Over the course of the past five years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued nearly 30,000 alleged copyright violators, with most cases settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. Last month RIAA spokesperson Cara Duckworth announced "There's no filtering… We are simply passing along a notice of detection and the ISPs will forward a notice to the subscriber."

On February 17th, all broadcast television signals are going DIGITAL. According to the National Association of Broadcasters, this will affect over 20 million households that watch television through the use of antenna. 25% of households mistakenly believe that they MUST subscribe to a satellite or cable service after February and 41% believe that they must purchase a converter box, even if they subscribe to satellite or television.

For videos check out the 2009 CES blog.

UK rock group Radiohead made an unprecedented move for a band of their stature last year, releasing their album In-Rainbows as a name your own price digital download from their site first. They sold 3 million copies of their album - 1.25 million copies were bought off their website and 1.75 CDs were sold, the number of copies sold online alone surpassed the physical sales of the band’s previous album – Hail To The Thief. Taylor McKnight, a partner of music website The Hype Machine discusses the results of this digital experiment.

Obama hasn’t appointed a Chief Technology Officer just yet, but has recently announced his team of leaders for a technology, innovation, and government reform policy group. But what specifically will be on the priority list for this CTO? A non-official Obama site, ObamaCTO.org allows users to vote on issues in order of priority. So far the top 3 policies listed on the site include: 1) ensuring net neutrality 2) ensuring the privacy of citizens and revising the patriot act and 3) repealing the digital millennium copyright act (THE DMCA). The problem with this list is that these are issues that the new CTO will not be able to directly address, as altering this policy is up to Congress.

This year, as many as a third of all voters nationwide will be casting their ballot for the presidential election early, which is up twenty percent from 2000. Mario speaks with Brian Moore, the Creative Director of GoVoteAbsentee.org which is a website that streamlines the process of absentee voting.

Five minutes, 20 slides. What would you say? Ignite is an event where 16 artists, technologists, thinkers, and personalities take the stage to answer this challenge. Mario speaks with two of the presenters, Brian Liles and Patti Chan from www.600block.com.