AP - Viacom Inc. and Google Inc.’s YouTube site began airing each other’s dirty laundry Thursday, providing a tantalizing peek at the wheeling and dealing that triggered a bitter battle over the copyright laws governing the Internet.
Reuters - Viacom Inc accused Google Inc of turning a blind eye to illegal video clips on its YouTube site in a bid to attract viewers, according to court documents released on Thursday.
Reuters - Google Inc could win a widely expected victory next week in Europe’s top court and still face many more battles over keyword advertising, the backbone of its Internet business model.
AFP - An auction in New York of the hotly desired Sex.com Internet domain name scheduled for Thursday was halted at the last hour when creditors forced the previous owner into bankruptcy.
NewsFactor - A back-and-forth battle is brewing between Internet search giant Google and media giant Viacom. Both companies are taking aggressive legal shots against each other after Viacom filed a copyright claim against Google’s YouTube service.
AP - THE REVELATIONS: YouTube co-founder Steve Chen once warned a fellow co-founder to stop posting pirated videos on their Web site. And Viacom Inc. wanted to buy YouTube before getting beat out by Google Inc.
NewsFactor - In a possible sign of the sea change that social networking has brought to the Internet, new industry data show that U.S. visits to Facebook last week exceeded, for the first time, those to the former top site, Google. While the difference was relatively small for the week ending March 13 — 7.07 percent of all visits for Facebook, compared to 7.03 percent for Google — the trend could point to the growing strength of the social Internet.
PC World - The Sunlight Foundation has launched a campaign to pressure all levels of government in the U.S. to put more information online.
PC World - Google’s eying the television as its next Web conquest. While the unconfirmed report raises lots of questions, the very idea of a Google TV and a Google set-top box, manufactured by Sony and powered by Intel, has great potential. It could also be a tremendous flop, if history’s any indication (Remember AOLTV?). Here are four things you’ll probably hear from naysayers, and four perfectly good rebuttals.
Reuters - Sony is teaming up with European movie-rental firm Lovefilm to offer TV viewers in Britain instant access to films from the Web, as a land grab for space on Internet-connected televisions gets under way.