iFive: LimeWire Pays Out For Piracy, Square Hires Apple Engineer, Cisco's Worst Job Cuts, Sony's Sales Suffer, Winklevii Sued

1. AttentionGoogle--this is what happens when you anger the record labels: LimeWire and its former CEO Mark Gortonhave agreed to pay$105 million to close a legal suit alleging LimeWire encouraged users to share pirated music. It's a result of a court ruling last year that the P2P service and CEO could be liable for the illegal sharing actions of its users, and is one of the biggest music settlements yet.

2. Square, the novel mobile credit card reading solution, haspulled offa small hiring coup. It's confirmed that Mike Thole, previously anAppleengineer with responsibilities for the UI of Safari on the Mac desktop and in iOS implementations, has now joined Square's team. Thole also developed a search app called iSeek, available on the iOS App Store. and though we don't know what he's doing at Square, we can imagine its user experience may get a lot slicker.

3.Ciscois braced to deal with the worst everround of job cutsin its history. To meet an ambitious goal of slashing $1 billion in costs, up to 4,000 jobs may go in the next few months--or about 4% of its workforce. The company has been mismanaged, according to its CEO, and ventures in expansion like the ill-fated Flip camera purchase need to be more controlled in the future.

4. Sony's ongoing PlayStation Network outage, after a series of high-profile and potentially damaging hack attacks, is having anunfortunate halo effect: It's now reported that retail sales of PS3 consoles are suffering, and more users than normal are returning them to stores to swap for Xboxes. Game-buying habits are also changing, with more sales seen on non-Sony systems. The pressure to get the PSN back alive is mounting.

5. The ongoing IP and compensation lawsuit overFacebook, driven by the Winklevoss twins just took an interesting twist: Boston developer Wayne Chang hasbeen granted court timefor a suit alleging his company is owed a share in the $65 million settlement the twins were awarded by Facebook. Chang says he had an MoI for 15% of ConnectU, the Winklevoss' company, thanks to code work he did for them.

Chat about this news withKit Eaton on TwitterandFast Companytoo.

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