Last month Viacom had asked YouTube to remove over 100k video clips from its website that Viacom stated violated copyrights, and then later that month Viacom made a deal with Joost to provide video content for their website. Today Viacom has issues a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google for copyright infringement claiming 1 billion dollars in damages.

Viacom is claiming that YouTube has over 160,000 unauthorized video clips of Viacom’s content on their website which collectively has been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Viacom is also looking to find a way to ensure that YouTube and Google do not violate any copyright infringement again with Viacom’s content.

Some of Viacoms many programming brands include BET, Famous Music, MTV Networks – MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, Comedy Central, CMT: Country Music Television, Spike TV, TV Land …

Today Intel, a world leader in silicon innovation, took their first crack at a new product line of solid state drives based on Nand flash memory.

The new Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive is intended to be used in the place of traditional hard drives offering a more cost-effective and high-performance storage solution. The Nand flash-based drives can offer quicker boot times and faster data access while using less power in systems such as PC’s, routers and gaming devices. Aside from just being able to improve boot times and the ability to find and read data faster, the flash memory based drives would also most likely last longer than a traditional hard drive since there are no moving parts involved.

“Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability,” said …

As chip design companies, Intel and AMD are locked in a seemingly never-ending race to outperform the other, with every little technological advantage that they can wring out of their designs trickling down to the bottom line and how much money they stand to make.

However, it looks like Intel just took the lead with today’s announcement that it is now selling more energy-efficient quad-core microprocessors. For companies that have data centers, the annual power savings could be significant if they used the power wise chips. Intel says that its new Xeon L5320 (1.86 GHz) and L5310 (1.60 HGz) quads consume just 12.5 watts of juice, a reduction of between 35 percent and almost 60 percent less electricity needed for the older models. At bulk orders of 1,000 units the cost of the L5320 is $519 while the L5310 …

Despite a plea that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, made to the big music companies in an open letter asking for DRM-free music, it appears that an issue with the European Union and Apple is coming to a head.

The European Union consumer chief Meglena Kuneva has been quoted by Reuters stating that she is unhappy with the restrictions that Apple imposes on their downloaded music. “Do you think it’s fine that a CD plays in all CD players but that an iTunes song only plays in an iPod? I don’t. Something has to change,” said Kuneva. This quote was taken from a preview to an interview that is to be fully published tomorrow.

The rights management that Apple has built into the iTunes music download service restricts consumers from transferring the downloaded files across the internet and to different devices. …

A new Home Beta site has been launched shortly after the announcement of the new virtual and interactive universe called ‘Home‘ from Sony at the annual Game Developers Conference last week in San Francisco.

The Home Beta site (www.homebetatrial.com) is a domain registered to ‘Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Limited’ in London, and was purchased less than two weeks ago. The site describes the new Home virtual world and urges viewers to check back in order to register for a chance to take part in the Beta Trial of Home.

“Home™ is a real-time 3D, networked community that serves as a meeting place for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) users from around the world, where they can interact, communicate, join online games, shop, share content and even build their own personal spaces. Home™ will be available as a free download from the PLAYSTATION®Store and will …

At the GDC 07 conference video game creators, publishers, manufacturers and consumers have been mingling to talk about the future of the industry. News has been filtering out from the many conferences but one of the biggest stories emerging is that Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto is developing an online Wii Channel where owners can exchange, show-off and enter their virtual characters, dubbed Miis, into contests.

With the announcement that Sony is also developing its own online channel for PlayStation 3 gamers and the news that Microsoft’s Xbox Live service has crossed the 6 million users plateau, developing a killer online channel app has suddenly become one of the major missions for the game system manufacturers.

Another hot property being talked about at GDC is LucasArts’ “Star Wars: The Force United”, in development for the Xbox 360 and PS3. Players will be able to …

Samsung has offered up some specs on their lineup of hybrid hard drives. Arguably the heart of any computer, the new drive is designed to consume less power than traditional HDDs. The hybrids use a buffer of non-volatile flash memory to cache data, improving accessing speed and increasing the boot speed. Additionally, since the drive only needs to spin for less than a minute every hour, the power consumption for a hybrid is 10-15% less than a traditional HDD.

The Samsung hybrid MH80 HDDs will be available in storage sizes of 80 GB, 120 GB and 160 GB. The buffer, OneNAND Flash, can be purchased in sizes of 128 MB or 256 MB. The company is saying that this flash will improve boot speeds up to 50%, offers five times the reliability of traditional HDDS while consuming 70-90% less power and increase battery life up …

Just how much digital information is being created today? According to research firm IDC, 161 exabytes of information were created by individuals and businesses in 2006. Just in case you don’t know, an exabyte is one billion gigabytes worth of info. But that’s nothing compared to what’s coming: in the year 2010, just four years from today, IDC predicts that there will be 988 billion exabytes of data made, over six times the 2006 figure. That’s 57% growth per year, compounded, or put another way, a stack of books reaching from the Earth to the Sun, 93 million miles long – twelve times.

In 1996 about 48 million people were on this new thing called the internet. Ten years later, that number was up to 1.1 billion. By 2010, the same research company predicts that at least another half-a-billion individuals will be online, surfing, sending emails, …

How many E3s have come and gone and gamers were still left wondering whether “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl” would ever see the light of day? European game designer GSC Game World has been promising a timely release for their first-person shooter for five years and release dates have slipped by. We were beginning to think that “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” was vaporware like “Duke Nukem Forever” but low and behold, THQ has announced that “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” has finally gone gold and will be shipping to retail stores around March 20.

You start the game as a stalker, sort of a futuristic bounty hunter that prowls the contaminated area that surrounds Chernobyl searching for relics and the whereabouts of another stalker. Over the decades since the nuclear reactor explosion of 1986, the animals and wildlife in the Chernobyl region have mutated and become strange, deadly creatures. As well, …

On Monday Apple released both an updated version of its iTunes digital music software and updates to the QuickTime media player software to fix eight security flaws.

According to a security alert from Apple, the 7.1.5 version of QuickTime fixes security issues involving how the player handles certain types of “maliciously-crafted” files including QuickTime, MIDI, 3GP, PICT and QTIF. The update also adds some functionality updates with the new version which can be downloaded through the Software Update preferences or from the QuickTime download page.

iTunes 7.1 adds features for improved sorting, full screen Cover Flow and most significantly additional support for the upcoming Apple TV. “Using iTunes 7.1, you can now enjoy your favorite iTunes movies, TV shows, music, and more from the comfort of your living room with Apple TV. iTunes 7.1 also supports a new full screen …

There are probably a number of you out there that went ahead and bought their Xbox 360 without the hard drive in it and saved some dough, only to find out when you got home that your really probably did need that hard drive to keep you from starting over at the beginning of your game every time. The drive also is needed to have somewhere to download games and demos.

Your options were either to live with it, or get a 64MB memory unit to at least save some things. Well, Microsoft has heard your concerns and coming April 3rd they will be offering a $49.99 512MB memory unit for sale that will hold a lot less than the 20GB hard drive that would have cost you twice as much, but it’s better than nothing. It’s also better than the …

It was recently announced that the global video carrier JumpTV Inc. well be bringing international television channels to Joost. Recently, Joost has been signing deals with many media publishers. One of the more noteworthy pact is the one with Viacom Inc. which will allow Joost to screen content from big channels such as MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount and Comedy Central.

What sets this deal apart from the rest is that JumpTV Inc. already has its very own online network for videos. However, they are more focused on local shows from around the world than anything else. The CEO of JumpTV, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, said that they will continue to show videos on their network, but are using Joost to reach a ‘broaderwider audience’. Thanks to this, we can look forward to seeing more and more videos pop up on …

To call the “Grand Theft Auto” game a popular franchise may be a bit of an understatement. The series’ last major chapter, “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas”, sold 12 million copies for the PlayStation 2 alone and the franchise as a whole has sold over 50 million units, making it one of the most successful video game series of all time. The series’ next chapter, currently known by the placement title “Grand Theft Auto IV”, is set for release on October 16, 2007 across North America and three days later for European gamers. Speculation as to what new features will be in GTA IV, its location, storyline and who among Hollywood’s A-list will supply character voices have been running high while Rockstar Games, the developer of GTA, has kept silent – but things are about to change.

The official website for …

Stephen Hawking is a name that by now we all know well. The Cambridge professor, best selling author and the world’s reigning expert on black holes is now set to take a zero-gravity ride out of Cape Canaveral. Since he has spent most of his life working around the nature of gravity, it seems only fit that he should experience it himself, first hand.

Said the executive of Zero G, “the idea of giving the world’s expert on gravity the opportunity to experience zero gravity” was irresistible. He will be accompanied by his own medical team to make sure that all is well with the genius.

Hawking, now 65, suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and is unable to move any part of his body, save his eyes and a small part of his fingers. Though this particular disease usually kills …

Due to the potential of overheating and a resulting fire Lenovo, a global developer, manufacturer and marketer of PC products and services, announced a recall of around 100,000 laptop batteries. This marks the second recall for the company in six months.

The company urges customers to stop using the recalled batteries immediately as dropping them in a certain manner could cause the overheating problem, and until a replacement battery has arrived you should power down your notebook and remove the recalled battery. Powering your notebook should only be done through the AC adapter during the interim according to the notice, although the Lenovo states a small drop will not cause the problem. “If you have it in your hand and it goes one or two inches and hits the ground, that’s not going to do it,” Mr Gorman said. “It has to be maybe …