Despite last-ditch attempts last week by 41 European parliamentarians to block it, the European General Affairs Council on Monday approved plans to extend the copyright protection time for music recordings from 50 years to 70 years.

Google, which has faced intense criticism for years over copyright issues, said on Friday it has made progress on four copyright-protection initiatives it outlined in December.

A short clip from a 2004 movie about Adolf Hitler has ended up speaking for a generation of discontented Internet surfers, as well as pushed the boundaries of copyright law, noted a Massachusetts Institute of Technology social networking researcher who discussed the reasons behind the clip's wide appeal at the Open Video Conference in New York last Friday.

A hosted application for securing shared corporate documents is being extended to handheld devices. With WatchDox, mobile users can view and even selected documents, but be prevented from saving, printing, or forwarding them, if desired.

Disagreements between the European Union and the US over whether to release the current negotiating text of a secretive international copyright treaty became moot this week, with the publication on a French website of a leaked version of the latest draft of the treaty.

Adobe Systems and McAfee will jointly develop a product that combines digital rights management capabilities with technology designed to prevent data from leaking outside corporate networks, the companies said Monday.

Yet another survey is indicating that security is a big issue for those intending to take up cloud computing.