Judge: Lawsuits Now Can Be Served Using Twitter

Reader schwit1 writes: A Kuwaiti religious leader who allegedly raised money for jihadist rebels in Syria appears poised to become the first foreigner served a U.S. lawsuit via Twitter. Hajjaj bin Fahd al-Ajmi has been a hard man to reach for a lawyer seeking compensation in a northern California federal court on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Christians who own property in Iraq and Syria. U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler, resolving the impasse, found al-Ajmi has "an active Twitter account and continues to use it," offering the "method of service most likely to reach" him to satisfy the service of process requirement for the case to move forward. Al-Ajmi is accused by both the U.S. government and the U.N. Security Council of funneling money to armed terrorists.

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Netflix CEO: Movie Theaters Are 'Strangling the Movie Business''

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings thinks the state of film is a "real tragedy" and that movie theaters are "strangling the movie business," he said at The New Yorker's Tech Fest on Friday. From a Business Insider report:On Friday, Hastings came down hard on these theater owners, saying there had been no innovation in the movie theater business in recent years, even as TV has been shaped by the rise of cable and internet networks. "Money" and "innovation" has flooded to the TV industry, Hastings said. Not so with film. The movie theater business has seen flatline revenue, Hastings said. Part of the problem is that small movies, such as many Netflix has snagged from places like Sundance, would be better distributed both at home and in theaters. That's a convenient position for Netflix to take, but Hastings said the movie studios feel the same way. Each movie studio would like to "break the oligopoly" of the theaters, but "they don't know how," he continued. If they collude to face the theaters, it's anti-trust, but if they are the ones to take the first step, their films will get killed. That means they just go along with the status quo.

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