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To combat falling advertising revenue, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has been proposing the formation of a consortium with other publishers to charge a fee for all news distributed on the Internet and on portable devices – reports the Los Angeles Times.

Yahoo Inc Internet radio service is not required to pay fees to copyright holders of songs it plays, according to a federal appeals court in New York ruling – a defeat for Sony Corp’s BMG Music.

Friday’s ruling is a setback for record producers that have struggled with slumping sales as customers increasingly obtain music online or through other means.

For all the fears of sophisticated digital intrusions preoccupying many computer security professionals, President Obama’s leading candidates for “cyber czar” also are focusing on an all-too-human …

Former White House cybersecurity official Paul B. Kurtz, in his first public remarks since becoming an advisor to President Obama’s transition team following the election, describes his biggest worry: A “cyber Katrina” in which fragmented bureaucracies and companies fail to share critical information and coordinate responses to cyber intruders attempting to disrupt power grids, financial markets, or any number of now-plausible scenarios involving a Web shutdown.

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Last week’s launch of Google Chrome generated some discussion over the legal language in our new browser’s terms of service (TOS). As we noted in a subsequent post on Google Chrome’s terms of service:

"… Under copyright law, Google needs what’s called a "license" to display or transmit content. So to show a blog, we ask the user to give us a license to the blog’s content. (The same goes for any other service where users can create content.) But in all these cases, the license is limited to providing the service."

We’ve also seen some discussion on a few blogs about how our universal terms of service apply to other products, with some users worried that Google is trying to claim ownership of the content they generate. To be clear: our terms do not claim ownership of your content — what you create is yours and remains yours. But in lawyer-speak, we need to ask for a ‘license’ (which basically means your permission) to display this content to the wider world when that’s what you intend. This issue is not unique to Google; it applies to lots of other Internet companies that display and transmit user content. You can see some other terms of service here from Amazon, eBay, and Facebook.