Pearl Jam closed Lollapalooza in Chicago on Sunday night with what was by all accounts a rousing performance, but if you weren‘t there you didn’t see the whole show. According to a Pearl Jam press release, ATT, which had the exclusive rights to webcast Lollapalooza via its “Blue Room,” silenced a piece of video from its live webcast that featured anti-Bush lyrics.

During the song “Daughter,” Eddie Vedder sang “George Bush leave this world alone” to the tune of “Another Brick in the Wall.” When he repeated the line again and then sang “George Bush find yourself another home” the sound was muted, even though it can clearly be seen Vedder was singing. The editing was first discovered by Pearl Jam fans, who notified the band. read more

ATT announced today it would begin filtering pirated music, films and other content from its network—something every ISP had long avoided up until this point. The L.A. Times reports ATT began working with movie studios and record companies last week to develop technology to keep the biggest pirates off its service.

From the L.A. Times: read more

Interesting development in the case of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and Qwest vs. FreeConference.Com, which we reported on last month (see below). FreeConference says Qwest and Cingular have stopped blocking their calls after an angry outpouring from customers.

FreeConference is a web-based service that allows users to make conference calls with a single long distance call. The telecoms began blocking FreeConference claiming the service was pulling a quick one by exploiting a loophole in telecommunications law. They said multiple people were never intended to be connected on one line. FreeConference officials said what they were doing was perfectly legal, but the telecoms were actually worried about all the business they were losing to the upstart. read more