MySpace.com will use “audio fingerprinting” technology to block users from uploading copyright music to the social networking site, the company said Monday.

MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., said it will review all music files uploaded by community members to their online profiles. The files will be run through a music database from Gracenote Inc.

“MySpace is staunchly committed to protecting artists’ rights, whether those artists are on major labels or are independent acts,” said Chris DeWolfe, MySpace chief executive and co-founder.

The company said users who repeatedly attempt to upload copyright music files will be permanently barred from the site.

Online sites such as MySpace and YouTube have come under fire from major record labels who have sued in some cases to prevent copyright music from being included as the soundtrack to a user-generated content.

Several record labels recently announced licensing deals with YouTube, which has chosen to share ad revenue with record labels rather than filter music itself.

Tags: MySpace, Audio Fingerprinting, YouTube, Music Files

Six Apart launched Vox, a new hosted blogging community, and has teamed up with MRM Worldwide to plot the ad strategy and develop new ways for marketers to get involved.

Where Six Apart’s LiveJournal community is heavily used by teens looking to connect with new friends, Vox is designed as a tool for (mostly older) users to share stories, photos, videos or audio with family and existing friends. Access to all content can be controlled by the blog’s owner with five levels of privacy for each piece of content.

Vox does have social tools as well, with a “question of the day” and “Vox Hunt” to let all members share their ideas on a certain topic or post photos of objects found in a daily scavenger hunt. It also lets users connect their Vox blog with services they may already be using, such as YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket and iFilm.

Six Apart has been planning and talking about Vox for several months. The service was planned from the start to be ad-supported, but Six Apart wanted to do more than just show some banner ads on their pages, according to Patty Mitchell, VP of worldwide sales at Six Apart.

“If you look at some social networks, the ads aren’t done very well — for the advertiser or the user,” Mitchell told ClickZ. “We knew we wanted to do ads differently than they’ve traditionally been done online. Vox is all about personal communication. The type of environment it creates is rich for advertisers.”

Tags: Six Apart, MRM Worldwide, Vox, Social Networks

Attackers have found a way to use a genuine MySpace account to trick users into disclosing passwords.

Reports today indicate that a MySpace user was e-mailing potential victims inviting them to visit a fraudulent log-in page, where they were asked to enter their e-mail address and password. That information was then sent to a server located in France, according to Netcraft, a Web analysis firm that reported the problem.

The attack, which was shut down by MySpace around 10 a.m. Pacific this morning took advantage of the way MySpace organizes URLs in order to give the fake log-in page a believable Web address, something that could confuse even security-conscious users, according to Netcraft analyst Rich Miller.

The attacker had registered a MySpace account named login_home_index_html, meaning that the MySpace page hosting the fake login, looked like a legitimate place where users would sign on to the service.

Tags: MySpace, Phishing Attack

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to consider whether Microsoft Corp. should have to pay damages overseas for infringing a speech recognition software patent owned by AT&T Inc.

The high court granted Microsoft’s petition to review an appeals court ruling that held AT&T could seek royalties based on the foreign manufacture and sale of infringing software products.

The Microsoft-AT&T dispute is one of the most important patent cases that will come before the court this year and could determine the reach of U.S. patents overseas, experts said.

The case raises “the question of how far downstream you can go in capturing damages in the chain of commerce,” said Stephen Maebius, a patent lawyer with the firm Foley & Lardner LLP.

At issue is a ruling last year that upheld a lower court decision that Microsoft was liable for infringing an AT&T patent for converting speech into computer code in copies of Windows sold overseas.

Microsoft Corp. has won a court case against a German spammer charged with forging e-mail and making it appear to come from Microsoft’s hotmail.com domain.

The regional appeals court in Karlsruhe found the person guilty of sending unsolicited mail and using Microsoft’s trademark-protected Hotmail brand without the company’s permission, Microsoft said Wednesday.

The spammer, whose name was not disclosed, had been distributing spam to promote his pornographic Web site for several months before the German court clamped down.

As part of the sentence, the convicted spammer agreed not to distribute forged e-mail using the Hotmail brand or face a $314,000 fine. In addition, he must provide Microsoft with detailed information about his e-mail promotional activities.