Google’s got a big problem with YouTube - the melting-pot nature of user-generated media.

This, along with a billion-dollar lawsuit, courtesy of Viacom, is keeping Google from making money on 96% of its content.

It’s time for Google to settle with Viacom, and get on with building a business based on what makes YouTube unique - user-generated media.

Verizon has backed out of a deal with controversial video blogger Loren Feldman after just a week, after civil rights groups and bloggers protested Feldman’s work, which many consider racist.
Feldman is no stranger to controversy, but his “Technigga” character, in particular, strikes many as bigoted. In a video entitled Where Are The Black Tech Bloggers, [...]

Four-hour work week author and blogger Tim Ferris talked to Daniel Ellsberg about new FISA (Foreign Information and Surveillance Act) amendments that promise to let big telecommunications off the hook, retroactively, for giving the government access to spy on you without warrant, and to make this type of activity legal.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of [...]

Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit against Google is getting ugly. The federal court hearing the case has ordered (pdf) Google to provide Viacom with “all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website”.
The ruling brings a new twist to [...]

Loren Feldman, the puppetmaster behind the puppet Shel Israel video blog, is moving on.
Puppet Shel Israel is a sort of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog for new media, parodying “new media expert” Shel Israel, while scooping him with entertaining interviews, like this discussion with Digg’s Kevin Rose:

While Loren’s puppet has been scoring the interviews, Israel [...]

Video conversation / social networking community Seesmic moved out of beta and opened up to the general public last week. The company launched in the fall of 2007, and raised $6 million in its “A” series of funding late this winter.
Today, Seesmic founder Loic LeMeur announced that the company has raised an additional $6 million [...]

A scandal has broken out over the fact that the most-viewed video of all time on YouTube, Evolution of Dance, has been beaten by a fan video for the song Music is My Hot Hot Sex.
A lot of people are crying foul - not just because the Hot Hot Sex video is so bad, [...]

The New York Times has a story today about the case of Stacy Snyder, a 25 year-old mother of two that lost her job over a MySpace photo of her as a “drunken pirate”:
In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can [...]

The controversy over the Richter Scales’ Here Comes Another Bubble appears to be drawing to a close.
The video was taken down from YouTube after photographer Lane Hartwell objected to the unauthorized use of one of her photos in the video. This has led to a great deal of debate over the role of copyright and [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a comprehensive account of Comcast’s packet-forging activities and has released software and documentation instructing Internet users on how to test for packet forgery or other forms of interference by their own ISPs.Separate tests in October from EFF, the Associated Press, and others showed that Comcast was forging small [...]