The recording industry will be powerless to stop their business model from crashing around them if American courts can't accomplish what international courts have either refused or been unable to do: Shut down the file-sharing sites that pervade the Internet. Several unnamed recording companies (you could probably guess who) are suing the Russian firm AllofMP3.com, owned by Mediaservices, for selling copyrighted music without permission. A lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in New York last Wednesday. The companies want AllofMP3 to surrender all of its domain names, which would basically close it down. Use of the American …

Google has displaced Yahoo as the world's second most-visited Web site--although not by much--according to November figures comScore Networks. Google's sites brought in 475.7 million visitors, compared to Yahoo's 475.3 million. Both trail global leader Microsoft, which attracted a whopping 501.7 million visitors. Other notable increases included News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, whose global traffic surged five-fold to 130.4 million. Web video leader YouTube rose 24-fold to 107.9 million; its traffic was not added to the total for Google, its new parent. For Google, this was the first time it ever attracted more visitors than Yahoo, …

LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, received a very-high-sounding valuation of a quarter of a billion dollars recently from its venture-capital backers. Compare this to the $500 million valuation Facebook received from its backers. So where is its valuation comes from? LinkedIn VP Keith Rabois says the company is exactly a year behind Facebook in terms of revenue, which means it should be generating between $45 million and $60 million next year--provided its users don't abandon the site for somewhere else. For a site that's mostly about networking (in the business sense), LinkedIn offers sponsors …

In the video-game sector, Microsoft may have the largest online gaming service, but it was also the first to market--and its growth is stalling. Microsoft's Xbox Live was supposed to be transformed into a mass-market online gaming portal, with the end-goal of becoming a video-game social network in which gamers chat, compete and post their records and scores. Fiftheen months since the launch of the Xbox 360, Xbox Live has some 4 million subscribers who pay $50 per year to use the service. Maybe gamers don't want to have to pay for Internet connectivity? Maybe there's not enough MySpace …

Standard & Poors analysts take a stab at predicting the new year for tech stocks, traditionally one of the most unpredictable sectors for investors. Market positions shift rapidly. For example, eBay and Yahoo's fortunes in 2005 and 2006 were markedly different. With each passing year, tech giants roll out new products and services, and to a certain extent, their stock prices are dependant on how those play with consumers. The tech sector has underperformed the S&P 500 Index since 2003, but there was a notable rebound in mid-2006, which should (could) last in 2007. Video …

Google gets lavish praise in the press. But guess what? Google Image Search sucks. It doesn't have a comprehensive video search, and its Web search engine still delivers too many false pages that are (conveniently) filled with nothing but Google AdSense links. Thankfully, the nimble universe known as the World Wide Web encourages startups to fix problems that bloated corporations don't have time to address. Polar Rose, the image-search company which announced its product earlier this week, uses a mapping technology to remember faces in 3D. Once you tag your photos using its software, the company's search engine …

CyWorld is the MySpace of South Korea, a social-networking monster (in that country) where up to 90% of the under-20 population are believed to be members. At the top of the company's New Year Resolution list for next year is collecting eyeballs from other parts of the world, namely the United States. Social networking is every bit the phenomenon in the U.S. that it is in Korea: Teenagers spend untold hours per day using (mostly) MySpace, sending messages, updating photos and posting video. Of course, that doesn't mean that Cyworld has a chance to win here. For starters, …

Remember CAN-SPAM? As many said at the time, an actual legal measure to fight unsolicited email messages would be merely symbolic, similar to the RIAA's lawsuits against users for stealing music. It would never eradicate the problem. We were right. The problem has only gotten worse. Spam cost an estimated $17 billion in the United States last year in lost productivity and expense of measures to fight it, according to Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based research firm. Worldwide, that number is closer to $50 billion. If you've noticed an uptick in the amount of spam you've received …

The tech world is always in transition. Older technologies depreciate over time, to the point where they become obsolete. Thinking ahead to the future of the video-game industry, this could be the last cycle for console systems, like Sony's PlayStation and the tangible software these systems require. And if it isn't the last cycle, it's certainly the next-to-last. As Internet technology, computer processing speed and storage capacity continue the onward march to ubiquitous connectivity, soon there will be no need for CDs, DVDs, video-game consoles, etc. However, advancement means intellectual property will become increasingly difficult to …

The bloggers from Business 2.0 slam yesterday's New York Times report touting Google Checkout as a PayPal killer. "How unsurprising: Bribe people heavily, and they'll use your service," the post says. That piece of logic hardly guarantees that Checkout, which is not used nearly as widely as eBay's PayPal, will be a runaway success. In fact, Google may not pose any threat at all to PayPal. Why? First, Google can't continue to provide Checkout for free without a credit- card processing fee, which is around 3%. PayPal doesn't actually make any money on that credit-card processing fee; it makes …