Northwest Airlines: We're dumping Priceline.com
Priceline.com has built its name on promising consumers low-priced airline tickets. But Northwest Airlines thinks the costs of selling tickets through Priceline make it a poor business proposition for the airline. In a filing yesterday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Priceline reported that it has stopped selling Northwest tickets in a dispute over distribution costs, which Northwest contends are too high on the airline’s lowest-yielding tickets. The airline says it will continue selling those tickets but through other low-fare outlets. The No. 4 U.S. carrier, Northwest has been hurt by high fuel prices and intense competition from low-cost carriers.

New HP virus fighter that slows their spread
Hewlett-Packard engineers know they can never wipe out viruses, but they’d like to make computer users’ lives a little easier. So they’re developing software that promises to slow the spread of internet-borne viruses and worms after they've infected a computer. Tentatively called Virus Throttler, the software would limit the impact of viruses by identifying and alerting the Virus Throttler-equipped computer to suspicious behavior. The program would then limit certain computer functions that could allow the virus to spread further. In a test run on 50 HP servers, technicians released viruses to see whether Virus Throttle would identify and subdue them. It worked. The program halted their spread without slowing down overall computer performance.

Kazaa Down Under: Hey, don't blame us
It's the case that everyone with an interest in the file-swapping controversy is watching closely, and it's being heard over these next several weeks in a courtroom in Sydney, Australia, where the major record labels are presenting their case against Kazaa. Yesterday the giant file-sharer launched its defense by arguing that its service is not unlike a video recorder. The device has legitimate uses and should not be held accountable if some people use it for illegal purposes. Defense attorneys argued that Kazaa can and does encourage people not to use the service to illegally record copyrighted music and other entertainment but that it has no means to prevent them from doing so and should not be held liable in cases where users do record illegally. That argument hangs on a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the court held that Sony was not liable for illegal recordings by users of its Betamax recorder, since the device had many other uses that were legal. The Sydney suit has been brought by EMI, Sony BMG, Universal, Warner and Festival Mushroom. In their filings, the music companies call Kazaa "the world’s biggest music piracy system" and blame it for sharing some three billion unlicensed music files each month.