Yahoo said on Monday that it would lead a group that would aim to make books and traditional media more available on the Internet, while being respectful of copyrights.

Google had launched a similar project last year, but met strong resistance after authors sued the Web giant over "massive copyright infringement" last month.

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Move over Microsoft and Google. California-based Nuance Communications, makers of voice automation technology, said on Friday they planned to sue Yahoo in order to prevent the company from hiring 13 of its engineers. The company also accuses Yahoo of attempting to steal its intellectual property.

The engineers were working on a project for Nuance known as Directory Assistance Automation, which would negate the need for a live person to search for telephone numbers.

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Kodak earlier this week unveiled a wireless digital camera, and announced a partnership with T-Mobile Hotspot that would allow the unit to e-mail pictures without the need for a computer. The camera was initially scheduled to debut earlier this summer, but engineering and marketing issues delayed its release.

The new camera has a resolution of 4.0 megapixels with a 3x optical zoom. 256 megabytes of internal memory will allow users to store up to 1,500 pictures depending on resolution. Also, a three-inch LCD touch screen enables users to navigate the camera's features.

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The head of the International Telecommunications Union says the United Nations stands ready to take over control of the Internet if the United States relinquishes control as it is being pressured to.

Yoshio Utsumi said the ITU "could do it if we were asked to" at a news conference Friday. However, it appears the chances of such an event happening are slim to none.

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A representative of Microsoft's French division told ZDNet France on Friday that the company plans to release a third service pack for the Windows XP operating system. According to Bernard Ourghanlian, technical and security director at Microsoft France, the update is significant and a priority for Microsoft's developers.

Microsoft last updated Windows XP in August 2004, focusing on security issues. The changes came after the company received widespread criticism over the operating system's apparent lax security. No details have been received on the contents of the update, although it may include a version of WinFX being fine-tuned for the now four year-old version of Windows.

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RadioShack said on Friday it plans to sell AMD's low-cost Internet terminal in its stores next week. The $299 USD device, dubbed the Personal Internet Communicator, was launched last year in an effort to bring Web access to low-income families in developing countries.

The unit is part of an initiative by AMD to put computers in the hands of half the world's population by the middle of the next decade.

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The argument between next-generation DVD formats Blu-ray and HD DVD got even more heated on Thursday. Blu-ray supporters Dell and Hewlett Packard shot back at comments made Tuesday by Microsoft and Intel in an announcement of support for HD DVD, calling the two companies statements on Blu-ray "inaccurate."

At issue were comments made regarding Blu-ray's storage capacity, copyright protection and the format's "backward compatibility."

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Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer is scheduled to meet with European Commission competition chief Neelie Kroes next week, her spokesperson confirmed to the press on Friday. While the exact topic of the Wednesday morning meeting is not known, the EU had received complaints that possibly could lead to a new case against the software giant. Last year, Microsoft was forced to pay 497 million euros for antitrust violations.

A spokesperson for Microsoft played down the meeting's significance, saying it was a routine meeting to discuss policy issues with the organization. The discussion was not requested by Kroes, however; Ballmer is on a business trip and had requested a meeting with her while in Europe. Ballmer is also scheduled to meet Siim Kallas, EU administration head.

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Sony on Thursday announced that it had developed a new version of its proprietary memory card format called Memory Stick Micro. About a quarter of the size of its predecessor, Micro is designed for use in compact mobile phones. Sony, along with manufacturer SanDisk, will begin offering licenses for the technology starting next week.

"Sony and SanDisk recognize the rapidly growing market opportunity for memory cards with multimedia mobile phones, and are joining forces to develop the ultra-small Memory Stick Micro format to foster development of extremely compact multimedia mobile phones," Dr. Eli Harari, president and chief executive officer of SanDisk said. The product is expected to ship in the first half of 2006.

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The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has upheld the University of California and Eolas Technology's claims to patents surrounding the mechanisms used to embed interactive programs in a Web browser. The decision strikes a blow to Microsoft's charges that the patent is invalid.

Eolas had sued Microsoft alleging the plug-in architecture in Internet Explorer infringed on its intellectual property. A federal court agreed, and awarded Eolas $521 million in damages. Initially, Microsoft said it would alter IE and how the browser implemented ActiveX as a result of the ruling.

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Just weeks after announcing that it would join the Internet2 consortium as a corporate member, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed another set of lawsuits against students using the next-generation research network for illicit file trading.

64 people were named in the suits across 17 universities, the RIAA said. The new filings bring the total number sued to 560 people on 39 campuses, all for running the i2hub P2P application on Internet2. In addition, the RIAA filed another 693 John Doe lawsuits against users of other online file sharing networks including eDonkey and LimeWire.

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Disney on Thursday unveiled its own MP3 player called the Mix Stick that it hopes would appeal to younger children who are increasingly turning to electronic toys over the traditional dolls and toy trucks. The company also is betting on its $49 retail price as a way to entice parents who may not be willing to spend $99 on an iPod Shuffle.

Mix Sticks will come in four different designs -- Disney Chrome, Forever Princess, Sassy Pixie and That's So Raven -- and are built for children age 6 to 12. However, from the characters selected for the designs, it appears Disney is attempting to target young girls.

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The first release candidate of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is now available for download, signifying a final release may not be far off. The free open source office suite has been hailed by users as an impressive alternative to Microsoft Office, and forms the code upon which Sun's StarOffice 8 is based.

"Now is the time to test the RC, and we urge all to download it, test it, and file issues with the QA project on what you discover," reads a notice on the OpenOffice.org Web site. Windows users will need to remove older betas of version 2.0, due to a problem with the Windows Installer.

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Hoping to cash in among audiophiles and those who want better quality in their music downloads, Nevada-based MusicGiants launched its digital music service on Wednesday. The music store will offer its tracks in Windows Media Lossless format, the first service to do so.

MusicGiants says these tracks would have up to seven times the quality of those available from competing services like iTunes and Napster, which offer songs at a bitrate of 128 kbps. In comparison, songs on MusicGiants will range from 470 kbps to as much as 1100 kpbs, producing a much more accurate reproduction of the music.

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Microsoft says it is investigating a report of a new vulnerability discovered in Internet Explorer that stems from XmlHttpRequest, a JavaScript object used in AJAX Web applications such as Google Maps. In an advisory, security firm Secunia says the flaw affects IE6 on a fully patched Windows XP SP2 system.

According to the initial paper detailing the problem written by Amit Klein, Internet Explorer can be fooled into running arbitrary HTTP requests. "IE doesn't validate some critical fields that are provided by the user," Klein said.

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