Content owners, rejoice! Or, at least for the moment. Some top Hollywood studios just won an injunction against Pirate Bay's bandwidth provider CB3ROB via a court in Hamburg. The injunction reportedly prohibits CB3ROB from "connecting The Pirate Bay Web site and its servers to the Internet." If you're not familiar, Pirate Pay allows web users to access music, movies and TV shows without paying for them, and claimed 22 million users in February. Rumor has it, however, that the ever resilient operation is already working on a backup solution. In mid-2009, Pirate Bay's four co-founders were sentenced …

Google, Intel and Sony are about to announce an ambitious plan to bring Web services to consumers' TV sets, reports The Financial Times. For Google, the so-called "Smart TV" platform will represent a "significant breakthrough into consumer electronics and the broadcast industry," FT.com writes. "Intel's Atom microprocessor and Google's Android operating system are spearheading their assault on set-top boxes and TVs featuring integrated Internet services." To date, technology companies have had little success penetrating the TV industry, but both Google and Intel are now seeking to take advantage of service providers and TV manufacturers desire to catch …

Google is no longer allowing dating sites for older women seeking younger men to advertiser their services using the term "cougar." The search has deemed the commonly-used term "nonfamily safe." For CougarLife.com, now banned from Google's content network, "that means its ads will no longer appear on more than 6,700 Web sites, including Ask.com, YouTube and MySpace, which accounted for 60 percent of its traffic," Thomas Koshy, vice president for marketing at the Toronto-based site tells The New York Times. Suggesting a double-standard, however, Google continues to allow similar advertising for the myriad sites that connect older …

Late last week, Fox News reported that Wikipedia cofounder and board member Jimmy Wales gave up his administrative privileges on the "crowdsourced" site following a community backlash against his removal of thousands of images deemed pornographic by Fox last month. Now, Wales is telling Venture Beat that the change to his editorial status was "a purely technical matter," and insists, "I am not stepping down or pulling back from anything." In April, Fox reported that Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger, who left the project in 2002, had sent a letter to the FBI specifying his concerns that at …

YouTube has turned 5, and wonks are taking the opportunity to marvel at the time gone by, and what has clearly become one of the Web's great success stories. Long discounted as a mishmash of amateurish one-hit-wonders and stupid human (and animal) tricks, its "cornucopia of content appears to be turning YouTube -- considered by many to be a risky investment when it was bought for $1.65 billion at the end of 2006 -- into one of Google's smartest acquisitions," writes The New York Times. Playing the role of proud parent, Google on Monday …

Not everyone is as bullish about Diaspora* as The New York Times, which positioned the social upstart as a potential Facebook alternative in a Thursday profile. Its young founders "have touched a nerve among the thousands of people who feel jilted by Facebook's recent actions," writes The Next Web's Alex Wilhelm. "That said, the idea behind Diaspora* (its implementation) is overly complex and won't work for the large majority of Facebook users." As its founders describe it, Diaspora* will let users set up their own personal servers, dubbed "seeds," create their own hubs, and fully control the …

Yahoo this week won approval from local officials to build its new 3 million-square-foot office campus in the heart of Silicon Valley. Yahoo acquired the properties for the proposed Santa Clara campus as part of a $112 million purchase during brighter day in 2006. Since 2008, however, the company has faltered following an unsolicited takeover bid from Microsoft, and mounting competition from upstarts like Facebook. According to MarketWatch, the company is presently engaged in an "ongoing turnaround effort. Under chief executive Carol Bartz, the company has sought to streamline operations, while easing investments in search and bolstering …

The New York Times has set a date for the launch of its so-called "metered" pay model: January 2011. Times executive editor Bill Keller revealed the news while speaking at a dinner event for the Foreign Press Association on Thursday, according to Fast Company. Still, "We don't know what Keller's latest thinking on pricing is, or whether the new pay-protected Times will follow the Net edition model adopted by the London Times, which is to make the Web version very much like the paper edition." In February, Janet Robinson, The Times Co.'s president and CEO, said the …

Time was when a person used a phone for calls. Yet, for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, email messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts tell The New York Times. "For many Americans, cellphones have become irreplaceable tools to manage their lives and stay connected to the outside world, their families and networks of friends online," writes The Times. "But increasingly, by several measures, that does not mean talking on them …

Online-only sales of the Google Nexus One will soon be no more. On the heels of news that Android phone sales surpassed those of iPhones for the first time in the first quarter of this year. Google announced it is closing the dedicated Web store for the device and discontinuing selling the model direct, which hasn't been good for sales. But don't let this make you think that Google is any less bullish on the Android platfrom than it has been. Nearly 65,000 Android-powered mobile phones are being shipped every day, according to Google chief executive …