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Don’t look for the case to get to court anytime soon. The discovery part of the case isn’t expected to end until sometime next year.

What might prove interesting in the meantime is that among the people Google has asked to depose are Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of the The Colbert Report.

The two companies are in the discovery part of the case and must make certain information available to each other. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that Google must turn over YouTube user activity–videos watched, IP addresses, and usernames.

Google responded on Thursday in a statement to the court’s order.

CNET News.com reported that Viacom is under strict instructions from the court not to use the data for anything other than proving the prevalence of infringement on YouTube.

The case is important to Internet users because it could help define the scope of the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That’s the part of copyright law that Google and other Internet service providers claim protects them from being held responsible for the actions of their users.

“We are pleased the court put some limits on discovery,” Google said in the statement, “including refusing to allow Viacom to access users’ private videos and our search technology. We are disappointed the court granted Viacom’s overreaching demand for viewing history. We are asking Viacom to respect users’ privacy and allow us to anonymize the logs before producing them under the court’s order.”

Viacom is getting its hands on some of YouTube’s sensitive user data as a result of the copyright infringement lawsuit the conglomerate filed a year ago.

Viacom, therefore, is forbidden from targeting individual users in the manner of the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuits against individuals found to be downloading illegal music.

For instance, you can enter your billing information to generate the credit check required for a new contract, pick a rate plan, and make an appointment to pick up an iPhone 3G. The phone still needs to be activated in the store, which is Apple and AT&T’s way of trying to deter those who wish to unlock the phone and resell it for a profit.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News)

The activation process is still not quite as smooth as the one that greeted new owners of the original iPhone, but Apple and AT&T seem to have figured out a way to make things a little easier while keeping the unlockers at bay as much as possible. A visit to an Apple or AT&T store is still required, but some of the preliminary details can now be completed via the Internet.

This may not apply to everyone, such as those who have business accounts or other special discounts, but should streamline the process a bit for everyone else. Piper Jaffray thinks Apple will have sold 5 million iPhone 3Gs in the current quarter, and this process could make it a little easier for holiday shoppers toward the end of the year.

Apple and AT&T have figured out a way to shave a few minutes off the iPhone 3G purchasing experience.

Apple has figured out a way to let prospective
iPhone 3G buyers get a few of the steps out of the way at home.

Kid Rock has sold more than 1.7 million copies of his latest album, Rock and Roll Jesus, with no iTunes presence at all. And last week, Warner Bros. pulled Estelle’s new album from iTunes in the U.S. in hopes of spurring physical sales. (The plan appears to have failed miserably.)

(Credit:
Apple)

Coming soon to iPhone and iPod Touch: albums as applications.

I hope this becomes standard practice for new releases–one of the greatest losses in the move from LP to CD to digital files was the gradual elimination of lyric sheets.

Apple is striking back before this scattered practice turns into a trend. According to Music Week, the company is working with alternative rock band Snow Patrol on an interactive
iPhone/iPod Touch application for its next album that will include more album art, videos, and–most important–lyrics, which are still way too hard to find online. (The exceptions are those pop-up-infested and largely inaccurate lyrics sites that show up in Google search.)

There’s been a lot of speculation lately about whether iTunes is a boon or burden to album sales.

Today, WordPress put out a video demonstrating its very own iPhone blogging tool, which supports WordPress.com blogs and self-hosted WordPress.org blogs (as long as it’s version 2.5.1 or later). WordPress promises the iPhone app will let you create and edit posts, will support multiple blogs as well as privacy settings, plus it will let you upload images directly from your camera or library. You can also preview the post in the iPhone’s
Safari browser before hitting Publish. While you can currently post to your WordPress blog via the Safari browser, this native iPhone app will hopefully offer a better and more seamless experience. It isn’t out yet, but seeing as the App Store is live and the iPhone 3G will be in U.S. stores tomorrow, we expect it’ll be out very soon. We expect to see a similar iPhone app from Blogger soon as well.

When the
iPhone App Store was mentioned in Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote, one of the many applications announced was a TypePad blogging tool, courtesy of Six Apart (The company also makes two other blogging tools; Movable Type and Vox). Now that the App Store has launched, other blogging platforms like WordPress are coming forward with their own iPhone app plans.

But a large part of Monday’s news was focused on software, too. As expected, Jobs announced the upcoming iPhone App Store, the foundation for which was laid out in March when he announced the release of the iPhone software development kit. Since the SDK was released, third-party developers have been busy writing applications specifically designed to run on the iPhone.

Hardware features include longer battery life, a flush headphone jack, silver button controls on the side of the phone, and a plastic back case that comes in black or white (for the 16GB version only).

(Credit:
Apple)

The new
iPhone will use third-generation wireless technology and run updated iPhone 2.0 software. It’s expected to launch July 11, Jobs said in his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. The iPhone will also be cheaper than its predecessor, with a 16GB version priced at $299 and an 8GB version that costs $199.

Steve Jobs unveils the new 3G iPhone at Apple’s WWDC.

CNET News.com’s Tom Krazit and Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

In what may have been the worst-kept secret in Apple announcements of late, CEO Steve Jobs announced a 3G version of the iPhone on Monday, along with a slew of new third-party applications designed for the device.

The iPhone 3G will launch in 22 countries on July 11 and will roll out to a total of 70 by the end of the year, Jobs said. It should arrive in Russia and China later this year, Jobs said in an interview Monday on CNBC. “I think you’ll see those later this year,” he said. In China, the company is awaiting regulatory approval, he added.

The new iPhone 3G from Apple

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)

During his keynote speech Monday, Jobs brought a string of developers on stage to demo the fruits of all that labor. Featured applications included a mobile-blogging app from Six Apart; a new version of Super Monkey Ball from Sega; an application from eBay that allows users to monitor their bids; an application from Modality that gives medical students up-close views of human body parts to help them study anatomy; an application that gives near real-time updates on Major League Baseball games; an Associated Press app that sends out local news based on where a user is; and a service from Loopt that lets people see where their friends are at any given time. (You can see a roundup of demos of each of these apps here.)

That upgrade in wireless technology is key. While on stage, Jobs compared how quickly the old and new versions loaded the National Geographic home page. The 3G version loaded the page in 5 seconds, while the older version took 18 seconds. The lack of next-generation wireless has kept a lot of potential international buyers who are accustomed to 3G service overseas from opting for the iPhone.

For its part, Apple is bringing GPS to the iPhone, along with a new service called MobileMe, which is essentially an update of the current .Mac service. Subscribers to the MobileMe get push e-mail, contacts, and calendars on the iPhone, and can also access their photo galleries remotely. That service costs $99 per year.

Yang is facing a proxy fight with Icahn, who is seeking to unseat the board and oust the Yahoo co-founder and chief executive from his top-dog position.

Yahoo board member Gary Wilson, meanwhile, offered up his two cents on corporate governance in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. In the op-ed piece, Wilson advocates for keeping the role of CEO and chairman separate, in a move to avoid the “Imperial CEO” syndrome.

In a counter punch, Yang characterized Microsoft as trying to “destabilize” the Internet search pioneer by issuing public support to Icahn and stating its willingness to renew its bid for all of the company, or just its search assets, should a new Yahoo board be put into place after the August 1 annual shareholders meeting.

The simple change I suggest to effect the separation of chairman and CEO–requiring that an independent director become chairman when a new CEO is named–would increase the rightful influence of ownership in the governance of American corporations, and lead to extinction of the Imperial CEO. This, in turn, would improve corporate performance and decrease the need for new, expensive and intrusive government regulations to control management excesses.

No formal discussions between the two companies are currently under way, Yang said in the interview.

Hmm, wonder if Icahn will follow such advice should his slate win in its proxy contest…

Jerry Yang

While the vast majority of Wilson’s op-ed piece is of a general nature on this topic, he does, as one would expect, make reference to Yahoo.

And Yang said any effort by investors to “trust” Icahn and his proposed investor slate would be “really a bad choice.”

I think that I can bring stability back to Yahoo, and I want to get on with building company. I think that the destabilizing by Microsoft has become more and more intentional. I am not happy about it.

I have also witnessed the benefits of separating the chairman and CEO roles as a director of Yahoo. Despite the mistaken impression left by some media coverage, the Yahoo board of directors is intensely focused on creating value for shareholders–and the separation of the chairman and CEO roles in 2007 has made the present situation involving Microsoft and other alternatives a shareholder-focused process marked by close board oversight of management. I am confident it will result in a good outcome for Yahoo shareholders.

The company’s board of directors and Yang are both under extreme pressure by shareholders, of which a number of significant players are calling for their heads.

Updated at 2:20 p.m. PDT, with details about an opinion piece by Yahoo board member Gary Wilson in The Wall Street Journal.

In his interview with the Journal, Yang said:

Wilson, in the op-ed piece, says:

Microsoft, in its public statement Monday, said it had come to the conclusion the software giant “cannot reach an agreement” with Yahoo. The Internet search pioneer previously rejected Microsoft’s sweetened buyout offer of $33 a share and declined its offer of a partial buyout of Yahoo’s search business, noting the terms of the partial deal were not adequate.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

After taking a one-two punch from investor activist Carl Icahn and Microsoft on Monday, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang threw a few punches of his own in an interview in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Yang noted he has been perplexed by Microsoft’s unwillingness to continue negotiations with the company if it wants to do a deal. He reiterated the company’s stance that it is willing to look at any deal Microsoft wants to propose.

Catch the most recent news about the iPhone 3G and App Store.

The app does save a fraction of time in bypassing
Safari’s initial loading of the iPhone-optimized page and works without a hitch.

With so much fairy dust in the air over Apple’s day-early release of the App Store and iTunes 7.7 (for Windows and Mac), it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement. And we are excited. Being the intrepid reviewers we are, we’re taking the unofficial iPhone 2.0 firmware for a ride to test out some of these apps. Be forewarned that the firmware has not yet been Apple-approved for wide release and cannot be vouched for.

Google’s app is a prime example. It opens with a blinking search bar and with the keypad already engaged. Like the optimized Web app version, suggested matches are displayed as the search begins; this time they are listed below the search field. Below the search space is a shortcut bar for seeing the array of Google apps, including Gmail, Maps, Docs, and Reader. These icons are themselves quick links for launching the Web-optimized versions of Gmail and clan.

More than 500 applications are already clustered in the App Store, many of them tiny apps and widgets that have been custom-built to run natively on the upgraded
iPhone firmware. Most of these early entrants are nearly identical to the iPhone-optimized versions previously released by publishers to work with the iPhone Classic.

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t be that surprised considering the tech industry’s counterculture wellsprings. I’m not going to cover that in detail here, but a good resource is John Markoff’s “What the Dormouse Said: How the ’60’s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer” does a nice job pulling the disparate strands of the story together. He offers a good explanation of how drug experimentation and rebellion against authority in the 1960s fed into the thinking of several of the key computer researchers, whose contributions to the tech canon ultimately laid the basis for the contemporary PC business.

“You’d be surprised how many secret Deadheads there are out there,” he noted.

Watkins, who calls himself “a Deadhead from way back,” owns a couple of the band’s old guitars as well as a gold record or two, among other Grateful Dead paraphernalia. And he says he’s not the only fan and collector from the ranks of Silicon Valley’s managerial elite.

“It’s one of my secret peeves,” he says. “I showed up at a meeting the other day, and I was the only one with blue jeans on. They were all dressed up in suits. But there’s another side to this. You start creating social structures within your companies where ties are becoming ways of differentiating the senior guys from middle management. It’s senior management that’s trying to differentiate themselves…and I don’t like it much.”

Maybe that’s why Watkins appears increasingly irritated at often finding business interlocutors–and even employees–dressing in formal attire (a no-no in the historically more casual West Coast technology community).

Seagate Technology CEO Bill Watkins doesn’t Twitter, but he’s not big on sartorial formality either–especially when it comes to ties. You know that cliche about marching to a different drummer? In this case, it’s Watkins’ own drummer and that’s why he grooves on the Grateful Dead.

Bill Watkins So much so that he’s one of the Silicon Valley hotshots volunteering to help the University of Santa Cruz raise money for its planned archive of Grateful Dead memorabilia.

“We’ve got a warehouse full of posters and letters and things,” Watkins says. “We want to create a library annex, and we’re going to try and raise $2 million to build it. In August, I think maybe we’ll hold a big fund-raiser party somewhere in the Bay Area.”

(Credit:
Grateful Dead)

Image sharing and markup, no download required.

Fuze is priced at $29.95 a month (much less with yearly commitment). That’s a bit high, and I expect competition (and the growing popularity of free products) will steadily push the prices down on remote presentation apps. I’m glad about that. I can’t stand WebEx.

Fuze also runs on some smartphones, like the Blackberry Bold, and includes support for video. I haven’t had a chance to check that out but it’s an important feature–you’ll be able to participate in a Web meeting while you’re sitting an airport waiting area with your laptop put away. On other phones, like the
iPhone, you can monitor the chat room but not see the shared screens.

I like the feature in the program to call people into a conference bridge, instead of the usual procedure, which is to e-mail them a phone number and access code. It will save a lot of time in online meetings if you can pull in your participants.

Bonus: What’s CallWave doing in this market?
Prior to releasing this product, CallWave made and sold an “Internet answering machine,” that did speech-to-text summaries of your voicemail. The company is backing away from that product. CallWave CEO Jeffrey Cavins told me that while there was good uptake from techies, the service was too hard to configure for general consumers. If cellular carriers had gotten onboard to offer it to their subscribers, the product would still be supported. But they didn’t.

On the downside, you can’t (yet) use Fuze for screen or application sharing, since that would require a software install on the sender’s side. The company is working on that, although the people I talked to there want to push the “no download required” pitch as long as they can, which explains the delay.

There’s a new WebEx competitor hitting the market: CallWave’s Fuze. Its advantages: No download required on either the viewing or the presenting side. It works with video and allows markup of video frames. And it has some nice call-handling features.

I used the tool briefly and although I found some bugs and performance issues in this early version, I like the design and found it simple to use. You can upload documents to share (images, text files, PowerPoint presentations, even videos), and once you’re sharing them, use simple drawing tools to mark them up and illustrate points. On the shared video player, you can sketch over the top of a paused video, and the sketches stay attached to the particular frame; you can see which frames have markups by little icons on the player’s progress bar.

Fuze is a Flash app, and reminds me a bit of Adobe’s own Acrobat Connect, with which it competes (it’s a very good product, too). There are several other products in the space, too, including Vyew, which was recently updated, and the open-source DimDim.

Internet users performed 11.7 billion searches in the U.S. in August, choosing Google 63 percent of the time, according to ComScore’s monthly analysis released Thursday. That’s an increase of 1.1 percentage points from 61.9 percent in July, the analyst firm said.

It’s a familiar pattern: another month, another increase in Google’s search market share.

Yahoo slipped from 20.5 percent to 19.6 percent, and Microsoft slipped from 8.9 percent to 8.3 percent.