E-Commerce

Google's Book Search project "systematically violates copyright" and deprives content owners of the opportunity to make money from their creations, according to a top Microsoft attorney. In a prepared speech to be given Tuesday to the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers in New Y...

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Digital Cinema Implementation Partners announced Tuesday a joint venture to bring to market a new system for distributing digital movies to theaters. "We expect to be organized and have the financing and deals we need in place for an aggressive roll...

Retail's enthusiasm for e-commerce started as a tentative courtship, but has blossomed into a love affair, with businesses large and small embracing the Internet as a prime source of sales revenue. Everybody, it seems, is entering the queue, hoping to attract a growing mob of cybershoppers. "Every e...

EMI on Friday formally rejected a $4.1 billion takeover bid from Warner Music Group, in the latest music industry attempt to consolidate the few remaining major labels. The world's third- and fourth-largest record labels, EMI and Warner have been flirting with a possible merger for some time. EMI sa...

Google plans to provide Web advertisers with more data and tools to combat click fraud, a damaging practice that costs advertisers an estimated $16 billion a year. The new tools are part of an effort to crack down on click fraud and dull its impact on the otherwise highly profitable pay per click on...

There's no doubt that online banking is widely popular in this country -- just ask the millions of customers who've signed on for the convenience it provides. As fraudsters create new scams to bilk financial services customers or to simply hijack their accounts, however, banking customer trust is on...

Google's YouTube said Monday it had struck a deal to license video from the National Basketball Association for use on the video-sharing site, which is also intended to encourage user development of basketball-flavored content. The deal is a small but symbolic victory for Google, which has struggled...

Swedish wireless equipment giant Ericsson is hoping to boost its multimedia services for the Internet with the purchase of Tandberg Television. The buy could push Ericsson to the vanguard of IPTV, or Internet Protocol Television, which is likely to be one of the major markets for the telecom industr...

Last month, Web-security firm MessageLabs said that for the first time ever it had recorded more e-mails bearing phishing attacks than those containing viruses or other malware. January's MessageLabs Intelligence Report also found that phishing attacks were becoming increasingly sophisticated, which...

"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." The oft-cited quotation from Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" seems apt when talking about the opportunity presented by digital communications and computing. It has also ushered in a new breed of cybercriminal who tries hard to use your personal...

A federal jury has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.52 billion to Alcatel-Lucent for infringing on two patents that convert audio into the digital MP3 file format. One of the largest patent awards on record, Microsoft has said the ruling could also impact companies that have licensed this technology, inc...

It's an e-tailer's nightmare: In the constant struggle to keep up with online shopping trends and technology, a company relaunches its Web site with all the bells and whistles. However, it soon learns that the site's upload time is at a crawl, or its checkout is too slow. Sure, the firm did its home...

Google, hoping to fend off ongoing criticism and potential legal battles, has decided to tackle copyright issues head on and will soon offer antipiracy technologies to halt unauthorized video-sharing, the company announced this week. YouTube, which Google acquired late last year in a $1.6 billion st...

Cybercriminals are as gung-ho about perpetrating online fraud as financial institutions and governments are dedicated to preventing it. It's not so much the number of people who have fallen victim to ID theft, but the potential for serious loss and the possibility that you or I will become the next ...

Google's efforts to convince video content owners to license their TV shows and movies to its YouTube video-sharing site may have hit another snag, with reports suggesting that a tentative deal with CBS may be unraveling. A sweeping agreement that would have given YouTube access to video clips -- su...