Warner Music Group is NOT a division of Time Warner, as referenced in "Section 2: Around the Net in Media" on Nov. 23. It has been an independent company for over a year.

Hollywood studios are breathing a sight of relief after popular peer-to-peer TV and movie file-sharing service BitTorrent announced plans to remove links from its heavily trafficked site directing users to pirated movies and TV shows. The company says it will focus on promoting and distributing only licensed entertainment content, creating the potential for a new online distribution system for the industry.

Budget car rental blogs, and "fake" classified ads are among the new buzz-oriented media being embraced by mainstream marketers, writes New York Times columnist Stuart Elliott in today's Times' ad column. The blog strategy is being employed by Cendant Corp.'s Budget Rent a Car, while the fake classifieds are being used by Hasbro to promote a new version of popular board game Monopoly.

"American Idol" judge Simon Cowell won't have to face a judge for a while in a legal battle with another British entertainment promoter who claims Cowell stole his idea for the popular reality TV show. A U.K. judge has postponed the case indefinitely as lawyers try to strike an out-of-court settlement.

What MTV did for video music, it now plans to do for video games. MTV Networks has acquired GameTrailers, including the Internet site GameTrailers.com, a popular broadband video destination for gamers.

After a year's absence from TV, Pfizer is going back on the air with subdued Viagra spots that focus on men talking about erectile dysfunction instead of mentioning the product directly. The understated approach is partly a reaction to consumer complaints about the sexual content of ads for Viagra and other drugs of its ilk--and the Food and Drug Administration's specific objection to a Pfizer commercial that showed a man and a woman shopping for lingerie.

CBS is close to an overhaul of its sagging evening news show, Chairman Leslie Moonves said Tuesday. While there is no explicit timeline, Moonves told Reuters it will not be "much longer" before the network shakes up the "The CBS Evening News," the third-ranked in a three-network evening news race. Moonves acknowledged he is frustrated with the news program's inability to attract young viewers. With a median age of about 60, it's one of the oldest skewing shows on TV. The network has been rumored to be considering everything from wooing NBC's "Today" anchor Katie Couric to Jon Stewart, host …

The season is only a couple of months old and CBS has already announced plans for two new "mid-season" replacement series launches in January: "The Jenna Elfman Show," which goes into the 9:30 p.m. (ET) slot on Monday night; and "Love Monkey," a comedy/drama that will go into the 9 p.m. (ET) Tuesday slot. Interestingly, "Love Monkey," a series about a single record executive, comes as the music industry is reeling from a payola scandals (see next story for further details).

At a time when Madison Avenue is struggling to define standards for paid product placement, another major media company has agreed to pay a multimillion dollar fine for paying to plug its own product: music. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer Tuesday announced a $5 million settlement with Time Warner's Warner Music Group, the nation's third largest record label, in the state's so-called "payola" investigation. It is the second major label to reach a settlement over charges that it paid radio programmers to play its songs. In July, Sony BMG Music Entertainment reached a similar agreement.

Viacom Tuesday named seven independent directors to the board of its soon-to-be-split-up companies. Former Viacom Vice Chairman Thomas Dooley; Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History; and Robert Kraft of the Kraft Group, which owns the New England Patriots, will join the board of the "new" Viacom, to be headed by Tom Freston. At CBS Corp., which will be run by Leslie Moonves, new directors include Charles Gifford, chairman emeritus of Bank of America; Bruce Gordon, president-chief executive of the NAACP; Ann Reese, financier and executive director of nonprofit Center for Adoption Policy; and Judith Sprieser, co-founder …