Newsgab

Entertainment Giant Viacom which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, says YouTube is showing its shows illegally and for the privilege is going to attempt to sue YouTube for a cool Billion Dollars.

Viacom alleges that about 160,000 unauthorised clips of its programmes have been loaded onto YouTube’s site and viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

As well as more than $1bn in damages, the legal action seeks an injunction to prevent what Viacom calls “massive intentional copyright infringement”.

“YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site,” said Viacom in a statement.

“There is no question that YouTube and Google are continuing to take the fruit of our efforts without permission..Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.”

Internet gambling site BETonSPORTS PLC has agreed to a permanent ban in the U. S., ending the civil component of the case against them. The permanent ban is an extension of the temporary injunction filed on July 17. The London-based online gaming site stopped its U.S. operations on August 11; in response to the indictments that were handed down in July for a dozen of its executives and the company itself. Charges include racketeering and the facilitation of gambling across state and national borders, as well as charges that the company has failed to pay billions of dollars in excise taxes.

In the settlement reached in a St. Louis federal court Thursday, BetonSports also agreed to begin refunding wagers placed by U.S. customers as of July 17, and to set up a toll-free phone number on the website for U.S. customers to contact for their refunds. The company had already shut down its operations in Costa Rica and Antigua which handled transactions with U.S. customers.

A bomb exploded at the PayPal headquarters, a subsidiary of eBay, located in San Jose, California, causing the evacuation of employees from the building. Authorities stated that the explosion was “not an accident.” Spokespeople for eBay said that the incident was “isolated” and that there were no injuries or deaths reported.

“It’s definitely not an accident. Everything else there is accounted for. This was not any kind of accident or malfunction,” said San Jose Police Sgt. Nick Muyo. He added that authorities have yet to find any kind of explosive device or material.

“We believe this is an isolated incident. We’re working closely with local authorities. We have everything under control,” said Amanda Pires, a spokeswoman for the PayPal division of the company.

The blast was seen from the street and was located in an area where workers take breaks. The initial damage reported was a broken window near the blast site.

Web surfers who confused Web site ‘utube’ with ‘YouTube’ ultimately overloaded utube.com and caused it to be down all week. Utube is owned by Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., a company that sells used machines that make tubes.

Ralph Girkins, Universal Tube’s president, said that it became a problem about two months ago. His company only has 17 employees and his Web site got 68 million hits in Aug. Just before Google Inc. said it would buy YouTube, the utube site crashed.

After adding more server capacity, the site was back up by late Thursday. “Just get me going. I don’t care.” Girkins said. “If I miss a $300,000 sale because of a Web site problem, it doesn’t make any sense to not to fix it.”

Universal Tube, based in suburban Perrysburg and founded in 1985, has about $12 million in annual sales.

Google has just announced that they are purchasing Youtube for a massive $1.65 billion.

The purchase is an interesting move for Google who already show videos via their own Google video service.

I’d imagine the potential for advertising revenues are going to be the key thing for Google who could earn big cash from the sheer volume of visitors to the video site each day.

An interesting result of Googles ownership will be the revenue sharing scheme the search engine giant hinted at as part of its announcement.

This will be a nice little earner for the likes of Sony who have recently signed a deal with Youtube, however the more typical punters who post their home vids on Youtube could also make a few extra bucks by using this service

It begs the question though, how will companies take to Google making profits on revenue earned whilst watching copyrighted material?

On Saturday morning the U.S. Congress approved a bill that would make it illegal for banks and credit-card companies to make payments to on line gambling sites.

Once ratified by the President, it is likely to affect the future viability of all on line gambling sites, but it is feared that the poker sites will be amongst those most affected.

UK bookmaker William Hill has already ceased taking casino and poker bets on line from US customers, saying we need to wait and assess the “scope and enforceability” of US state and federal gaming laws.

All international gaming sites lost share value this morning, as the markets opened, and this ruling is certain to affect future profits.

Party Gaming’s shares fell 59 percent while Sporting bet lost 64 percent, 888.com was down 45 percent and gaming software provider Play tech fell by 55 percent. Party Gaming admits that four fifths of its business is American based.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire Internet investor has blasted the credibility of YouTube as a business with the repost only a “moron” would buy it.

Despite the site’s enormous popularity there are copyright issues. When many of the users share their video clips they use copyright music, very often by famous artists.

Cuban, the co-founder of HDNet and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, said YouTube would be “sued into oblivion” because of their flagrant disregard of of copyright issues. He went on to add the only reason that it had not been done so far, was that there has not a person with sufficient money.

“They are just breaking the law,” Cuban told a group of advertisers in New York. “The only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue.”

It is hard to remember that Ebay, now such a large part of our lives, has only been around for just over ten years. The very idea of people wanting to buy from a public action house was unthinkable.

However it does illusatrate how much the Internet has fundamentally changed our lives. The mission statement for Ebay should be “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, - sell it!”.

EBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in his living room, in 1995, it started life named AuctionWeb. Although it was technically started as a hobby; it’s function was clear from the outset.

The concept was devastatingly simple, but highly innovative, to sell goods and services on the Internet. It was a hobby because very few people had either the chrystal ball or the imagination to sell things in that way - through an online auction.

It’s funny how Google seem to have a few hidden ‘features’ that few of us mortals seem to know about

This is one of the these features which apparently has been around since 2000 - How the hell did I miss something like that?!

From the Author of the applet

Around Feb 2, 2000, I happened to be visiting Google to give a talk. Sergei Brin asked whether I had any little 2D interactive animated characters. So I showed him the heart. He got all excited and said that they had to put that up on the Google site for Valentine’s day.

The people who worked for him were very nervous about that idea. They had never used Java in a Google page before; what would happen if it crashed everybody’s machine?

I love Ebay, in fact I feel on occasions that Ebay invokes in me a few addictive tendencies, however, even though I’m a pretty regular visitor, it still surprises me the kind of things you can ‘pick up’ on there.

If you like your Celebrities (ok, perhaps most of these fall into the D, E, F and Z List celebrity category and most will only be known to UK readers), you now have the opportunity to bid for a date with such well (un)known celebrities such as Miss England, Eleanor Glynn…Schwing!! Miss Scotland, Micola McLean… Schwing!!! Jade Parfitt….Schwing!!! and Liz Mcclaron…Schwing!!!..Schwing!!! on the UK version of the auction site.

Liz, actually appears to be doing pretty well for herself, at time of typing over 57 punters have bid up to the current highest figure of £5,500 ($10,300 US) for the chance to shmooze with the former Atomic Kitten.