple's iPhone.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the nonprofit organization that created a radical, inexpensive laptop for children in developing countries, is working on another vision. It wants to build a $75 tablet computer to succeed its XO laptop.

Called the XO-3 and targeted for release in 2012, the 8.5-inch by 11-inch concept is entirely a thin touchscreen with no physical buttons. The tablet was designed by Yves Behar, founder of FuseProject, which also designed the XO.

'Simple and Practically Frameless'

As part of its quest to organize the world's information, Google is upping its commitment to organizing everything you can buy. On Thursday, the search giant announced Google Commerce Search, a new hosted enterprise search product that will help customers find products at online retail stores and e-commerce sites.

Microsoft is making available a free Windows 7 Enterprise Trial version for IT professionals without access to the release to manufacturing version. The trial must be activated within 10 days of download from the Springboard area of TechNet, and is good for 90 days.

The version was announced Tuesday by Microsoft's Stephen Rose on the Springboard Series blog. The trial is meant to give IT professionals a way to test their applications, hardware and deployment strategies.

Clean Install Will Be Needed

The e-book wars are heating up with Google's announcement this week that it's backing the EPUB e-book publishing standard. The move puts Google on Sony's side, against Amazon.

On the Inside Google Books blog, Project Manager Brandon Badger wrote that the company will offer free downloads of more than a million public-domain books in the EPUB format, as well as in other formats.

Not 'Locked' to a Device