Busy week coming up for Google's lawyers. On Tuesday, Google's senior legal office Dave Drummond will be on Capitol Hill to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on his company's proposed search ad partnership with Yahoo. Although Congressional hearings are mostly for tourists, Drummond will need to be careful in answering the committee's questions as the deal is also under investigation by the Department of Justice, which probably isn't just doing it for show and will likely regard anything Drummond says as part of the record. Drummond will be joined at the witness table by Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan and his counterpart at Microsoft, Brad Smith.

The appeals of last year's Copyright Royalty Board decision on the royalties paid for the use of sound recordings by Internet radio stations continue on, and one recent filing raises interesting questions of whether or not the CRB was properly appointed. Last week, the Department of Justice, which represents the CRB in defending its decision in the Court of Appeals, filed its brief in opposition to the briefs of the webcasters, which we summarized here. The DOJ brief essentially argued that the webcasters' briefs were insufficient to satisfy the requirement for a successful appeal - that the CRB decision was arbitrary and capricious or otherwise contrary to law.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the Ala Carting of Video on the Net. The premise was very simple. To paraphrase an old saying, "If you give away the milk for free, there is no need to buy the cow". If you give away your best stuff on an ala carte basis, then the value of everything that depended on that "stuff" declines. Some folks agreed, others searched for ways to disagree. Many in their responses seemed to think that because I own HDNet that I am biased and my judgement is clouded. In fact, its the exact opposite.

The issue of whether Google’s indexing of news sites constitutes copyright infringement is likely to receive more attention following a report that Google has entered into licensing agreements with several large UK news groups, similar to the licensing deals that Google has made with the Associated Press in the U.S. and Agence France-Presse in France. Duncan Riley at TechCrunch is predicting the end of news indexing as we know it, but I’m not so sure.

New York - Major record label Warner Music Group has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against music-focused social networking site Imeem, Reuters reported.