Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates is planning this week to unveil the company's strategy for the government IT market, an intensely competitive area that has seen open-source software gain a strong foothold.

Google Inc. attorneys will square off against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) at a Feb. 27 hearing over the issue of providing the government with information about searches for pornography on the company's site.

The U.S. government is asking a California court to force Google Inc. to turn over information about usage of the company's search engine for finding pornography on the Internet.

Taiwan's legislature has passed a resolution asking the government to reduce its purchases of Microsoft Corp. products by 25 percent this year, a further sign the world's largest software company is running into resistance in Asia.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is praising a U.S. District Court judge's preliminary approval Friday of a settlement with Sony BMG Music Entertainment over two widely-criticized copy protection programs found on an estimated 15 million music CDs.

The recent controversy over a copy-protection system employed on music CDs from Sony BMG Music Entertainment proved to Sony Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer the need to carefully balance the needs of customers and the rights of artists, he said this week.

Microsoft Corp. has blocked the site of a Chinese blogger critical of the government, raising sharp questions from its own employees over how far the company should go in abiding by restrictive laws used to curtail free speech and press in the communist country.