Viacom might have sued YouTube for $1 billion this week, but other TV networks, including former corporate sibling CBS, see a use for the video sharing site.

Google will no longer indefinitely store data that could link individual users with their search histories, but instead will make the records anonymous after 18 to 24 months, the company said on its blog yesterday.

NBC Universal will start selling episodes of "Heroes," "The Office," "Monk," "Battlestar Galactica" and other full-length TV shows to wireless users that subscribe to MobiTV, the companies said this morning.

Setting the stage for a legal showdown over the limits of copyright law in the age of video-sharing, Viacom today filed a federal lawsuit against Google/YouTube.

Search giant Google has quietly started selling TV ads, The Wall Street Journal reports.

News Corp apparently is mulling creating a video portal that could potentially rival YouTube. Fox Interactive Media head Peter Levinsohn reportedly told investors at a Bear Stearns conference this week that the company is in talks to amass a trove of video clips for online distribution.

Lawmakers in Connecticut this week said they will introduce a bill aimed at restricting teens from using social networking sites without their parents' consent. The proposed legislation would require social networking sites to verify users' ages and prohibit those under 18 from setting up profiles, unless their parents approved.

Last year, FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz publicly called for action against the marketers that use adware companies to serve pop-ups to consumers -- at least when those companies get their adware on people's computers without their consent.

Look for MySpace to soon play a much bigger role in helping News Corp monetize its Web properties. That's according to a particularly bullish report issued this morning by brokerage house Merrill Lynch.

Aiming to make its Web site more interactive, USA Today has redesigned its site to feature user-created material far more prominently than before.