Google offering limited services at Chinese site

In today's podcast: Judge cuts file-sharing fine; Google offering limited services at Chinese site; and Intel not going to dump Celeron.

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Even after cutting a damages award in a file-sharing case to one-tenth the original sum, a judge said Friday the new fine was still excessive. The Massachusetts judge on Friday reduced to US$67,500 an original $675,000 award that a jury had ordered a Boston Ph.D student to pay for illegally sharing music files. A group of record companies sued Joel Tenenbaum, a Ph.D student at Boston University, last August for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs online. Last year, a jury decided he should pay $22,500 per song for copyright infringement. Tenenbaum subsequently asked for a reduced sentence and a new trial.

Google's recent restoration of Google.cn may have helped the company secure a renewal of its Internet Content Provider (ICP) license in China, but the search site provides precious few search services to users. Google.cn, which since March had automatically redirected visitors to the company's uncensored Hong Kong site, regained its landing page last week. While it lets users click over to the Hong Kong site manually, Google.cn itself only allows users to perform product and music searches, and use the company's translation service.

Intel has no plans to shelve its Celeron processor brand in 2011, the chip maker said Friday in response to a Taiwanese press report. Intel's comments came following a report, based on anonymous sources in Taiwan's hardware industry, that the chip maker plans to stop shipping processors under the Celeron brand next year. Intel has long used the Celeron brand for inexpensive processors found in low-end desktops and laptops, and the company's current price list contains both desktop and mobile versions of the chips.

Comcast customers whose broadband service was slowed when the Internet service provider slowed peer-to-peer traffic will be able to get a payment of US$16 under a class-action lawsuit settlement approved by a U.S. judge. A judge approved the settlement June 29, and the Lexington Law Group, which represented plaintiff Jon Hart, announced the settlement Thursday. Comcast will pay up to $16 million to customers in the settlement. Comcast's 15M bps broadband service typically costs $42.95 a month, not including special offers.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.