Corporate and legal

Viacom, parent company of BET, MTV and Paramount Pictures issued a statement Thursday following the release of hundreds of documents regarding the company's copyright complaint against Google. The full text of the statement is below. Go here for the full story about what was revealed.

YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube's founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement. By their own admission, the site contained "truckloads" of infringing content and founder Steve Chen explained that YouTube needed to "steal" videos because … Read more

Google and a group of telecommunications companies are about ready to turn on a fast Internet cable running under the Pacific Ocean from the U.S. to Japan, increasing bandwidth by about 20 percent and giving Google its own connection to Asia.

The Unity Consortium, which consists of Google, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel, has nearly completed the testing of the $300 million project. Internet users in Asia will start seeing faster Internet speeds over the next several months from the new cable, which has the potential to create a 7.68Tbps (terabits per second) connection under … Read more

With the release of hundreds of pages of court documents in the legal dispute between Google and Viacom over the presence of copyright material on YouTube, Google has released a statement on the case. It follows below in its entirety. See this CNET story for more background on the case and check back later for new information as the documents are studied.

The statement was attributed to Zahavah Levine, YouTube chief counsel.

Broadcast yourself Around the globe, YouTube has become a metaphor for the democratizing power of the Internet and information. YouTube gives unknown performers, filmmakers, and artists new ways … Read more

Court filings released on Thursday in the bitter $1 billion copyright fight between Viacom and Google's YouTube show just how far apart the companies remain, as the 3-year-old case winds through federal court.

Viacom, in 108 pages of court documents, portrays YouTube's founders as reckless copyright violators who were far more concerned with increasing traffic to their site than obeying the law. Even executives at Google, which acquired YouTube for $1.7 billion in October 2006, questioned the ethics of building a site through questionable copyright practices, according to the Viacom filings.

But in the 100-page document filed … Read more

Apple board member Jerome B. (Jerry) York has died, Apple announced Thursday.

York, 71, was hospitalized Tuesday night after suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

He sat on Apple's board for 13 years, and was also the chairman, president, and CEO of Harwinton Capital. Previously he held the position of CFO at both IBM and Chrysler.

"Jerry joined Apple's Board in 1997 when most doubted the company's future. He has been a pillar of financial and business expertise and insight on our Board for over a dozen years," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, in a … Read more

Microsoft's MSN China venture is losing a key executive.

Vice President of Sales Xiao Chen is resigning from his position at the end of March to start his own company, a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters. Chen has been with Microsoft's Chinese MSN venture since its start in 2005.

MSN China has struggled to gain a foothold against QQ, a Chinese social network service that has grabbed a sizable percentage of China's Internet users.

And late last year, MSN China got into some hot water after it was revealed that its microblogging site Juku lifted programming code from … Read more

Handset maker HTC says it's ready to defend itself against a patent complaint filed by Apple.

Earlier this month, Apple launched legal action against HTC, alleging that the Taiwanese company had violated 20 different patents related to the Apple iPhone. HTC makes phones based on Google's Android operating system as well as Microsoft's Windows Mobile.

On Thursday, HTC issued its response.

"HTC disagrees with Apple's actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done," said HTC … Read more

I've been spending this week at the Cloud Connect conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, Calif., listening closely to the broad range of opinions and concerns raise by both the customers of cloud and it's vendor community. The conference has been an amazing place to get a sense of what those deeply involved in cloud believe will happen in the next few years.

What has surprised me a little bit has been an apparent consensus that more and more applications will leverage public clouds, and that a large number of enterprises will adopt those … Read more

The copyright showdown between Google and Viacom, parent company of Paramount and MTV, is finally about to start playing out before the public.

Expect fireworks.

Viacom filed a $1 billion copyright complaint three years ago against Google, accusing the search engine of profiting from and encouraging copyright infringement on YouTube. Google denied the allegations and said the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects the company and all Internet service providers from liability for infringing activity by users. On Thursday, we'll get to see what kind of documentation the two companies possess to support their claims.

Sources close to the case … Read more