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How did the Department of Justice’s e-book case get started? How did it go so wrong? And, most intriguingly, who fed the DOJ's investigators all the details? In other words, who dropped the dime? We may have to wait for the trial to get definitive answers, but there are enough thinly veiled hints in the complaint to allow some educated guesses.

• The "corporate superior" who provided e-mails translated from French would have to be Hachette, the only co-defendant based in France.
• The "large print and e-book retailer" whose e-mails from Penguin CEO David Shanks are quoted verbatim could only be Barnes & Noble (BKS), an Amazon competitor whose share of the e-book market grew to 27% after Apple introduced the so-called "agency model" and whose share price dropped 6.4% one day after the antitrust suit was filed.
• And the unnamed "non-defendant publisher CEO" who makes at least five appearances in the complaint is, according to three sources who declined to go on the record for fear of angering the largest and most powerful publisher in New York, Markus Dohle, CEO of Random House.

Verizon Communications reported earnings that were largely in the range of what analysts were expecting as it continued to gain wireless customers.

The wireline and wireless operator said it earned $3.91 billion in net income for the first quarter, compared to $3.26 billion in last year’s first quarter. Verizon’s operating revenue was $28.2 billion, up 4.6 percent from a year earlier. Verizon Wireless said it added 734,000 retail customers in the first quarter, including 501,000 traditional postpaid customers, to end the quarter with 93 million retail customers, a 5.2 percent increase from a year earlier. As of the end of the quarter, nearly 47 percent of traditional contract customers were using smartphones, up from 43.5 percent a quarter earlier. As far as new sales, almost three out of four new customers were opting for smartphones, up from a rate of three in five a year ago. Verizon said it added 193,000 net new FiOS Internet connections and 180,000 net new FiOS Video connections in the quarter, to give it a total of five million FiOS Internet and 4.4 million FiOS video customers by the end of March. The company said that “Internet devices” — as distinct from phones — make up 8 percent of its base of traditional postpaid customers, and that 62 percent of tablet customers are postpaid. Typical contract customers are spending $23.80 per month on the data portion of their bill — up 16 percent from a year ago. Of its device sales in the quarter, 2.9 million of the devices sold were capable of running on Verizon’s high-speed 4G LTE network. That means that 9.1 percent of Verizon’s base is running on LTE, up from 6 percent a quarter earlier, and less than 1 percent of customers who had LTE phones a year ago.

New York's attorney general is suing wireless carrier Sprint for allegedly failing to pay sales taxes for the past seven years. State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman claims Sprint under-collected and underpaid millions of dollars in taxes.

"By deliberately evading sales taxes, Sprint cost state and local governments over $100 million that could have been used for critical services and much-needed resources that our state and its citizens need given the challenging economic times we are in," says AG Schneiderman. The issue focuses on fees collected for monthly access plans. In 2002, New York passed a law requiring mobile carriers to collect and pay sales taxes on full monthly charges for service plans. While fellow carriers such as AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have complied with the law, AG Schneiderman says Sprint hasn't paid the taxes since 2005.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) grilled Maria Pallante, the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, over a meeting with movie studio lawyers on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) during a hearing of the House Administration Committee.

Rep Lofgren said she was concerned because a day after the meeting with movie studios in Los Angeles, Pallante called for a serious response to online piracy in testimony in support of SOPA. "SOPA was an extreme measure that blindly pursued copyright enforcement at the expense of many other considerations," said Lofgren, a chief opponent of the legislation. In her earlier testimony to the House Judiciary Committee one day after the meeting in Los Angeles, Pallante warned that without a serious response to online piracy, "the U.S. copyright system will ultimately fail." She called SOPA "serious and comprehensive" but also "measured." Under pressure from Rep Lofgren, Pallante acknowledged the anti-piracy bill was "one of many things" discussed with the lawyers from Warner Brothers, Paramount and other major studios. Rep Lofgren also asked Pallante about a meeting in December with the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The copyright chief acknowledged that she discussed the anti-piracy legislation and the problem of rogue pirate websites at the meeting.