A New York District Court judge on Thursday announced the delay of the Google Book Search hearing and instead will hold a status conference on the scheduled October 7th date. Google Book Search is a settlement case that has been pending for more than four years between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The deal would allow Google to digitize millions of out-of-print, coprighted books and make them available for sale to readers online. The authors and publishers of the books would share in sales and advertising profits.

The delay from judge Denny Chin comes due to a recommendation from the Department of Justice who felt that the settlement proposal violates copyright, class-action and antitrust regulations. Chin stated that the hearing currently “makes no sense…as it does not appear the current settlement will be the operative one.”

The government of Pakistan has today ordered all local internet providers to block access to Google’s YouTube video sharing site “until further notice” due to offensive content. According to officials, the YouTube website contains cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad which angered a large number of Muslims.

The same cartoons were published earlier in a Danish newspaper which led to protests, rioting and eventually more than 50 deaths in countries including Pakistan. Internet surfers in Pakistan trying to access the YouTube site were met with a simple message saying the site was unavailable, with the local ISP’s unable to restore access despite upset users.

Six American film studios have filed a lawsuit against the Chinese file-sharing firm Xunlei Networking Technology for copyright infringement. They were offering hundreds of movie downloads illegally. The firm is part owned by Google. The studios are seeking more than $1 million in damages and costs, according to the Motion Picture Association, though that seems a low number.

The MPA trade group said in a statement on Friday that in addition, the plaintiffs are seeking a public acknowledgement of the infringements and a pledge from Xunlei to stop them. The MPA said that Xunlei facilitated the unauthorised transmission of hundreds of Hollywood movies produced by its members, like “Spiderman 3,” “War of the Worlds” and “Miami Vice.”(Who the hell watches Miami Vice? Now that they have, I assume they have learned their lesson. Some movies aren’t worth the trouble.)

Only yesterday we saw Google bring their YouTube online anti-piracy tool to beta to help combat the illegal posting of copyrighted videos. Today an announcement by a group of technology and media companies suddenly sheds some light on the significance of Google rolling out the service when they did.

A group consisting of Fox, CBS, NBC Universal, Walt Disney, MySpace, Viacom, and Microsoft (note the absence of Google) has announced a copyright protection agreement for rules that they …

Today Google has announced the beta launch of YouTube Video Identification, a new antipiracy tool that we heard about in July during a copyright infringement lawsuit with Viacom. The new system is a result of a number of angry video owners, Viacom being one of the angriest, complaining that YouTube was supporting users uploading and sharing illegally copied video content.

The new system will use a “fingerprinting” type of technology which provides a unique identification to each video. With Video Identification users will still be able to upload any videos they would like and have the instantly appear on the site as before, but once uploaded YouTube will then be comparing the uploaded content to legitimate videos provided by the owners. When matching videos are found the owner’s can choose to automatically have the video removed, promoted or in true Google form they can even take advantage of the uploaded content and monetize the video for copyright holders who chooses to license their videos.

Universal Music Group has announced that it is going start offering 99 cent downloads of its online music without any copyright restrictions as somewhat of a trial starting August 21 through Jan 31. UMG says it will be offering the music tracks in the MP3 format but individual retailers will be allowed to sell them in whichever DRM-free format they wish. This comes after last month when UMG decided not to renew its contract with Apple iTunes, and although …

Google may have an antipiracy tool for the YouTube video sharing site as soon as September according to a statement Friday by an attorney for Google. During a hearing in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google last March a Google attorney stated that they are currently working on some type of video recognition technology.

The new technology should be able to create a unique identification on each video, similar to the uniqueness of a fingerprint, that owners of the videos can place on their …

EMI Music has finally fallen in line and taken a big swig of the YouTube/Google kool-aid along with peers Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner by making an agreement with the mammoth video sharing site to show “approved” EMI content. EMI may have ben the last of the “big 4″ to make a deal with YouTube since they were recently consumed with being the first to launch a DRM-free music catalog with Apple.

With the agreement, EMI is able to get compensated for it’s videos that are shown …

Friday YouTube and their new parent company Google were hit with another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time from England’s top soccer league and a US music publisher.

The Premier League and Bourne Co. issued the lawsuit citing that not only does YouTube have their copyrighted content on the video sharing website, but that they are encouraging people to view the footage on the website and subsequently are “knowingly” misappropriating the two companies intellectual property. By this, according to the lawsuit, the operators of YouTube are exploiting the …

Two days ago Viacom dropped a $1 billion lawsuit on Google and YouTube stating that the video sharing giant had violated copyright laws by hosting videos created by some of Viacom’s programming brand.

In response, attorneys for Google feel that they have strong legal protections under current copyright law, according to Reuters. The legal team feels they have a very strong defense due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, …

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 …

Viacom will become a major content provider to the Joost global broadband television service, according to an announcement on Tuesday. This marks the first big licensing deal for Joost.

As a partner, Viacom will offer television shows and movies from its MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount Pictures divisions. Using Joost, consumers can watch Viacom content on their computers for free.

Viacom made headlines a mere two weeks ago after the media company pulled clips from Google’s YouTube online video sharing service due to copyright concerns.

Joost provides advanced television viewing features …

Google is welcoming Princeton University as the latest library partner in its Book Search Library Project.

Princeton University will be opening approximately one million public domain works from their library system in an effort to make them available online in a searchable format. The Princeton University library system consists of the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library and thirteen special libraries located around the campus.

The books being considered for the project are out-of-copyright works and therefore part of the public domain. Once digitized, the books will be fully searchable by …

20th Century Fox has served YouTube with a subpoena over entire episodes of “24″ and “The Simpsons” which were uploaded to the site. Fox wants to know who uploaded the video to the video site. YouTube is owned by Google who may have set aside money for the legal defense of YouTube over copyrighted material that makes its way to the site.

Fox is upset because the “24″ episodes were uploaded to YouTube and another site, …

Google is partaking in a multi-year project in conjunction with University of Texas at Austin to digitize more than one million books from the universities libraries. This extends on a deal they had made starting in 2004 with five other libraries – the universities of Oxford, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library. This is a massive, massive job that Google is undertaking, but Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe stated an important fact at an invite-only event called ‘Unbound’ held …