Crying

Roy Orbison

Japanese Train Runs Without Driver

An empty train with no one at the controls rolled about 5 miles at Tsu, Japan, Sunday night before staff caught up with it, officials said.

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Talented young BBC actress found hanged days after show's finale

A young actress has been found hanged after the long-running series in which she starred was canceled.

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Protests in Sweden Over Pirate Bay Verdict

Hundreds of protesters demonstrated on Saturday following Friday's conviction by a Swedish court of key members of the BitTorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay.

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Centenarian rolls into bowling history in Nevada

A 100-year-old woman from New Jersey has become the oldest competitor in the history of the United States Bowling Congress Women's Championships.

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Meeting Ten Bears

A scene from the film "The Outlaw Joesy Wales".

Peek into kangaroo's pouch shows 2 tiny pink joeys

A zookeeper's efforts to earn a kangaroo's trust has paid off with a video showing twin joeys, tiny and pink, growing inside their mom's pouch.

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Forbes: Why Google Is The New Pirate Bay

This week has offered a hard lesson for pirates, both water- and Web-based: Keep a low profile and your illicit business can flourish. But draw too much attention, and you're likely to get sniped.

On Friday, the trial of the Pirate Bay, the Web's highest-profile source of TV shows, movies and music, came to an end when a Swedish court found the administrators of the site guilty of copyright infringement, sentencing them to a year in prison and more than $3 million in fines.

The verdict comes as a surprise to many who assumed the site, which indexes the "tracker" files that allow users to share video and music, was beyond prosecution in its home country of Sweden. And though the sites' owners say they plan to appeal the decision, it may nonetheless lead to the takedown of the Web's most popular index of peer-to-peer downloads.

But even if the Pirate Bay sinks, putting an end to file-sharing isn't so simple. Waiting in the wings to absorb the site's audience are dozens of second-string bittorrent tracker and index sites that have avoided the Pirate Bay's level of notoriety, including Mininova, isoHunt and Demonoid.

And according to Ben Edelman, (pictured above) a professor at Harvard's Business School focused on Internet regulation, that longer-tail assortment of piracy outlets means the starting point for finding pirated content has shifted to an even more resilient source: Google ( GOOG - news - people ).

"Google now can and does do what the Pirate Bay has always done," Edelman says. "And if they're prosecuted, they would have much more interesting arguments in their defense."

By searching for pirated music or video, Google users can easily scan a range of lesser-known pirate sites to dig up illicit content. Those looking for the upcoming film X-Men Origins: Wolverine, for instance, can search for "wolverine torrent." The first result is a link to file-sharing site isoHunt, with a torrent tracker file that allows the user to download the full film. In fact, searches for "wolverine torrent" on Google have more than quadrupled since the movie file was first leaked to peer-to-peer networks on April 5, according to Google Trends.

Googling more obscure films works just as well. For example, search for "the maltese falcon torrent," and the first result links to Torrentz.com, which in turn links to other sites listing torrents for the Bogart classic, including Mininova, BTjunkie, Torrenthound and Seedpeer.

Google, for its part, says it is vigilant about removing illegal content. "We are committed to respecting copyrights and have a well-established process under the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] for removing links to infringing content when they appear in our search results," a company spokesman wrote in an e-mail. Yahoo! did not respond immediately to requests seeking comment.

But Google and Yahoo! ( YHOO - news - people ) have always been a starting point for peer-to-peer piracy, says Eric Garland, chief executive of the bittorrent research firm Big Champagne. In focus groups, Garland says he's found that users begin their searches for pirated movies on search engines as often as any source, including the Pirate Bay. That means preventing a user from downloading copyrighted files would mean not simply shutting down the Pirate Bay, but every one of the lesser-traveled sites that Google or Yahoo! provide links to.

"I've argued for years that the real battle rights holders are fighting isn't with individual users or file-sharing sites, but with search," Garland says. "As long as there's robust search that allows people to find the titles they're seeking, you will have this problem, period."

The Pirate Bay's guilty verdict was partly due to its notoriety as a flagrant source of pirated content. The site thumbed its nose publicly at its detractors in interviews with Wired, Vanity Fair,Forbes and other news outlets and its administrators publicly posted their retorts to cease-and-desist letters, including repeated suggestions that media company lawyers perform painful acts on their nether regions with a retractable baton.

Google, on the other hand, may be more legally defensible than any single torrent site. Any piracy-related activity by its users would be dwarfed by the search engine's massive number of legitimate users, says Big Champagne's Garland, and Google is careful to avoid any encouragement of copyright infringing activity.

"Google doesn't call itself 'The Pirate Google,'" Garland says. "If the number of queries looking for copyrighted works is massive, that's only because the number of searches on Google in general is massive."

Google's popularity as a resilient portal for piracy means that even if the media industry were to pursue torrent sites one by one, the search engine would always link to the newest site to host those tracking files, a potentially endless war on torrent sites.

"It's a cat and mouse game," says Harvard's Edelman. "Sometimes the mouse gets eaten. But there are always more mice scurrying around, willing to try their luck."

Miss NC is Miss USA

Miss North Carolina USA Kristen Dalton was crowned Miss USA 2009 on Saturday, beating out 50 other beauty queens in the live pageant televised from Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino in Las Vegas.

The 21-year-old aspiring motivational speaker from Wilmington edged out first runner-up Miss California USA Carrie Prejean, of San Diego, and second runner-up Miss Arizona USA Alicia-Monique Blanco, of Phoenix.

Contestants from all 50 states and the District of Columbia competed in the pageant, aired live on NBC. Contestants were judged by their performance in swimsuit and evening gown modeling contests and their responses to a question asked onstage; unlike the rival Miss America pageant, Miss USA contestants do not perform a talent.

The top 15 contestants worked the stage in white string bikinis designed by pop star Jessica Simpson's swimwear line. Rocker Kevin Rudolf performed his song "Let it Rock," followed by The Veronicas, who performed their single "Untouched" as the top 10 beauties showed off their choice of glittering evening gowns.

Dalton's title comes with a year's use of a New York apartment, a public relations team, a two-year scholarship at the New York Film Academy and an undisclosed salary.

She also will go to the Bahamas in August to compete in the Miss Universe pageant, where American beauties haven't been lucky in recent years. Both Miss USA 2008 Crystle Stewart and her predecessor, Rachel Smith, wiped out on stage during the evening gown competition, becoming accidental YouTube stars.

Asked about the tumble during the show on Sunday, Stewart said it was a lesson in bouncing back from defeat.

"I think it was a true test of my character," said the 27-year-old Texan, who worked to raise awareness for breast cancer as she traveled the globe promoting the beauty contest.

If there is a YouTube moment from Sunday's show, it may be Miss California's answer to a question about legalizing same-sex marriage. The tall blonde stumbled some before giving an answer that appeared to please the pageant audience.

"We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage," Prejean said. "And you know what, I think in my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised."

Some in the audience cheered, others booed.

The pageant had enjoyed a scandal-free year until earlier this month, when Miss Universe 2008 Dayana Mendoza was skewered for a blog posting from a trip to Guantanamo Bay. The entry described having "aloooot of fun" at a base that houses the notorious military prison; it was later deleted from the pageant's Web site.

The contest, which is owned by NBC and reality TV mogul Donald Trump, was hosted by "Access Hollywood" co-anchor Billy Bush and Nadine Velazquez of the NBC sitcom "My Name is Earl." This year's judges included "Saturday Night Live" cast member Kenan Thompson, "Dancing with the Stars" winner Kelly Monaco and gossip blogger Perez Hilton.

Miss Wyoming USA Cynthia Pate, of Casper, Wyo., was voted Miss Congeniality by her fellow contestants. Jessi Pierson, of Milton, W.Va., was voted Miss Photogenic through an online contest on the

Miss Universe Web site.

Organizers said Sunday's show kicks off "Green Week" at NBC. As part of the environmental awareness campaign, the Miss USA crown was designed by a jeweler that specializes in conflict-free and eco-friendly jewels. The crown from Diamond Nexus Labs of Franklin, Wis., is worth $202,000.

Baseball player benched after charity work

Washington Nationals player Elijah Dukes is also fined after his work on behalf of the team at a local Little League takes too long.

Player benched

Could excavation reveal Cleopatra's lost tomb?

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Egypt's top archaeologist is hopeful that recent findings could lead to the lost burial place of doomed lovers Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

Cleopatra's lost tomb?

Also:

• Rare artifact saved after Italy quake
• Scientist, nearly 100 years old, still at work

Our Readers

Some of our readers today have been in:

Oostrozebeke, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
London, England, United Kingdom
Arrschot, Brabant, Belgium
Larnaca, Larnaca, Cyprus
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Markum, Ontario, Canada
Cancun, Quintana Roo, Mexico
Monchengladbach, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Bristol, England, United Kingdom
Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Malaysia
Brighton, Victoria, Australia
Copenhagen, Kobenhavn, Denmark
Garbsen, Niedersachsen, Germany
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Leeds, England, United Kingdom

as well as Serbia, Scotland, Wales and the United States

Daily Horoscope

Today's horoscope says:

This is the perfect time for you to embrace the art of planning! Okay, it's not always the most exciting activity, but deep down inside you have the capacity to enjoy the act of planning, and excel in it. Moving forward too quickly in one area today -- whether it's a relationship, financial goal, job prospect or confrontation -- is not the wisest thing to do. The idea now is to get all the facts about something and then formulate a plan for moving forward. In the end, you will go farther.

Good idea.