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Some people might be embarrassed if their friends found an old copy of Mr. Big's "To be with you" or Paula Abdul's "Cold hearted (snake)" stashed away in their CD collection. But not EMI. They own those songs, and they want the world to know it.

The music giant is suing social-networking site Hi5, video advertising start-up VideoEgg, and 10 unnamed defendants for allegedly infringing on the copyrights of those and hundreds of other pop throwbacks.

The lawsuit alleges that Hi5 users have uploaded and disseminated hundreds of music videos the company owns rights to. VideoEgg is on the hook because it's a former partner of Hi5, and those allegedly infringing videos were uploaded to its servers. (On May 31, VideoEgg stopped hosting videos uploaded by the public and refocused efforts on its ad network, prompting rumors that the company was on its way out.) The lawsuit doesn't say much of anything about who the 10 John Does are.

The companies had attempted to work out some kind of deal for more than a year, a source told TechCrunch, but those efforts eventually failed.

Legislation introduced in Canadian Parliament on Thursday would fine consumers about $500 in Canadian dollars for owning bootleg copies of digital music and up to $20,000 for posting copyrighted music to the Internet or giving away an iPod with music on it.

The changes are designed to bring the country's Copyright Act into the digital age. As it is today, the law does not allow people to copy music onto devices such as MP3 players or computers, according to TheStar.com.

Under the new law, consumers could copy a book, newspaper, or photograph that was legally acquired but couldn't give away the copies or copy material that was borrowed.

Consumers could copy music that was legally acquired but would be prohibited from copying music that was borrowed or rented. It also would be illegal to post copyrighted work on the Internet without the permission of the owner and to circumvent digital locks designed to prevent illegal distribution.

The bill, introduced by Industry Minister Jim Prentice, would allow consumers to record TV and radio programs for playing back later, but it would prohibit them from keeping the copies indefinitely, according to Reuters.

Last December, YouTube removed more than a dozen videos on the site that showed common practices at rodeos, such as tame horses being tasered to make them buck and calves being injured in roping contests and dragged off to die.

The videos, and the account of the nonprofit anti-cruelty group that posted them--Showing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK)--were removed from YouTube for about two weeks after the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association claimed they violated copyright under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

YouTube put them back up after SHARK convinced the site that the DMCA takedown notices were improper. To make sure the videos stay online, SHARK, with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed a lawsuit on Monday in federal court in Chicago.

The suit asks the court to affirm that the videos do not infringe any copyrights and to hold the rodeo group accountable for filing "spurious claims."

"This copyright claim is completely baseless, and made simply to block the public from seeing SHARK's controversial videos," EFF Staff Attorney Corynne McSherry said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the rodeo association said the group had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment until then.

A YouTube spokesman said the company does not comment on specific videos, but offered this statement: "YouTube complies with DMCA takedown requests from parties who claim to own a piece of content. If an uploader wants to contest ownership, they can file a DMCA counter-notice and YouTube will restore the video to the site."

The lawsuit is part of EFF's No Downtime for Free Speech Campaign, which is designed to protect online expression in the face of baseless copyright claims.

Last year, the EFF sued Viacom on behalf of a group that posted a parody video of The Colbert Report on YouTube, which Viacom had demanded be removed citing copyright law. The EFF later dropped the suit after Viacom admitted it had erred in asking that the video be removed.

A company that legitimately distributes its video programming via peer-to-peer is shut down for three days last weekend after being pummeled with traffic. The likely culprit: a company paid by the major movie studios and record labels to fight piracy. What's wrong with this picture?

It was Memorial Day weekend and Revision3 was scrambling to get its Web TV network back up. Its servers were being bombarded with so much traffic, they were shut down in what is known as a denial-of-service outage. That meant no Diggnation or Tekzilla--popular Web shows for a generation of tech-savvy consumers who get their news and entertainment from the Internet instead of TV.

The attacks led to hundreds of thousands of disgruntled fans and tens of thousands of dollars in lost ad revenue for Revision3, estimates Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback.

In the following days, Revision3 was able to trace the majority of the packets overwhelming its torrent index server to a company called ArtistDirect, which acknowledged to Louderback that the IP address generating the packets belonged to a Los Angeles-based subsidiary called MediaDefender.

MediaDefender offers Internet piracy fighting services to clients including "every major record label and every major movie studio, video game publishers, software publishers, and anime publishers," according to its Web site. The company markets "non-invasive technological countermeasures" it uses on peer-to-peer networks that are designed to "frustrate users' attempts to steal/trade copyrighted content."

Among those methods are decoying and spoofing, in which they send blank files and "data noise" that make finding pirated content on the Internet as hard as finding a needle in a haystack.

MediaDefender Chief Executive Randy Saaf says he has found evidence that Revision3's tracker has been used to index pirated content for at least four years.

"They are running an open tracker that had (links to) a lot of pirated content on it," Saaf said. "We didn't know they were running it. We were targeting the pirated content."

But Louderback says that since April 2007, Revision3's tracker has only linked to its own content, except for during the five weeks leading up to Memorial Day. Last month, the company switched tracker software as part of a move to stabilize the server because it was crashing, and that left the server open to the public to post links to outside content, he says.

"We didn't advertise it was open. It's like leaving your garage door open," and people can't legally just walk in, he said.

Things came to a head after Revision3 closed what Louderback described as a "back door" to its tracker server. The MediaDefender packets--arriving as fast as 7,000 packets a second--backed up and Revision3's operations were offline for about three days, according to Louderback.

"They were either grossly negligent in how they program, or programmed (the traffic) to be obnoxious," he said. "I can't impugn their motives. All I can say is the behavior we saw."

"They said they are changing their process and procedures," he added. "That still doesn't give me my weekend back."

MediaDefender's Saaf sees it differently. "In our mind we were not targeting a legitimate company. All we saw was a public tracker with (links to) pirated content, he said.

Going forward, MediaDefender will look to see if any public trackers it finds are associated with a company, and if so will contact them before acting, Saaf says.

"Hollywood goes too far and loses all credibility when their investigators, in the name of antipiracy, act like lawless pirates and hack servers and force law abiding services off the Internet."

--Ira Rothken, intellectual property attorney

The legal issues are unclear. Putting aside any discrepancies over whether there were links to pirated content on Revision3's tracker and for how long, there are questions about whether by transmitting so many packets at once, MediaDefender knowingly caused a denial-of-service outage. In addition, anti-competition questions could be raised since ArtistDirect promotes videos and music and could be seen as a rival to Revision3.

Using a back door to a server without permission of the owner could make MediaDefender liable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and could violate Revision3's terms of use, which typically prohibit creating unreasonable loads on the servers or accessing servers without authorization, said Ira Rothken, an attorney who recently defended TorrentSpy against copyright claims.

Louderback, who wrote about the situation on his company blog early on Thursday, said he probably won't sue because of financial constraints.

MediaDefender's behavior has crossed a line, Rothken says.

"Hollywood goes too far and loses all credibility when their investigators, in the name of antipiracy, act like lawless pirates and hack servers and force law abiding services off the Internet," he said.

"It's ironic for a company that is supposed to be helping major Hollywood organizations in getting legal compliance, that they would use techniques that at least optically appear to be in violation of the law," Rothken added.

To others, including my CNET News.com colleague Charles Cooper, Revision3 is more like a civilian casualty in an escalating cold war over how to protect and distribute copyrighted content in a digital age.

"You'll find over time more and more examples of Hollywood, big music and their agents being overzealous, overreaching, and overprotecting," said Eric Garland, chief executive of peer-to-peer file-sharing tracking firm Big Champagne. "If they are going to compete and defend their content aggressively enough to put a meaningful dent in piracy, they are going to be overinclusive and make mistakes."

Updated 3:20 p.m. PDT with comment from MediaDefender and to clarify that individual movie and recording studios, and not RIAA and MPAA, are clients of MediaDefender, and that Dmitri Villard is CEO of MediaDefender parent ArtistDirect and not MediaDefender.

Revision3 has investigated the denial of service attack that kept it offline over the Memorial Day weekend and has concluded that antipiracy group MediaDefender is to blame.

In a blog post on Thursday morning, Revision3 Chief Executive Jim Louderback writes that much of the traffic that bombarded the Web TV network was traced back to MediaDefender. The group has a history of launching DOS attacks against distributors of what they believe to be copyrighted content, he alleges. MediaDefender's clients include all the major recording label and movie studio, but not the RIAA or MPAA.

"They saw us as a "distributor" - even though we were using Bittorrent for legitimate reasons. Once we shut them out, their vast network of servers were automatically programmed to implement a scorched earth policy, and shut us down in turn.

Louderback says he called MediaDefender and was told that it had indeed been injecting spoof files into the Revision3 network without permission for months as part of its antipiracy efforts to dilute the pool of pirated content online, but MediaDefender denied responsibility for the DOS attack.

It appears that Revision3's servers were overwhelmed by backed up traffic when the company closed a back door that MediaDefender had been using into the network, Louderback speculates.

"Media Defender was abusing one of Revision3's servers for their own purposes--quite without our approval. When we closed off their backdoor access, MediaDefender's servers freaked out, and went into attack mode," he writes.

He notes that DOS attacks are illegal in the U.S. under 12 different statutes and that Revision3 suffered "measurable harm" to its business as it was unable to serve videos and ads through much of the weekend and into Tuesday, and its internal e-mail servers were even shut down.

The FBI is looking into the matter, he adds.

MediaDefender Chief Executive Randy Saaf told CNET News.com later on Thursday that the firm did nothing illegal, did not target Revision3 specifically, and was merely posting spoof files to what it saw as a public torrent index server that had pirated content on it just like anyone can post files to a torrent network.

"We're fans of Revision3," he said. "We didn't know they were running" the index server.

Dimitri Villard, chief executive of MediaDefender parent ArtistDirect, did not immediately return calls or respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Editor's note: Updated on Wednesday at 5:58 a.m. PDT to add information from Copiepresse.

A group representing Belgian newspaper publishers is demanding that Google pay it up to $49 million euros--some $77 million--in damages related to a lawsuit alleging the search giant linked to and cached their news stories in violation of copyright law.

According to an Associated Press report Tuesday, the group, called Copiepresse, said it has sent a legal summons to Google asking that the company appear in court in September to decide whether it should be forced to pay Copiepresse between 32.8 million euros and 49.2 million euros. The group also requested 4 million euros as "provisional" payment, the AP said.

Google has already lost earlier rounds of a court dispute with Copiepresse, which has argued that Google had violated copyright law by failing to secure permission before using headlines and snippets of Belgian French- and German-language newspaper articles in its Google News aggregation service and by providing links to cached copies of the articles in the search results on its Belgium search engine.

Google, which has challenged that ruling, said on Tuesday that it had not yet received the new Copiepresse legal summons and that it still awaits the outcome of its appeal.

"We strongly believe that Google News and Google Web search are legal, and that we have not violated Copiepresse's copyright," said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker. "This is why we are appealing the February 2007 ruling. We consider that this new claim for damages is groundless, and we intend to vigorously challenge it."

Stricker declined to provide further details about the status of the lawsuit.

Copiepresse and Google had been in talks after the February 2007 ruling about how to reach a mutually agreeable solution. Last May, Google reportedly began reinstating links to Belgian newspaper sites in its main search results as a result of some of those negotiations.

A Copiepresse representative reached by e-mail told CNET News.com early Wednesday that the new legal action occurred because the two entities could not find an agreement, so the negotiation period ended, and the judicial process resumed.

Buzz about possible fines against the search giant, however, is not new. In November 2006, just after an initial court ruling against Google, there were reports that Copiepresse was seeking some 34 million euros in fines, though Google promptly denied that was the case.

Copiepresse has feuded in the past with other Web companies, reaching a settlement with Microsoft.

For the first time ever, the federal government has successfully won a jury verdict against someone accused of illegally downloading music, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.

A jury in Alexandria, Va, found Barry Gitarts, 25, allegedly a member of Internet music piracy group, Apocalypse Production Crew (APC), was found guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.

Gitarts faces up to five years in prison, a fine of $250,000 and must make full restitution, according to a statement released by the DOJ.

The Recording Industry Assoc. of America (RIAA), which said it helped develop evidence against APC, applauded the jury verdict.

"For the first time ever, a criminal online music piracy case went to trial, and the jury rendered a swift and unanimous verdict," said Brad Buckles, executive vice president for the RIAA. "The crimes committed here -- as well as the harm to the music community -- are severe, and so are the consequences. We congratulate and thank the U.S. Attorney's office for its work on this case."

APC was among the pioneers in music piracy according to the blog TorrentFreak. The group is considered by many to be the first to coordinate pre-release uploading of MP3 files, TorrentFreak reported. Gitarts is accused of participating in the group for nearly a year, the DOJ alleged. The government has convicted 15 APC members so far.

What is different about Gitarts' case is that unlike any of the other APC members, he decided against striking a plea agreement and took his case to court.

What makes APC members different than average Lime Wire users is the group was sophisticated and specialized in releasing copyright music on the Web, according to the DOJ's statement. Gitarts operated a server where APC members stored hundreds of thousands of song files, the DOJ alleged.

Three of the largest broadcast TV networks have sent a cease-and-desist letter to RedLasso , a little-known but rapidly growing video syndication site.

Fox News Network, NBC Universal, and CBS sent a letter on Monday, accusing the company of "building a business based on the unauthorized syndication of" the content owners' news, sports, and entertainment shows.

RedLasso records TV shows and then indexes clips so users can find, pull, and embed them on other Web sites. Reporter Liz Gannes over at Newteevee.com saw this one coming. Two weeks ago, Gannes noted that RedLasso had grown from 2 million unique users in November to 24 million in April.

Gannes wrote: "Now might be a pretty good time to get permission."

She added later that RedLasso executives told her they were on good terms with broadcasters. The executives' assertions, however, are untrue, the networks said in their letter to RedLasso. In the letter, the entertainment companies wrote that such statements "falsely convey an affiliation...when there is none."

At a time when the networks are giving their content away for free, one has to wonder why RedLasso would even get into this business. Anyone can go to Hulu and grab embed code for many NBC Universal shows without violating the law.

I was in Los Angeles for the Digital Hollywood conference earlier this month and there was plenty of discussion about the influx of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs moving in to make deals with the studios. The big entertainment companies were more open to cutting deals than ever, insiders told me.

They also said that partnerships awaited those that could help the entertainment industry solve problems of advertising, marketing, and syndication on the Internet.

Executives from King of Prussia, Pa.-based RedLasso were unavailable for comment.

Disclosure: CBS has agreed to acquire CNET Networks, publisher of News.com. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.

The emergence of online video has begun enticing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to Hollywood, and unlike an earlier migration during the dot-com era, the film industry is rolling out red carpets.

After spending three days at the Digital Hollywood conference, where I spoke with dozens of entertainment executives as well as tech CEOs, it's easy to spot what's going on: studio executives are more comfortable with online video and clip-playing gadgets than in the past. The entertainment sector also needs help figuring out how to make money from digital. On the other side, the geeks seem less dismissive of studio's copyright concerns and are much impressed with the film industry's glamor and riches.

"In the Hollywood culture, it's about the lawyers. It's an arm wrestle at a table. The (two industries) have a very different understanding of how to structure a deal."

-- Lynda Keeler, former Sony Pictures exec

"The new group descended so quickly on Los Angeles," said Philip Lelyveld, a former Disney executive who is now on his own as an entertainment-technology adviser, and has been a member of Hollywood's tech community for over a decade. "It's been in the last six or seven months where we suddenly saw a huge (spike) in activity. The reason for that is people are seeing startups built around content are suddenly becoming economically viable. The studios have also made their content more available. In some cases, they have made it clear that there are things that can be done with content that were still in dispute a few years ago."

Indeed, the film industry has begun galloping into the digital age.

News Corp. and NBC Universal launched Web video-portal Hulu in March. Earlier this month, the top movie studios agreed to allow Apple to offer flicks via iTunes the same day they're released on DVD. Two weeks ago, Warner Bros. Television announced it was bringing back the WB channel, the TV network shuttered 18 months ago, as an online-only play. According to one Warner Bros. executive, "the TV network of tomorrow won't be found on TV."

The new alliances, however, could still prove fragile. Tech entrepreneurs still complain that it takes too long to close licensing deals. The Studios continue to chafe when the whiz kids build services around their films or TV shows before they obtain rights--ala YouTube. And nobody can overlook the vastly different and often conflicting ways each side does business.

Lynda Keeler, a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist and chief of Sony Pictures Digital Group, said the techies are known for their willingness to work hard for options and equity--the possibility of a future payday. In Hollywood, she said, people want their money upfront. She remembers interviewing for a position with a venture fund after spending most of her career in entertainment. She asked the VC execs if they would like to speak to her lawyers.

"They said, 'Lawyers? We only use lawyers for term sheets," recalled Keeler, who now runs online retailer, Delight.com. "In the Hollywood culture, it's about the lawyers. It's an arm wrestle at a table. The (two industries) have a very different understanding of how to structure a deal."

Despite their differences, it's clear both sides see a profit in working together.

Derek Broes is Paramount's senior vice president of worldwide business development and the person assigned to find new ways for the studio to profit from its content. Lelyweld says Broes is among the group driving Hollywood's technology welcome wagon. To launch Paramount's VooZoo service, which allows Facebook users to send famous scenes from the studio's film library to friends, Broes got help from FanRocket, a developer of social-networking and media sites.

"Fan Rocket was a natural," Broes said. "We are a motion picture company that doesn't have a lot of technical experience and we're not in a position to be bringing in engineers on staff and start building things. The folks at FanRocket and Danny Kastner, their CEO, immediately got what I was trying to accomplish. We took off from there. VooZoo is only a first step in a larger strategy"

Broes is a former manager at Microsoft and Brilliant Digital Entertainment, the company that made news for bundling its Altnet P2P application into Kazaa. So he knows something about approaching the studios with a disruptive technology. He said the past friction between Hollywood and Silicon Valley was due to a lack of understanding of each other's businesses.

"I include myself in this," Broes said. "Back then it was almost like, 'Hey, look, give me your content. Look at all these people I have. I'll put ads around it and it will be hugely popular.' Well, they don't understand that the studios have certain restrictions in their business and have previous windows occupied by previous agreements. It wasn't a lack of wanting to go out and make money in a new way. It was just limitations of a legacy business that are now beginning to change."

Broes also said that for any of the new online ad models to work, corporate America must embrace new technologies. During a panel session at Digital Hollywood, Broes singled out the face-mapping system developed by start-up Big Stage. The company uses photos of a person's face to create a digital avatar and then computers manipulate the image to change facial expressions.

Broes asked why the technology couldn't be used for ads. Instead of showing Facebook users a commercial with actors, why not replace an actor's face with a viewer's. "If I can actually star in my own commercials, I'm going to watch them, Broes said."This is where the advertising community has completely failed at adjusting and adapting and being creative."

As for whether the geeks and movie people can get along, there's no doubt, according to Keeler, the former Sony executive.

Although she did not attend, Keeler said she heard that the much-publicized party thrown last month in Los Angeles by TechCrunch was a huge hit. "It was a mash of tech guys and beautiful women," Keeler said. "It showed the two tribes can get together...the children that come from this union are going to have it all, the good looks of Hollywood and the smarts of the valley...but it's going to be a painful pregnancy."

(Read my related blog: Advice for techies who want to star in Hollywood)