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Major League Baseball has struck out in its attempt to get the U.S. Supreme Court to intercede in a fantasy baseball dispute.

The justices on Monday said they won't take up MLB's challenge, backed by the National Football League Players Association, of prior court rulings favoring a fantasy league company. The announcement came without comment in a standard list of case statuses published by the high court (PDF).

MLB's Internet media arm, later joined by the pro-baseball players' union, had claimed that C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing--a Missouri company that sells fantasy sports products via the Web, e-mail, regular mail, and phone--was using baseball players' names and statistics without a license, thereby violating the players' rights to publicity under state intellectual property laws. (A right to publicity, of course, is a person's right to control and profit from the commercial use of his name and likeness.)

The original lawsuit actually came from C.B.C. The company sued MLB after the pro baseball association began providing fantasy baseball games on its own Web site. MLB offered C.B.C. a license only to promote MLB's products, not to continue selling its own fantasy baseball games. Fearing a lawsuit from MLB if it continued business as usual, C.B.C. filed its own suit.

C.B.C. won at the district court level and again last year at the appeals court level, which held that the company's "first amendment rights in offering its fantasy baseball products supersede the players' rights of publicity."

The U.S. Congress may soon vote on a new "compromise" spy law that would still likely derail pending suits against AT&T and other companies accused of opening their networks to the government in violation of wiretap law.

Democratic leaders, facing intense election year pressure from Republicans and more conservative "Blue Dog" members of their own party, had said they hoped to reach an agreement on a contentious rewrite of a 1978 electronic-surveillance law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, before their Memorial Day recess.

That self-imposed deadline passed without action. The major sticking point has been whether to grant so-called retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies facing lawsuits over allegations that they illegally assisted the National Security Agency, violating their customers' privacy.

The latest proposal, which Republicans are touting as a "compromise," would shift that debate behind closed doors, allowing a secret court to dismiss lawsuits related to the president's warrantless-wiretapping program--that is, during the period after the Sept. 11 attacks and before then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales agreed to submit the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program to the same secret court for review.

In order to dismiss the suits, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose 11 judges are appointed by the U.S. Supreme Court's chief justice, would be required only to consider whether the attorney general's "certification" requesting surveillance assistance from a communications company was terrorism-related and legally authorized by the president. That's according to a draft proposal and summary provided by Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.)'s office and discussed at a press conference last week.

"It's clear that they're giving (the provisions) nice titles, and Bond is suggesting that he's made a lot of concessions, but ultimately, the way the provisions work out is, the administration gets what it wants," Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU's Washington office, said in a phone interview. "The immunity provision is garbage."

Critics--including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which have filed legal challenges against the surveillance activities--say that would amount to a rubber stamp of sorts on any past warrantless eavesdropping.

Aides to Democratic leaders told CNET News.com that their bosses are reviewing the proposal and haven't yet taken a position on it. But civil-liberties groups say they fear that, thanks to political pressure, they will ultimately accept much what they call a "sham" compromise.

The White House and Republicans, of course, have preferred all along to give more blanket "retroactive" immunity to telephone companies. Earlier this year, they appeared poised to get their way, when the U.S. Senate voted to approve a bill (PDF) that likely would have wiped out scores of pending legal challenges against the likes of AT&T and Verizon Communications.

But the House of Representatives ultimately objected to that approach and refused to call up that bill for a vote, opting instead to narrowly approve a version (PDF) lacking so-called "retroactive immunity" for phone and Internet companies accused of wrongdoing.

The "compromise" this time around appears to involve a couple of things: Outside parties challenging the government's warrantless surveillance would be allowed to submit briefs to the secret court. There would also be an arguably lower legal standard than in the already-approved Senate bill for when court would be allowed to review the attorney general's "certifications," though civil-liberties groups said it's unclear exactly how that will work in reality.

Under the revised proposal, the secret court would also have the option of sending a legal challenge back to a regular federal court, if it--and a subsequent secret appeals court--determines the case against a phone company should not be dismissed.

There's no guarantee, however, that such a move, if it even occurred, would not result in the federal court simply throwing out the case itself. After all, appeals courts have already dismissed similar suits on the grounds that state secrets would be revealed.

And throughout it all, a good amount of secrecy would be required under the revised bill. For instance, the secret court would be prohibited from disclosing how or why it reached a particular conclusion about whether to dismiss a case, if the attorney general declared that such revelations would harm "national security."

What remains unclear is what happens next. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he now hopes to call up a compromise bill for a vote sometime before Congress departs for its August recess. Hoyer has also said "differences" remain to be worked out among their versions, but it wasn't immediately clear what those differences are, as a Hoyer representative didn't immediately respond to requests for elaboration.

Democrats, meanwhile, insisted again that intelligence agents aren't hamstrung by the lack of legal changes so far.

"Our intelligence community has the tools it needs to keep America safe, and we are absolutely committed to ensuring that this remains the case," Hoyer said. "The Director of National Intelligence has not informed us of any degradation in intelligence collection, and we continue to call on him to inform Congress if this changes."

The Bush administration on Wednesday hit out at the European Union for imposing taxes on imports of certain electronics in alleged violation of an existing trade agreement.

U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said the United States has filed a formal complaint with the World Trade Organization, which means that U.S. and European officials now have 60 days to consult about the dispute. If they don't reach a resolution at that point, the United States can call for a panel to determine whether the EU is complying with its World Trade Organization obligations under the 1996 Information Technology Agreement (PDF).

U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab

(Credit: U.S. Trade Representative)

The ITA, as it's known, counts 71 signatories, including Japan and China, and dictates that a "wide range" of high-tech products must be imported duty-free, according to the U.S. Trade Representative. But Schwab said EU customs officials now claim they can charge taxes on certain products--namely, certain multifunction printers, cable and satellite set-top boxes, and flat-screen monitors--because they incorporate newer features or technologies than those spelled out in the original agreement.

"The EU should be working with the United States to promote new technologies, not finding protectionist gimmicks to apply new duties to these products," Schwab said in a statement. "Therefore, we urge the EU to eliminate permanently the new duties and to cease manipulating tariffs to discourage technological innovation."

Schwab said the U.S. has been raising its concerns with EU officials for the last 20 months but has failed to see progress. She said Japan also plans to join the formal case.

EU representatives were not immediately available for comment.

American high-tech companies were quick to applaud the USTR announcement. The Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Apple, Dell, Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Sony, said it's concerned that European countries are currently posing taxes as high as 14 percent on imports of flat-screen monitors, set-top boxes, and multifunction printers. Approximately $70 billion of those products were exported globally in 2007, according to the USTR.

"The EU is violating the letter and spirit of the ITA, which has been the most successful, pro-innovation and pro-growth agreement of the past decade," said John Neuffer, an ITI vice president. "The EU is taxing innovation by removing products from the ITA's zero-tariff status simply because companies have found ways to improve them for businesses and consumers."

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.

Computer scientists have pressed for e-voting paper trails for years, in peer reports and in testimony on Capitol Hill. Now it looks like Congress is poised to ignore this idea: forthcoming legislation will say that a backup "electronic" record is OK too.

Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Bob Bennett (R-Utah), who lead a Senate committee charged with overseeing election law, said they plan to introduce a bill in the next few weeks that would require voters casting ballots on touch-screen or so-called "direct recording electronic" machines to have the ability to verify their selections through "an independent paper, electronic, audio, video, or pictorial record." That's according to a press release that came out Thursday--a copy of the bill's text is not yet available because it's still being drafted, a Feinstein aide said.

Groups like the Association for Computing Machinery have long advocated for use of "hybrid" systems containing both electronic and paper components, which are designed to enable independent audits and provide a backup record in the event of buggy or hacked voting machine software. Princeton University computer science professor Edward Felten, an ACM advisory committee member who studies e-voting security, said Friday that he couldn't comment on the new bill without seeing more details.

The bill's approach seems to indicate that the senators feel some sympathy toward arguments that paper trails aren't the only option for independently verifying a voter's pick and that other innovative alternatives could emerge down the line. Michael Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and consultant to the Pennsylvania government, is one such skeptic who has argued that paper ballots are susceptible to problems and rigging of their own.

The decision may also be a nod to state and local election officials who have complained about the costs associated with outfitting their machines with paper trails.

The new voting machine requirements would take effect on January 1, 2012, unless a state requested a waiver, which, if granted, would give it until the beginning of 2014.

That new deadline represents yet another delay in getting new federal electronic voting machine rules off the ground. Last year, Feinstein introduced a bill that would have required states to scrap paperless voting machines by this year's presidential election, but at a hearing last summer, she said she'd decided 2010 would be a safer bet, giving voting reform advocates and election officials more time to reach a compromise.

In addition to the new voting machine obligations, the bill would require states to do public audits of their election results. It would also establish certain security requirements for the voting machines and their software and would set up a research grant program designed to encourage development and testing of new technologies for verifying votes.

Feinstein said in a statement that the bill is necessary because "we now have a patchwork of voting systems throughout the country, including five states that use electronic voting systems but have no independent records to help ensure the accuracy and reliability of the vote, and eleven others in which large sections of their states use electronic systems that have no such independent records."

Meanwhile, 30 states already have legislation on their books requiring use of paper ballots in some fashion, according to Verified Voting, a group that advocates for use of paper trails. But other state officials have balked at the potential costs of upgrading their systems, particularly since some subscribe to the belief that providing paper trails isn't a panacea to ballot-tampering, anyway.

Senators Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) discuss their concerns about Internet censorship by foreign countries, including China. Chinese authorities serve up the cartoon cops (pictured here) on its citizens' screens from time to time as reminders that they're being monitored.

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)

WASHINGTON--Senators on Tuesday pressed executives from Yahoo, Google, and Cisco Systems to justify their business practices in China and other Internet-censoring countries, with Cisco in the hot seat over new allegations of cozier-than-confessed ties with the Chinese police.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), who led the morning hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee's human rights panel, said he is actively considering whether to draft new legislation that, similar to a pending House of Representatives proposal, would place a host of new restrictions on American companies doing business in Internet-restricting countries.

Durbin said he appreciates the efforts of American companies to promote free expression in otherwise oppressive countries but believes some are falling short on those pledges.

"Perhaps it's time for Congress to consider converting this moral obligation into a legal obligation," he said.

Still, the event lacked the pervasive finger pointing and name calling that punctuated two previous hearings about similar topics in the House of Representatives during the past two years.

Durbin set the tone for the less antagonistic hearing, which lasted barely two hours and counted only three politicians present at its most crowded, by saying up front: "This is not a black and white issue, and this is not an easy issue. U.S. technology companies face difficult challenges when dealing with oppressive governments."

Cisco and China: Censorship collaborators?
Two human rights activists present at the hearing, however, said it's clear that the companies aren't doing nearly enough to resist demands that they censor their services and called for new legislation to address that issue.

Cisco general counsel Mark Chanlder listens to Shiyu Zhou, a Chinese human rights activist, after Tuesday's hearing. Zhou says internal documents show Cisco has been assisting the Chinese government's censorship aims, which the company denies.

(Credit: Anne Broache/CNET News.com)

Although Yahoo has arguably faced the most protracted scrutiny from politicians at previous hearings, Cisco endured the bulk of the questions this time.

A portion of the hearing focused on a 2002 internal Cisco presentation, which was provided to the subcommittee by Shiyu Zhou, deputy director of a group called the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, which creates technological tools designed to circumvent censors. In Zhou's view, the 90 PowerPoint slides, which Cisco says were produced by a lower-level Chinese employee working in China, suggest the company assisted the Chinese government in meeting its censorship aims, although Cisco vehemently denied those allegations.

The slides--a translated copy of which was provided to CNET News.com--include descriptions of the Chinese government's so-called "Golden Shield Project," which is responsible for operating China's "great firewall." One slide lists one of the project's main objectives as monitoring and controlling the Internet to combat the "Falun Gong evil cult," a spiritual practice that the Chinese government has persecuted.

Another slide lists planning, construction, technical training, and maintenance as "opportunities" for Cisco, which Zhou argues "flatly rebut(s) Cisco's repeated and self-serving claims" that it has sold the same generic routers and other equipment to China as to any other government and does not in any way assist with its censorship goals. Zhou said he provided the subcommittee just before the hearing with another presentation that offers additional evidence to that effect.

Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler attempted to defuse those allegations, saying he was "appalled" to see the anti-Falun Gong line included in the presentation. He denied once again that his company has participated in any way in the Chinese government's censorship activities, saying Cisco does not customize its equipment to meet those aims.

"We disavow the implication that this (presentation) in any way reflects Cisco's views," Chandler told the committee.

Durbin called the presentation "troubling" and asked Chandler to explain what policies Cisco has in place to make sure its employees don't cooperate with foreign censors.

Chandler said the company has an "extensive written code of conduct," and "employees who would customize our products in such a way as to undermine human rights would not be consistent with the code of conduct." He added that Cisco isn't sure exactly what devices the Chinese government uses to monitor and filter its network but believes the Chinese government itself has devised those tools.

An industry code of conduct
As they have done in the past, executives from Google, Yahoo, and Cisco each defended their current practices, saying they have no choice but to comply with the law in the countries where they operate. But, on the whole, they said they firmly believe the presence of their technologies does more good for the people of the countries who can access it, even if it's used in a restrictive way, than would the utter absence of their services.

"It isn't perfect, as we know, that but we do think that something about being there is right," Google deputy general counsel Nicole Wong told the subcommittee.

Durbin voiced some skepticism about that argument. "When you are asked to be complicit through your companies in restricting the flow of information for the public good and the public health, aren't your hands a little dirty at the end of the day if you participate in that?" he asked the companies.

As Durbin sees it, there are two areas of concern: when companies censor information, such as search results, based on government requests; and when they turn over private information about subscribers in response to government requests related to activities that wouldn't be illegal in the United States.

The Illinois Democrat cited Google and Yahoo's censorship of search results on their Chinese search engines, as required by Chinese officials, and grilled Yahoo deputy general counsel Michael Samway over Yahoo China's decision a few years ago to turn over information about dissident writer Shi Tao that led to his imprisonment.. (Yahoo, for the record, currently owns a minority stake in Yahoo China.) Rather than hinting more closely at what sort of legislation he has in mind, Durbin stuck to asking broad questions.

"Should we declare it wrong for an American company to in any way cooperate with censorship and repression?" Durbin asked.

Wong, Chandler, and Samway each reiterated their calls for additional help from the government, whether through trade negotiations or new legislation, to protect their operations in countries where legal standards differ dramatically.

They also pointed to their efforts during the past 18 months to begin working out a solution on their own, by devising industry standards for dealing with such countries, in conjunction with human rights organizations, socially responsible investors, and academics. The companies said agreement is on the way, although a Human Rights Watch representative, Arvind Ganesan, seemed somewhat less optimistic about the companies' willingness to have their overseas practices monitored by a third party, as human rights activists have proposed.

Durbin questioned why the code of conduct hasn't been completed sooner, challenged each of the representatives present "to no longer tolerate the delay," and warned that Congress would be monitoring their progress closely.

"I hope within the next 48 hours we'll have an announcement," Durbin said, referring to the code of conduct. "That would be terrific."

Sen. Joe Lieberman wants YouTube and its rivals to delete any videos produced by al-Qaida, other Islamic terrorist groups, and any suspected sympathizers. But because there's no U.S. law requiring deletion--at least not yet--there's not much the onetime veep candidate can do except complain.

On Monday, the chairman of the U.S. Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee suggested in a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt that the company wasn't doing enough to remove videos that are violent or could be used by terrorist groups to enlist followers. "By taking action to curtail the use of YouTube to disseminate the goals and methods of those who wish to kill innocent civilians, Google will make a singularly important contribution to this important national effort," Lieberman wrote.

Sen. Joe Lieberman wants Google to remove terrorist-related videos from YouTube.

(Credit: U.S. Senate)

On the other hand, there's no national consensus on censoring YouTube, and there's actually evidence that U.S. spy agencies like being able to monitor what their adversaries are doing online. In addition, scholars routinely evaluate al-Qaida videos as part of their research, in much the same way as a previous generation researched Nazi propaganda (which has become part of a online exhibit by the U.S. Holocaust Museum).

Google, for its part, said its YouTube administrators had reviewed videos flagged by Lieberman's staff last week and pulled down an unspecified number, but only if they contained violence or hate speech. YouTube's community guidelines do prohibit a number of categories of content, including "graphic or gratuitous violence" and depictions of "bad stuff" like "bomb making."

"While we respect and understand his views, YouTube encourages free speech and defends everyone's right to express unpopular points of view," the company said on its official blog. "We believe that YouTube is a richer and more relevant platform for users precisely because it hosts a diverse range of views, and rather than stifle debate we allow our users to view all acceptable content and make up their own minds."

At the moment, legally speaking, Google and other Web hosts aren't required to censor what their users post. That's because of a piece of federal law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Under that law, Web hosts are free to restrict access to content that it deems "objectionable"--if they choose--but in general they can't be sued for choosing not to do so.

"Under section 230, YouTube has no obligation to review this kind of content," said John Morris, an attorney for the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group that has received funding from Google. "The policy judgment that underlies Section 230 is that speech on the Internet--and indeed commerce and everything else on the Internet--would be radically harmed if sites had the responsibility to review every single bit of posting and content that their users put up there."

Of course, as a senator, Lieberman could try to rewrite Section 230, and there are some hints (and in tech-policy circles, much speculation) that he'll do just that. Without mentioning that law, Lieberman has hinted that he may want to create some sort of new exception to those existing rules, saying in his letter to Google that removal of such material "should be a straightforward task since so many of the Islamist terrorist organizations brand their material with logos or icons identifying their provenance."

Leslie Phillips, a spokeswoman for the Senate committee that Lieberman leads, told News.com on Monday afternoon that her boss found Google's response to be unsatisfactory and was troubled that the company "does not appear willing to change its guidelines to prevent foreign terrorist organizations (as designated by the State Department) from posting videos used to radicalize followers and incite them to violence." She declined to comment on the status of any pending legislation.

Concern about terrorists mobilizing through online venues is hardly a new concern for Lieberman and other senators, who held a hearing last year on the topic and recently released a report calling for the government to coordinate strategies for counteracting terrorist messages on the Internet.

If Lieberman were to try to seek to prohibit the distribution of certain videos through federal law, it would most likely run into First Amendment difficulties.

"Certainly that's an appropriate thing for Congress to do, to restrict financial support to terrorist organizations (though the State Department watch list)," CDT's Morris said. "It's quite a different thing to say that the ideas...that, for example, some people in this world do not like America, that those ideas are ideas that need to be censored in this country. It is anathema to what this country stands for."

Beyond that, such a policy could also be impractical on a few levels, Morris said. First, it may be difficult to determine whether terrorist organizations themselves are posting the content, and second, because intelligence agencies reportedly monitor terrorist activity online as a way of helping to track their activities and potentially prevent attacks.

Eric Goldman, an assistant professor of law at Santa Clara University, noted that YouTube censorship isn't exactly a new idea: a non-binding resolution introduced in the House of Representatives last year (that got stuck in committee) called on user-posted video sites to do precisely that. "So what if Google/YouTube suppressed these videos?" Goldman said. "They would still be available online somewhere, so why do politicians care if they are hosted on Google/YouTube vs. somewhere else? What a silly PR stunt by Lieberman."

News.com's Declan McCullagh contributed to this report

A U.S. Senate panel has unanimously approved a bill that would encourage federal, state, and local police to use and create special software designed to nab child pornography swappers on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to send an amended version of the Combating Child Exploitation Act, chiefly sponsored by Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), to the full slate of politicians for a vote.

All told, the bill would allocate more than $1 billion over the next eight years for a broad array of efforts aimed at tackling Internet crimes against children. It calls for hiring 250 new federal agents at the FBI, the Immigrations and Custom Enforcement Agency, and the U.S. Postal Service dedicated to child exploitation cases; for beefing up personnel, equipment, and educational programs designed to combat Internet crimes against children; and for creating new forensics laboratories if the attorney general deems it necessary to deal with a "backlog" of online child exploitation cases.

"We need to give law enforcement the funds and the tools to pull the plug on Internet predators," Biden said in a statement.

An amendment adopted Thursday also adds new sections to the original bill that would rewrite existing child pornography laws. One section is designed to make it clear that live Webcam broadcasts of child abuse are illegal, which the bill's authors argue is an "open question." Another change is aimed at closing another perceived loophole, prohibiting digital alteration of an innocent image of a child so that sexually explicit activity is instead depicted.

It's unclear whether the changes are necessary. The Justice Department in the past, for instance, has netted guilty pleas in cases related to live Webcam recordings involving minors engaged in sexual acts.

The bill's passage follows a hearing last month at which Biden and other senators suggested they saw considerable promise in software designed to detect child pornography sources--specifically a tool called "Operation Fairplay." The so-called "comprehensive computer infrastructure" was developed two years ago by Special Agent Flint Waters in the Wyoming Attorney General's Office, where the system is still housed, and is currently being used by online child exploitation investigators nationwide.

The bill approved Thursday allocates $2 million for the attorney general to build upon that software by creating a "National Internet Crimes Against Children Data System," which would make information about ongoing cases--particularly high-priority ones--accessible to investigators nationwide and coordinate development of new software tools designed to detect alleged child predators in real time.

Through the existing Fairplay system, investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download files--frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" and much more obscene--to their own machines. The Fairplay software allows the investigator to obtain the IP address of the file's sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.

Once armed with an IP address and date and time of the download, investigators can subpoena the Internet service provider for more information, such as name and address of the subscriber who was assigned it at that moment. It's not clear whether any wiretaps are also conducted to monitor ongoing file-swapping.

Through that process, investigators have identified more than 600,000 unique computers allegedly trafficking in child pornography and traced them to the United States. But Biden and others have voiced dismay that they're only equipped with the resources to investigate about 2 percent of those potential cases.

Grand Theft Auto: Atlanta, anyone?

That title may not be far off, if the state of Georgia gets its way. Its latest goal, in the name of economic development, is to become the video game production capital of the United States.

Sonny Purdue, governor, Georgia

(Credit: Georgia Governor's Office)

Earlier this week, the state's Republican governor, Sonny Purdue, signed into law a proposal to offer greater tax incentives not only to game producers, but also to music video, movie, and TV production projects.

"The new incentives will put Georgia among the top five states in the U.S., in terms of financial competitiveness for entertainment projects," Ken Stewart, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, said in a statement. "We expect to see an increase in the number of industry jobs and overall economic impact for the state in the coming years."

Under the 2008 Entertainment Industry Investment Act, eligible companies that spent at least $500,000 on production costs in the state would be eligible for a 20 percent tax credit on that investment, up from the 9 percent that was previously on the books.

The companies can qualify for an extra 10 percent tax credit, too, but only if they agree to embed promotional ads and animated Georgia logos in their content.

According to a statement from Peach State, the entertainment industry has contributed more than $1.17 billion to Georgia's economy since 2005, when the first wave of tax credits took effect. Georgia, of course, is home to Turner Broadcasting System, the high-power media empire that includes CNN, Cartoon Network, and game network GameTap.