Intermix Media Inc. has agreed to pay the state of New York $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit charging it with bundling hidden "spyware" along with millions of programs it gave away for free, the company said on Tuesday.

Swedish telecoms equipment maker Ericsson has teamed up with online music company Napster for a service that will let consumers download music to mobile phones. The companies said on Wednesday they will license the Napster-branded music service to mobile phone carriers, much as Ericsson currently sells services such as text messaging and voice mail.

Podcasting comes home to the mother ship as Apple and the Sundance Channel announce a deal that will make content from the cable network exclusively available as podcast downloads from the Apple iTunes Web site.

Time Warner Cable may have a companion when it goes public sometime next year ? America Online. Media giant Time Warner has considered combining its cable unit and AOL into one separate publicly-traded company, according to two sources close to the company.

Chinese bloggers, even on foreign-sponsored sites, had better choose their words carefully -- the censors are watching. Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.'s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities -- such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

Google is expected to unveil a search engine for Web-only video this summer that will let people preview media clips from its Web site.

Google is being criticized as taking an anti-conservative stance involving a banner campaign advertising a book about the "abuses of power" by former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY. The author and publisher claim ads were pulled late last week after initial acceptance, while Google denied removing any ads that received approval.

Music and video freely accessible to anyone on the Web is the centerpiece of America Online's planned switch to an advertising-supported operation aimed at maximizing daily traffic rather than subscription sales, according to the company. Executives from the Time Warner online service unveiled the new content strategy at a press event yesterday. The portal, which has 22.6 million subscribers, will still provide those subscribers with a package of software and support services such as parental controls, special sections for children and antivirus and security programs.

Online technology firm Activ8now, and its operating company, Active8media, filed a suit in United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia for patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation against Advance Publications.

File-swapping networks alone are not to blame for the recording industry's woes and might plausibly be converted into legitimate channels for distributing music, one of Europe's most influential economic bodies has concluded. In a report issued Monday, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development -- a Paris-based alliance of developed nations -- also suggested that it's difficult to establish a link between piracy and the music industry's shrinking revenues.