YouTube debuts copyright enforcement

Seven months ago, Viacom filed a copyright infringement lawsuit, demanding $1 billion from Google and YouTube. It charged the companies with "brazen disregard" for intellectual property laws and threatened the economic underpinnings of one of the most important sectors of the US economy, reports Information Week.

On Tuesday, YouTube finally launched a content identification system, YouTube Video Identification, to give copyright owners some measure of control over the presence of their content on the site.

The new service requires that content owners upload videos they wish to protect so that a "hash" - a numeric fingerprint of sorts - can be created. That done, content owners will be able to prevent YouTube users from uploading copies of their videos; they will also have the choice of monetising unauthorised uploads with ads.

Apple has cut the price of its DRM-free music from $1.29 to 99c, the same amount it charges for songs encoded with its FairPlay DRM technology, says PC World.

The move brings Apple`s pricing closer to that of Amazon, which recently began selling DRM-free music for 99c or lower.

Apple`s DRM-free music catalogue is largely made up of artists from EMI. Apple and EMI signed a deal to offer higher-quality songs with no DRM, but the songs were priced at a premium.

Microsoft has laid out new software and a strategy that could shake up the already tumultuous telecommunications-equipment business, says the Wall Street Journal.

The company demonstrated Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, the software centrepiece to a multiyear effort to reshape business communications.

The Microsoft OCS software runs on large server systems and allows people using Microsoft`s Office software to manage voice calling from their personal computers and in combination with e-mail, instant messaging and other communications.

News Corp`s MySpace and eBay`s Skype have agreed to put Internet calls into MySpace`s instant messaging feature to gain more users and broaden the distribution of their two services, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The companies will share revenue from the partnership. Other terms were not disclosed.

MySpace, which is the largest social networking Web site with 110 million members, and Skype, which lets consumers make free calls via computer, have been trying to broaden their networks.