Microsoft have emailed PPC advertisers to notify them of changes to their trademark policy in North America, and have also posted updates online. Microsoft says that 'to come in line with search industry practices' - i.e. Google - they will cease editorial investigations from 3rd March into complaints about trademarks used as keywords to trigger ads on Bing & Yahoo! Search in the United States and Canada.

This change removes the involvement of Microsoft from the practice of bidding against trademarked terms, and they now say that if there is concern that an advertiser may be using a trademark keyword inappropriately, the trademark owner should contact the advertiser directly.

Microsoft will still investigate complaints relating to alleged trademark violations in advert text, but will continue to allow fair use of trademarks in ad text. They say that advertisers are responsible for ensuring that their use of keywords and ad content, including trademarks and logos, does not infringe or violate the intellectual property rights of others.

News sites, such as the BBC, are reporting on the legal case in Italy which has widespread implications for video posting sites on the Internet. An Italian court has convicted 3 Google executives of breaking Italian law by allowing the video to be posted online showing an autistic teenager being bullied.

The convictions (suspended 6 month sentences) were due to privacy violations, but the ruling has come under widespread criticism and Google has also posted a blog article regarding the decision and the implications for Internet freedom and responsibility. If firms can be held liable for every piece of content on their site they would face an impossible job of policing and vetting everything before publication, particularly where there a large sites that encourage social interaction, such as YouTube and Facebook.

Google says it will vigorously appeal the case. The BBC report says that there is no indication that a similar case could or would be brought in any other European country at the moment. However Italy does seem determined to pursue such cases and similar ones are ongoing against other firms, such as eBay, Yahoo and Facebook.

Richard Thomas, the UK's former information commissioner and consultant to privacy law firm Hunton & Williams, said the case was "ridiculous". He is quoted as saying that "It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post. I can't imagine anything similar happening in (the UK). The case wasn't brought by the Italian equivalent of the information commissioner but by criminal prosecutors and we don't know their motives".

However, the verdict is likely to have ramifications for content providers around the world. Google said at the trial that pre-screening all YouTube content was impossible and the video at the centre of the case was posted on Google Video in 2006 shortly before the firm acquired YouTube. Italian prosecutors argued that Google broke Italian privacy law by not seeking the consent of all the parties involved before allowing it to go online, yet Google's lawyers said that the video was removed as soon as it was brought to its attention and that the firm also provided information on who posted it. As a result four students were expelled from their school in Turin, northern Italy.

An article on Search Engine Land indicates that Google is to relax its trademark restrictions for AdWords advertisers across more countries. A Google representative is stated as saying that "As of June 4th, Google will no longer investigate complaints relating to the use of trademarks as keywords by AdWords advertisers. This means that in the affected regions, a company advertising on Google will be able to select trademarked terms as keywords, and a user searching with a trademarked keyword may see a greater number of relevant ads in the sponsored links section, giving them greater choice."

Google was already allowing this use of trademark bidding in North America and had also relaxed the rules for the UK and Ireland last year. This new move will mean that advertisers will now be able to bid against trademarked terms as a keyword, if desired. Google says that their aim is "to provide our users with the most relevant information, from both search results and advertising. We are making this change because we want to give users greater choice and to help them make informed decisions."

There will clearly be implications with this change, both for advertisers wishing to bid against trademarked terms as well as those companies wishing to protect their trademarks within the Google search results.

Reuters has reported the outcome of a US legal case where a man has been sentenced to 30 months in prison for sending spam emails to over 1 million users of AOL. He pleaded guilty to breaking anti-spam laws and by-passing the Internet company's spam filtering system - he also has to pay $180,000 to AOL in compensation.

The ongoing court case in the US between Google and Viacom over the use of copyright video content on YouTube has taken a notable turn this week as the judge has ruled that Google must reveal the viewing habits of every user on YouTube who has ever viewed a video. As reported by the BBC, the ruling means that Google must hand over the viewing log to Viacom, which contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

This development clearly has major implications for online privacy and Google are now arguing about the format of the data and the need to conceal individual user's details. This depth of information shouldn't be necessary for Viacom, who want to assess the total viewing patterns of their content through YouTube (which includes clips from MTV and Paramount Pictures). They have previously claimed that about 160,000 unauthorised clips of Viacom's programmes were available on YouTube prior to 2007 and that these had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Viacom had also requested access to Google's source code for YouTube, but the court turned down this, since it recognised that it was effectively a "trade secret" and therefore shouldn't be disclosed. However, Google hope that the court will allow them to anonymise the data on individual user habits - nevertheless, this ruling means that Viacom will have access to a huge amount of activity logs in what is becoming an increasingly bitter legal case between these 2 giant US companies.

The eventual ruling in the case is likely to become a landmark case in Internet history and potentially affect the way that online video sites can operate in the future.

Google is facing another lawsuit in the US, according to a report by CNet. The claim aims to take a class action status for many affected advertisers and has been filed by the same firm that previously won significant cases against both Yahoo! and Google for click fraud issues. The new claim accuses Google of deceiving its customers into paying for ads they didn't expressly request.

This is based on the sign-up process for a new AdWords account whereby advertisers are automatically included in the 3rd-party content network of adverts (Google AdSense). There is not an obvious opt-out option for this part of the advertising network and advertisers need to enter the campaign settings after the account has been set up in order to deselect this option.

It is likely that Google will need to revise this system in the future to make it more obvious to advertisers what they are selecting and how they can easily opt-out if required. It also seems to be the nature of being a big corporation now that Google will continue to face these types of action whenever a potential failure in their system can be exploited for money.