Viacom has already made itself unpopular with the free speech crowd by telling YouTube to remove 100,000 clips from its servers. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have complained, that has led to many non-infringing videos being removed by mistake (see the EFF video below, which you can also view on YouTube here.)

So imagine the angst that will be caused by Viacom’s latest salvo: a $1bn lawsuit and a request for an injunction that would bar YouTube from posting any of its copyrighted material in the first place. The collateral damage could be huge.

There’s no way that YouTube can guarantee to keep Viacom material off its site. As we reported at the start of this year, a promised technical fix to prevent copyright video from being uploaded has not materialised. So the only way to meet the terms of an injunction would be to close the site down completely. Surely no US court would order such a thing?

Traders in London and New York are apparently addicted to an online game that lets them behave like Gordon Gekko and Master Chief at the same time.

Eve Online, a rare hit from Reykjavik, is not one of those warm, communal efforts at Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). It is brutal, backstabbing and rather proud of it.

Not surprisingly, its 200,000 players are 95 per cent male, with half coming from the US and the bulk of the rest from Europe. Large numbers are based in New York and in London, where a supercomputer serves up the game as a single universe, as opposed to the multiple servers or shards of something like World of Warcraft.

Trading for items is a key part of the game using the ISK – inter-stellar kurrency, which is also the symbol for the Icelandic Krona.

One player set up a bank, offered high interest rates and then paid the interest from other deposits before trying to convert $200,000 in ISKs on eBay. He was caught and ejected from the game. Others staged a successful IPO in the game to raise money to build space stations on the edge of the universe.

No sooner had they done so than they were attacked and taken over by another fleet, meaning investors lost all their money.

“It’s all about power – financial, political and military, it’s a dog-eat-dog world,” Magnus Bergsson, chief marketing officer for Eve, told me on the fringes of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

“You have a space ship and it can be full of valuables. I’d collected mine over eight months and I lost everything in a matter of seconds when I was attacked. I cried for about three days.”

The dread of losing everything forces people to team up to protect their assets and Magnus says these friendships driven by fear mean the social ties are stronger than in other games.

“The people in Eve Online, although I never see them, really are my friends. You don’t get many chances to save a friend’s life, but in this game you do.”

For the past few years, Cisco Systems has been trying to diversify its revenue stream by moving away from the internet backbone - where it dominates - and closer to end users. By doing so, Cisco hopes to caputure more of the value of the data that flows through its swtiches and routers and into homes and businesses.

This strategy has won plaudits in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. But even the Cisco’s biggest fans may be scratching their heads over the company’s latest move to build a portfolio in social networking.

On Monday, Cisco announced that it had agreed to a partial acquisition of Utah Street Networks, the company behind the social networking site tribe.net. The announcement followed news last month that Cisco had agreed to buy Five Across,  a company that lets customers add user-generated communities and other social networking features to their websites.

Most of Cisco’s recent excursions into adjacent markets - such as its booming IP telephony business - have enjoyed clear synergies with the company’s core networking business. It is harder to see where social networking fits in.

Read more after the jump.

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It was actually a relief yesterday to see Sony finally deliver some next-generation inspiration after trailing Microsoft and Nintendo for so long in the current round of console wars.

The company was beginning to lose its cool factor among gamers, a prospect that at one time would have seemed unthinkable.

All the pizzazz of the PlayStation 3’s hardware had been dissipated by the expense of the machine, the clunky updates needed, the lack of compelling games and the most basic of online offerings, all of which made it seem a non-essential purchase for all but the most hard core of gamers.

Home could spark a change of momentum for the PS3, the demonstration at the Game Developers Conference was that impressive.

It will appear on the Xross Media Bar as a new icon for beta testers from next month and open up a whole new virtual world for them. It amounts to a free, user-friendly take on Second Life, with much better graphics and a far more entertaining experience for its target audience.

There are games galore of course, cinemas to watch movies in, apartments to socialise and party with friends and a 3-D Hall of Fame for a gamer’s trophies and awards.

Sony could see considerable revenues from selling virtual furniture and clothing – as Kaneva expects to in its PC combination of virtual worlds and social networking. Music, and video sales could also be boosted in this appealing environment.

While the critics may feel people would prefer a more 2-D Web interface to enjoy content online, Home seems to have a natural appeal to a gaming audience.

They spend most of their time assuming characters and roles in the games they play, Home should be a home from home for them.

Virtual worlds ought to be an obvious extension for social networking sites – what could improve the experience more than sharing your videos and music in your virtual home with friends recreated in 3-D?

Kaneva, an Atlanta-based start-up, is planning to enable just that with a service launching officially in the next few weeks and is as surprised as anyone that it is first to come up with the combination.

Kaneva, which comes from the Latin word for a blank canvas, has been in development since 2004 and is the pet project of Chris Klaus, the former chief executive of internet security company ISS, sold to IBM last year for $1.3bn.

It functions like a dumbed-down version of Second Life and resembles the Sims Online with an injection from MySpace.

Rob Frasca, chief operating officer, showed me a near-final release version. Many people were put off by the degree of difficulty in navigating Second Life and building their characters, he said. Kaneva’s avatars are as simple to construct as a Sims person and they will find it hard to get lost – they are restricted to going home to their apartments or teleporting to friends’, wandering around a mall or playing paintball in a jungle.

All the apartments have wide-screen TVs and large frames to project videos and their favourite photos onto the walls. Right-clicking on an avatar reveals personal profiles and allows people to connect, build communities of interest and direct others back to content on the 2-D web.

“You get the best of both worlds – I’m not going to read a blog in a virtual world,” says Frasca.

Kaneva expects to make money through sponsorships and product placement, by selling in-world items and by licensing its platform to others.

The business model seems sound - Habbo Hotel sold $77m in virtual items last year, while South Korea’s Cyworld is selling nearly $300,000 worth of imaginary goods every day.

Just how big is the digital universe? The amount of data captured or stored on PCs, digital cameras, plasma TVs and other digital devices last year was 161 exabytes, according to a new report by IDC, the market analysis group.

That’s 161,000,000,000,000,000,000  bytes of data - or 161 million million megabytes - equivalent, according to IDC, to 12 stacks of books stretching from the Earth to the sun.

If IDC’s growth assumptions hold true, the amount of information captured and/or stored on PCs, cameras, televisions, and other digital devices could hit 988 exabytes by 2010, driven by growth in video and growth in the amount of information stored by businesses.

The IDC study was sponsored by  EMC, the world’s biggest maker of data storage equipment and software, so naturally there is a storage angle in all this. IDC says this year could be the first year that the amount of data produced surpasses the amount of available storage:

Whether this information gets stored permanently or not, it will be transported over networks, shuttled from switch to switch, stored temporarily somewhere and otherwise require use of networking and storage infrastructures, both those in organisations and those in carriers, hosting firms, and other digital information service providers.

Little wonder  that companies like EMC and Cisco are bullish about the future.

You’re watching a video on your PC of a man and a woman walking across a hotel lobby. You mouse over them, and words appear on the the screen. She’s wearing a bustier pencil dress, you could buy it for $35. Him? A Remus Uomo jacket, $95. Click on either figure, and a browser pops up to take you straight to a page where you can buy their clothes.

Yes, it sounds like another of those internet pipe dreams, circa 1998. But this technology will actually be trialled next month by an (unnamed) big US retailer. That is according to James Colborn, who has been working on new ideas like this at Adcenter, Microsoft’s belated attempt to get into the advertising game against Google and Yahoo! (You can see a demonstration here.)

Will it catch on? Who knows. But some traditional media organisations are finally building up the courage to take the leap into the unknown (viz the BBC’s deal today with YouTube,) and more experimentation like this is badly needed. The BBC’s public funding insulates it from some of the pressures faced by more commercial entities, but if they are to have any hope of drawing more video content to the Web, internet companies need to prove they can make money from it, and soon.

Opera, the web browser from Norway that lost out to Microsoft and Mozilla in the PC wars, is making a comeback in all manner of other devices.

Opera’s browser now sits on Nintendo’s DS and Wii game consoles, TV set-top boxes and millions of mobile phones.

On a visit to the FT’s San Francisco bureau, Hakon Wium Lee, chief technology officer, revealed Opera was working on technology that would allow seamless browsing from device to device. Users could carry on reading web pages they had left on their desktop PC’s browser when they moved to their mobile phones or to their TV or games console at home.

Opera is still bent on improving its PC browser, which it claims is leaner and faster than Internet Explorer and Firefox and has features such as widgets, a text magnifier and a Powerpoint-style presentation application.

But it has a share of only around 1 per cent in North America and pockets of popularity elsewhere (Russia 10 per cent, Australia 5 per cent).

Some operators have adopted its mobile phone browser, although most prefer an Openwave browser they can brand themselves. But more than 10m cell phone users have downloaded and activated its Opera Mini application that offers an alternative way of surfing the web on a phone.

Opera originally charged $29 for its PC browser, with a free version available that contained advertising. It went completely free after reaching a deal with Google to include its search box in the browser.

“We realised it should be free too late and, by that time, Firefox was ahead of us,” said Mr Lee.

But with Google paying it for the searches it originates and device manufacturers giving it a cut of every product they sell, Opera has at least regained a foothold in the ongoing battle of the browsers.

Second Life may be moving into the world of voice, but it looks as if creator Linden Labs is at risk of being outflanked in the China market by an ambitious clone game, HiPiHi. (Demo video here).

Copying sites and ideas from the US, Japan and South Korea is the established route to internet success in China, and foreign companies ranging from Amazon to Yahoo! and Google have struggled to catch up after local look-a-likes seize a market presence.

In a recent blog entry, Chinese tech expert Kaiser Kuo reckons the Second Life clone idea "might have more legs than its US counterpart" given the popularity here of massively multiplayer online role-playing games - but he also notes in a separate post a potential downside of operating in China - the Communist party’s disapproval of online sex and gambling.

A “UN Meets Silicon Valley” summit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on Wednesday was pushing technology to bridge the digital divide, but it also highlighted the different strategies in emerging markets of the two processor protagonists, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

It is not hard to see why Intel is focusing on emerging markets with its $1bn World Ahead programme aimed at extending broadband PC access by a billion people over five years.

These markets now account for more than a third of its business and half the growth rate for PCs.

Intel’s pump-priming for demand for its chips includes encouraging governments to introduce computers in schools and banks to offer interest-free loans to students.

Its flagship product is the Classmate PC. After pilot programmes in schools in Brazil and Nigeria, it is about to go into mass production for trials in 30 emerging markets this year.

It will cost around $300 and features a Celeron processor, 7.5-inch screen and ruggedised case.

While pupils in a class will all have the basic laptop, teachers will have a more sophisticated notebook that can view what each child is working on through a dashboard networking application.

This differs from the One Laptop Per Child product and strategy that aims to provide $150 notebooks to both pupil and teacher.

“OLPC are very student-centric, we use teachers and are not so revolutionary, but we both have the same vision,” says John Davies, head of Intel’s World Ahead programme.

AMD yesterday showed off the OLPC machine with its AMD Geode processor inside and said it was talking to partners about bringing similar devices to the same category.

“Intel are trying to market to that environment, we are not: we are trying to change it,” said Henri Richard, AMD head of sales and marketing.

He said Intel had rejected an offer he made to collaborate and share code between Intel and AMD engineers on emerging market products.

Another market, another round of rivalry, it seems.