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 …

The cost of buying ads on the Internet is going up, and it's going to continue. The Web has proven to be the cheapest, most effective means of reaching a targeted audience. As such, more advertisers are shifting dollars to the Web, which places the supply of quality Web sites and ad networks at more of a premium. The question for 2007 is just how much publishers will raise their ad rates. To a certain extent, publishers are wondering that too, especially as they scramble to keep up with their competitors. Joanne Bradford, MSN's corporate vice president, notes that …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

For art dealers, the Internet is becoming just another way to sell their clients' works. Renowned collector Charles Saatchi is launching a Web site specifically to house the works of art students. As art prices soar, collectors say they have less time to travel to galleries and shows to see new works. Similarly, painters and sculptors are having a hard time being seen in a fragmented and growing environment. So the Web is the best place for many artists to get their works seen. Many also participate in social networks like MySpace, but Saatchi is hoping to attract …

Advertising forecasts for 2007 are mixed, but just about the only constant is that Internet advertising will continue to grow apace, outperforming other media and likely, surpassing expectations. In 2006, Web spending was forecast at 20%; with three quarters now behind us, that number is closer to 50%, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Even so, most research firms think Web advertising will grow somewhere between 15% and 20% next year. However, history tells us that number is most likely conservative. Since the bubble burst in the early 2000s, forecasters and some investors have erred on …

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 …