The original VoIP business Skype won more fans by offering free calls from the PC to landlines and mobile phones in the US and Canada; that promotion ended only recently.

Lawsuits abounded, with Symantec suing Microsoft for “deliberately and surreptitiously” misappropriating its technology for part of the operating system. Portable music player makers got nasty, as Creative sued Apple for breach of patent over the iPod’s user interface, and Apple responded with a counter-suit.

Meanwhile, Microsoft and Adobe had a bit of a falling out over the “save as PDF” function in some of Microsoft’s software.

In the photography world, Microsoft announced that it was working on a Windows Media Photo file format to challenge the JPEG, although nothing has been said since that date in May.