Wired marks the five-year anniversary of the Recording Industry Association of America's assault on illegal file-sharers with an article about how ineffective the more than 30,000 lawsuits launched by the organization have been in curbing the widespread problem. According to the report, the suits have targeted everyone from students to the elderly -- no one in the U.S. who uses KaZaa, Limewire or any other file-sharing network is immune to the RIAA's investigators, and fines under the Copyright Act go as high as $150,000 per track. Meanwhile, billions of copyrighted songs continue to change hands on file-sharing services and some …

We knew things were bad for the newspaper industry, but we didn't know they were this bad. The Newspaper Association of America on Thursday said that not only did print revenues fall precipitously in the second quarter, but online revenues also fell 2.4% to $777 million. Really? Online revenues? There may be a recession going on outside, but online ad revenues haven't actually been falling anywhere, not even at AOL. As TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld notes, the common practice of bundling print and online ad sales probably has something to do with the declines, as advertisers trained to buy the entire …

Yahoo's stock continues to plummet, but the Web giant is by no means the only tech company having a rough ride on the market these days, says BoomTown writer Kara Swisher. While it's "absolutely worrisome" that Yahoo shares fell to a five-year low of $17.75 in Thursday trading, it is Google that is actually off the most this year on a percentage basis. The search king is down 32% this year, while eBay is off 27%, Microsoft is down 25% and Yahoo, 19%. Yahoo, of course, started the year at $19.86 and then fell into the $18s before Microsoft swooped …

In an interview with the Financial Times, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that the company's decision to move into the browser market was partly a defensive move against Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer has a commanding 76% usage share. "Microsoft has a history of favoring its own applications and I can give you 500,000 pages of court testimony, document web blogs and so forth and so on about that," Schmidt said after conceding that, "there is a defensive component" to Google's decision to build Chrome, its new Web browser. Schmidt pointed to Microsoft's now-famous defeat of browser-maker Netscape, which ultimately led …

For years, stories have emerged claiming that the Web is heading for a massive traffic jam, but a report released Wednesday aims to dispel that notion. According to TeleGeography Research, international Web traffic surged 53% last year -- but Internet capacity grew even faster, easing the burden on many Internet backbones. "Broadband subscriber growth has been slowing since 2001, but the volume of traffic generated by each user (has) grown," said Alan Mauldin, TeleGeography's director of research. "Traffic growth is fueled by consumer demand for video, delivered via Web browsers, peer-to-peer services, or streaming protocols." The study found that traffic …

It wasn't long before privacy hawks started to scrutinize Google's Terms of Service agreement for Chrome, the company's new Web browser. Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick and many others pointed out that Chrome's terms included a section giving the search giant "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services." Said Kirkpatrick: "That seems pretty extreme for a browser, doesn't it?" Soon thereafter, Google engineer Matt Cutts responded on his blog that something was wrong …

Online advertising continues to post healthy gains, but only a few at the very top are benefiting, The Wall Street Journal reports. Even though Web spending grew 20% in the U.S. in the second quarter, and growth forecasts remain strong in spite of a weak economy, the gap between online advertising's haves and have-nots is widening, the report says. In fact, the gap between search advertising giant Google, which sits at the very top of the online ad pile, and Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL is widening, too, as advertisers continue to favor simple search ads over display. Indeed, in the …