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Online piracy isn’t just a problem for music companies; it hurts newspapers and magazines as well. News organizations are now trying to do something about the many Web sites that simply copy articles and paste them into their own pages.

Last week The Associated Press said it would put warnings against copyright violation on its articles and digitally track illegitimate uses. It didn’t say what it would do to violators, but it has been quick to use legal means to block reuse of its material.

A start-up called Attributor, based in Redwood City, Calif., is proposing an approach that is more carrot than stick. It has developed an automated way for newspapers to share in the advertising revenue from even the tiniest sites that copy their articles.

The plan faces many technical and legal hurdles. Attributor wants to take some of the ad money that would have been paid to the pirate site and give it to the copyright owner instead. To do that it needs the cooperation of big advertising networks like those run by Google and Yahoo. So far those companies have reacted coolly to the proposal.

Still, Attributor has been able to attract many major publishing companies to what it calls the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is exploring its ideas. These include The New York Times Company, the Washington Post Company, Hearst, Reuters, Media News Group, McClatchy and Condé Nast.

The Attributor plan “seems to me to be a way to bring order out of the chaos,” said Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters Media.

For now those companies have committed only to receiving data from Attributor about how widely their content is being used on Web sites that don’t pay for it. Later they will decide whether to proceed with the revenue-sharing plan.

“We’re in ‘prove it’ mode,” said Jim Pitkow, the chief executive of Attributor. “We are going to prove to them piracy is an issue and here is the scale. Then we will take that to the ad networks.”

Mr. Pitkow, a former chief executive of the news aggregation service Moreover Technologies, founded Attributor with Jim Brock, a former Yahoo executive. It has raised $20 million in three rounds of venture capital.

Mr. Pitkow said a study in January of 250,000 articles from 25 publishers showed that on average, each article appeared on 11 unauthorized sites. Looking at traffic data, Attributor calculated that five times as many people read each article on pirate sites as on the site of the publisher faxless payday loans. And it estimated that collectively the publishers were losing $250 million a year from unauthorized copying.

Those numbers seem high to many in the Internet business, including executives of some of the companies working with Attributor.

Lincoln Millstein, Hearst’s senior vice president for digital media, said he didn’t believe that the company was losing much revenue this way.

“I don’t think it’s that big of a problem,” he said.

Reuters, by contrast, is very concerned. Mr. Ahearn said there was “tens of millions of dollars worth of inventory that is likely being created that we are not getting our fair share of.”

Attributor’s plan rests on the idea that most of these pirate sites depend on networks like Google’s AdSense to place ads on their pages and send them a share of the revenue. Attributor proposes to scan the Web for pages that have articles of participating publishers. It will then notify any network with ads on those pages so the network can share the revenue with the copyright owner.

Mr. Pitkow said this represented the best of all worlds: news organizations get a way to syndicate their work widely and benefit from it, small sites gain legitimate access to professional content, and the networks are able to sell ads on pages that they might otherwise have to pulls ads from if the copyright owner complained.

So far, one small ad network, AdBright, has agreed to Attributor’s model. But the larger networks appear to be wary.

Spokesmen for Yahoo and Google said they had not had a chance to review Attributor’s proposal in detail. They both noted that they were already supporting news organizations through their policies of removing ads from pages that carried unauthorized copyrighted material.

Mr. Pitkow said he believed the advertising networks would ultimately get on board in the interest of helping out struggling newspapers. But if persuasion doesn’t work, he has a threat. Publishers will start to demand that ads be removed from all the pirated pages, a time-consuming and revenue-sapping task.

“Ad networks that decide not to participate may end up receiving tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of take-down notices a day,” Mr. Pitkow said.

Start-Up Plans to Make Journalism Pirates Pay Up

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – Warren Buffett said he has no plans to soon exercise Berkshire Hathaway Inc's (BRKa.N) (BRKb.N) warrants to buy $5 billion of Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) stock, although he could make a big profit by doing so.

Berkshire got the warrants in September when it also bought $5 billion of Goldman preferred shares, which throw off a $500 million annual dividend.

The warrants let Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire buy Goldman common shares at $115 each at any time until October 1, 2013. With Goldman's stock having closed at $165.45 on Thursday, those warrants are worth well over $2 billion.

Buffett is sitting tight.

"We will hold the warrants," Buffett said on Fox Business Network. "Every instinct in my body tells me that we will want to hold those warrants until they're very close to their expiration date. The preferred pays us the dividend and the warrants are going to make us the money."

Goldman is the largest financial services company to exit the U.S. government's bank bailout program.

Earlier this week, it paid $1.1 billion to buy back warrants issued to the Treasury Department no fax payday loans. The government said it got a 23 percent annualized return on its Goldman investment.

For a while, Goldman had looked like one of Buffett's lesser ideas, as its shares fell below $48 in November.

Yet its recovering stock price signals investors' belief that Goldman still deserves much of its luster as one of the world's most aggressive and profitable banks.

Buffett, the world's second-richest person, has had less success with a purchase of preferred stock and warrants in General Electric Co (GE.N).

Berkshire in October bought $3 billion of GE preferred shares yielding 10 percent and warrants to buy $3 billion of GE stock at a $22.25 strike price. GE shares closed Thursday at $11.95, leaving the warrants out of the money for now.

Class A shares of Berkshire rose $1,050 to 94,550 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; additional reporting by Steve Eder)

Buffett: I’m keeping my Goldman Sachs warrants

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LOS ANGELES, July 24 (Xinhua) — California lawmakers ended a more than -20-hour discussion on Friday with approval of a plan to end the U.S. state’s budget crisis.

The plan will close the state’s 26.3-billion-dollar budget gap by cutting off social services, borrowing from local governments and reducing state employees’ payments.

The assembly of the state legislature approved the final version of the resolution package through a vote on Friday afternoon and the Senate voted earlier in the morning after a long night of discussion.

An agreement on resolving the budget crisis, which has prompted the state government to issue IOUs for its debts, was reached earlier in the week between California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the legislative leaders approved payday advance in seconds.

But Schwarzenegger will not sign the budget bills until early next week, after the document has been reviewed by his aides over the weekend, according to the governor’s office.

State finance officials said that, even after the governor signed the bills, it might still take weeks before the budget took effect and the state-issued IOUs could be cleared.

California lawmakers approve budget plan after marathon session

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Warren E. Buffett showed again why he is known as one of the world’s best investors, thanks in part to another prominent investor, Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Buffett’s stake in Goldman is now worth $9.1 billion, or about $4.1 billion more than what he paid 10 months ago, according to an analysis by Linus Wilson, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

According to Mr. Wilson’s calculations, Mr. Buffett would realize an annualized return of 111 percent if he sold his Goldman stake, which is held by his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway.

In comparison, the federal government received a 23 percent annualized return for its Goldman investment.

Goldman turned to Mr. Buffett in September, seeking a cash injection. In return, Mr. Buffett negotiated what was considered even then to be very favorable terms fast cash. Berkshire Hathaway received perpetual preferred shares in Goldman, which pay a 10 percent annual dividend, or $500 million a year. Berkshire Hathaway also received warrants to buy $5 billion in common stock at a strike price of $115 a share, which could be used at any time within five years of the initial investment.

Mr. Wilson ascribed a $5.5 billion valuation to Mr. Buffett’s preferred shares and $3.2 billion to the warrants. He also calculated that Berkshire’s reinvested dividends from the Goldman stake were worth about $400 million. The analysis was based on Goldman’s closing share price of $160.46 on Wednesday.

Buffett’s Goldman Stake Pays Richly

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SAN FRANCISCO/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Chinese Internet search leader Baidu Inc (BIDU.O) expects sales to grow faster than market forecasts in the third quarter, helped by rising customer acceptance of its new advertising system.

Already, the roll out of the advertisement keyword bidding system — Phoenix Nest, similar to Google Inc's (GOOG.O) AdWords — played a part in Baidu's better-than-expected second-quarter revenue growth of 37 percent, along with China's rapidly growing number of Internet users.

For the third quarter, Baidu projected sales of $184 million to $189 million, compared with the average analyst estimate of $178.9 million.

"We expect the benefits of Phoenix Nest to ramp up in the quarter to come, in terms of enhanced monetization and as well as improved ad relevancy," Chief Executive Robin Li told a conference call.

Phoenix Nest will display paid links and keywords on the right side of Baidu's search page and will provide clients with statistical functions.

"The new bidding system should lead to more targeted results and higher revenue over time," Steve Weinstein, an analyst from Pacific Crest Securities said in a note.

Baidu, the No. 1 search engine in China, controlled 61.6 percent of China's search market in the second quarter, according to Analysys International. The firm is holding off rival Google Inc (GOOG.O), which held 29 percent of the China search market.

Baidu, whose shares surged roughly 140 percent since the start of the year, fell 2.3 percent to $325.00 in after-hours trade on Thursday, amid a decline in most technology stocks following Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) weaker-than-expected quarterly revenue quick payday loans.

According to a Deutsche Bank note, web traffic to Baidu increased gradually since late March while traffic to Google China remained flattish.

Analysts expect Phoenix Nest to be a key growth driver for Baidu in the upcoming quarters as China's search market continues to expand at a rapid pace. The market grew 47 percent year-on-year in the second quarter to 18.1 billion yuan ($2.6 billion), according to data from Analysys International.

RISING COSTS

Baidu reported net income of $56.1 million, or $1.61 a share, for the second quarter, compared with $38.6 million, or $1.11 cents a share, a year ago.

Revenue grew to $161 million in the second quarter from $117 million in the year-ago period, beating analysts' average forecast of $158 million.

"During the second-quarter, macroeconomic conditions remained challenging even as we began to see some signs of recovery in the Chinese economy," Li said.

Jennifer Li, Baidu's chief financial officer, said the firm was expecting higher costs in the third quarter because Baidu was hiring more sales people for Phoenix Nest and hosting a forum in that period.

The company said the number of online marketing customers using its site increased 9.7 percent quarter-over-quarter to 203,000 in the second quarter.

Excluding the effects of stock-based compensation, Baidu earned $1.71 a share, above analysts' average expectation of $1.56 a share, according to Reuters Estimates.

(Editing by Lincoln Feast and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Baidu sees new ad system boosting Q3 sales

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Filed at 3:44 a.m. ET

ZURICH (AP) — Swiss-based electrical engineering company ABB (NYSE:ABB) Group on Thursday posted a 31 percent drop in second-quarter net profit as orders fell due to the global economic recession.

Profits for the quarter reached $675 million, down from $975 million in the same period last year.

Still, the results beat analyst expectations that the company, which specializes in power infrastructure and industrial automation equipment, would post a net profit of $571 million.

Orders sank by 35 percent to $7.31 billion compared with $11.27 billion in the year-ago period. ABB said it booked restructuring costs of $120 million in the quarter multi payment payday loans.

“The economic environment remains challenging, although there are growth opportunities driven by the need for more intelligence and automation in the power network, and the generation and integration of renewable energies,” said Chief Executive Joe Hogan.

“While we’ll continue to focus on adjusting costs quickly, we also aim to take advantage of these opportunities to extend our market leadership,” he added.

Shares in ABB rose 2.8 percent on the Zurich exchange to 18.50 Swiss francs ($17.34).

ABB Net Profit Drops 31 Percent

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Filed at 1:02 a.m. ET

ZURICH (AP) — Swiss bank Credit Suisse Group (NYSE:CS) has reported a 29 percent rise in second-quarter net profit to 1.57 billion francs ($1.41 billion).

The bank says the results include one-time charges, legal costs and tax benefits.

It says without the charges net profit would have been 2.5 billion francs in the second quarter cash til payday.

The Zurich-based bank said Thursday that assets under management dropped by 1,093 billion francs — or 5.5 percent — compared to the previous quarter.

Credit Suisse Reports $1.4 Billion Profit

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MISKOLC, HUNGARY — Reuters

Some heavy industries across Eastern Europe that survived the collapse of communism 20 years ago may not live to see the end of the current economic crisis.

The downturn, which has pummeled export-led economies in the region, is threatening to turn former powerhouses of the communist and post-Soviet eras into a new “rust belt,” causing a surge in unemployment and leaving deep social scars.

Geza Tokodi has worked in the Hungarian steel mill DAM, in the northeastern city of Miskolc, for 38 years.

The global crisis has brought him face-to-face with the once-unthinkable: a complete shutdown of the plant six months ago while yet another buyer is being sought. The huge production halls, which once employed 18,000 workers, have been plunged into eerie silence.

“My ears got used to the noise of the plant,” Mr. Tokodi said, walking the vast, deserted halls during a recent visit. “Quiet is good when you want to have a rest, but here, it’s much worse than noise.”

The only sound in the plant is the occasional crack of metal expanding and contracting as the temperature changes, or the chirping of birds that venture in through broken or open windows.

The sprawling steel complex, once called the Lenin Steel Works, developed quickly in the 1950s when the communist government wanted to make Hungary “the country of iron and steel,” despite its lack of raw materials or low-cost energy.

In its heyday in the 1980s, the city of Miskolc had more than 200,000 residents, most working in industry.

The population has fallen to about 170,000 and unemployment stands at 15 percent to 16 percent, well above the national average of 9.8 percent.

DAM, a survivor of privatizations in the 1990s which has changed hands several times since because of financial problems, is being wound down again and laying off its approximately 700 remaining employees.

The process started June 24 and the liquidator has to put the assets up for sale within 120 days from that date. If it can find a new investor, the plant may survive. But there is little optimism.

“There have been a few liquidations, and the plant always survived, but I don’t think this will be the case now,” said Jozsef Papp, 53, who has been at DAM for 36 years.

Steel makers throughout Europe have operated at capacity-usage rates of 55 percent to 60 percent this year, shelved investment plans and cut jobs to weather the biggest downturn to affect the industry since World War II.

Miskolc, the second-largest city Hungarian city after Budapest, is finding it hard to cope with mushrooming unemployment and a lack of new jobs.

Agnes Dudas, who heads the Miskolc unemployment office, says the number of registered jobless had risen to 18,200 in May from as much as 13,000 at the end of last year.

More than half of those losing their jobs at the steel mill are older than 50 and finding new work for them will be difficult, even though the city receives funds from a European Union program partly designed to help crisis-hit regions, she said fast payday loans.

“Those who worked at DAM for 30 to 40 years would have never left this plant,” Ms. Dudas said. “First they must overcome the trauma of all this, and it’s very hard.”

Miskolc has a Roma population of about 12,000 to 15,000, many of whom used to do unskilled jobs in the steel industry. Next to the steel works, hundreds of Roma families live in houses with no running water or sewer system connection.

“Most families here live on social assistance now” as well as odd jobs, said Ferenc Botos, who works for the local Roma minority council.

Hungary’s Roma minority is one of the largest in Central Europe, accounting for 6 percent to 7 percent of the population.

Growing social tension in Miskolc, once a Socialist stronghold, showed in European election results in June when the far-right Jobbik Party won 21 percent of the votes. The Socialists received 23 percent.

“Industries have collapsed and services are not developing at a pace which would allow them to absorb the extra workforce,” said Imre Lakatos, head of the Iron Workers’ Union, Vasas, who has worked at DAM for 40 years.

Dunaujvaros, formerly Sztalinvaros or Stalin City, is 70 kilometers or 43.5 miles south of Budapest and is the home of the biggest Hungarian steel mill, Dunaferr.

The plant, a unit of Donbass Group of Ukraine, experienced a 40 percent drop in its revenue in the first quarter of 2009. It has said it will lay off 400 workers and offer early retirement to several hundred more to try to weather the crisis.

It will have a work force of 7,200 after the restructuring.

The town is faring better in the face of the crisis because of its proximity to Budapest and investment by the South Korean tire manufacturer Hankook in 2006, which created new jobs.

ArcelorMittal’s Czech unit, in the northeast of the Czech Republic where unemployment is rife, is using only 35 percent to 45 percent of its capacity because of a lack of orders.

The glut in the steel sector has spread, hurting earnings for New World Resources, which owns the largest hard coal mines in the Czech Republic.

In the past 20 years, the labor force has shown few signs of changing in many former communist industrial centers.

“It will be difficult to expect any big structural changes in industrial regions because people skilled in heavy manufacturing or mining can’t transfer easily to other sectors of the economy,” David Marek, an economist at Patria Finance, said. “For the regions, it can be a big problem, especially when it comes to a high concentration of heavy industries like steel or coal. It’s a social problem, not only an economic problem.”

Industries Like Steel Mills That Survived End of Communism in Eastern Europe Now Crumbling

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NEW YORK (Reuters) – SunTrust Banks Inc (STI.N), a large U.S. Southeast regional bank, posted its third straight quarterly loss on Wednesday, hurt by an increase in soured commercial and residential loans.

The net loss applicable to common shareholders of the Atlanta-based bank was $164.4 million, or 41 cents per share, versus a profit of $530 million, or $1.52, a year earlier.

"Recession-related costs continue to impact our results," Chief Executive James Wells said in a statement.

He said he was encouraged by the bank's growth in deposits and net interest margin, efforts to cut costs, and a decline in "early-stage" delinquencies measuring borrowers who fall behind on payments for the first time. SunTrust has cut nearly 3,100 jobs, or 10 percent of its work force, in the last year.

Analysts on average forecast a quarterly loss of 51 cents per share, according to Reuters Estimates.

Results included several one-time items related to capital-raising, including a gain from the sale of Visa Inc (V.N) shares. SunTrust took a charge of $48.4 million to contribute to a federal deposit insurance program.

Borrowers on $5.5 billion of loans, or 4.48 percent of all SunTrust loans, were not current on payments no fax cash advance.

The bank set aside $962.2 million for credit losses, more than twice the year-earlier level. Net charge-offs totaled $801.2 million, with increases in nearly all categories, and included $116.2 million for fraud and denied insurance claims.

Net interest margin, the difference between what the bank earns on loans and pays on deposits, rose to 2.94 percent from 2.87 percent in the first quarter.

SunTrust took $4.9 billion of money from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, but regulators have not allowed it to repay that sum.

The bank was one of 19 large U.S. banks to undergo stress tests of their ability to weather a deep recession. It was ordered to raise $2.16 billion, which it has done.

SunTrust ended June with $176.7 billion of assets. It operates 1,692 branches in 11 U.S. states and Washington, D.C.

Shares of SunTrust closed Tuesday at $15.18 on the New York Stock Exchange. Through Tuesday they had fallen 49 percent this year, compared with a 19 percent decline in the KBW Bank Index (.BKX).

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; Editing by John Wallace)

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PARIS — In a sign of how technology is shaking up entrenched interests in the electrical power sector, a tiny company here has found itself at the center of a fracas for seeking to save money for consumers.

Two weeks ago, the French Energy Regulatory Commission, the C.R.E., decided that Voltalis, a company that installs electricity management devices for homes and businesses and then manages their use, would have to pay power producers for the power that it saves. Such a step would effectively destroy the Voltalis business model.

Voltalis’s Bluepod boxes, free to consumers, plug into the home electrical panel and communicate back to the company’s computers by Internet. When, for example, summer demand on the electrical grid nears a peak, the system would automatically turn off the air-conditioners of hundreds or thousands of willing consumers for a short time to avoid the need for additional electrical production to come on line.

The company says its “distributive load shedding” technology can save users as much as 10 percent on their electricity bills and save power producers billions in investments in power plants that are used only for peak periods. The business model assumes the grid operator pays Voltalis for help in maintaining market equilibrium.

Voltalis’s chief executive, Pierre Bivas, took his case to the public last weekend, where the reaction has been scathing.

“At this rate, it will soon be obligatory in France to consume large quantities of electricity, or face taxes and fines, and maybe imprisonment, too,” the antinuclear group Sortir du Nucléaire said in criticizing the decision.

Challenges, a French business magazine, suggested that the country’s powerful electricity producers, including Électricité de France, which is 85 percent owned by the government, wielded too much influence over regulators.

At peak periods, producers must bring more costly capacity on line or else demand must be limited. Voltalis’s technology, which is also in use in the United States, has disrupted the existing model easy online payday loans.

“From the consumer’s side, it’s exactly symmetrical,” Mr. Bivas said on Tuesday. “In both cases, the energy produced is used by consumers and paid for by consumers. They’re saying consumers should pay for the energy that was never produced and never used.”

He said the company has already installed around 5,000 of the boxes, but that he is aiming for “tens of thousands and ultimately millions.”

Cécile George, a technical expert for the regulator, said the decision hinged on how the company would be paid, because having the grid operator pay Voltalis “would be discriminatory against how other large suppliers are treated.”

“I wouldn’t say there were any regulatory obstacles, but someone has to pay for it,” she said. “Voltalis can’t be a free rider, reselling the energy made by someone else for free.”

She said the agency still supported the concept of demand management and that it would continue to work with Voltalis in the area of providing real time demand data.

Électricité de France has taken tentative steps of its own toward the distributed load shedding technology, paying for a test of Voltalis’s system.

“E.D.F. is behind on the technology, and it appears the regulator wants them to work together,” Marianne Boust, an analyst at Emerging Energy Research in Cambridge, Mass., said.

Jean-Louis Borloo, the French energy and environment minister, backed the regulators in their decision. But on Monday, perhaps because of the rising political heat, he said he was appointing a working group to propose the legal and regulatory changes necessary “to favor energy-saving and respect the interest of all the parties involved.” The panel is to report back by the end of the year.

French Regulators Resist a Power-Monitoring Business

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Major European markets were at least 1 percent higher Tuesday amid the latest wave of earnings and ahead of an appraisal of the economy from the Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

The FTSE 100 index in London was up 1 percent while the DAX in Frankfurt rose 1.3 percent. The CAC-40 in Paris was 1.2 percent higher.

Earlier in Asia, Tokyo’s market outperformed the region to hit a two-week high after being closed for a holiday Monday, as investors seemed to shrug off the unfolding shake-up in Japanese national politics. Japan’s Cabinet agreed to dissolve the powerful lower house of parliament, setting the stage for national elections that could topple the country’s ruling party.

Tokyo’s benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average closed up 256.70 points, or 2.7 percent, to 9,652.02, but Hong Kong’s Hang Seng ended down 0.64 point at 19,501.73.

Shares on Wall Street were expected to open marginally higher as upbeat earnings reports from several large companies added to investor optimism.

The UnitedHealth Group said its second-quarter profit more than doubled compared with the year-ago period, which was weighed down by large lawsuit settlements. The health insurer also raised its profit outlook for the year. The Coca-Cola Company, the world’s largest beverage maker, said its earnings jumped 43 percent even as sales fell, beating analysts’ estimates.

Meanwhile, both the chemical maker DuPont and the drug company Merck reported drops in their quarterly profit, but results still came in ahead of Wall Street’s forecasts free credit report.

Earnings reports have largely exceeded expectations so far this earnings season, fostering a renewed sense of optimism in the market and helping to drive the Dow Jones industrials back into the black for the year. Though the bar had been set fairly low, the results were still an encouraging sign that the recession is taking less of a toll on corporate America than it was just a few months ago.

Also at the forefront will be Mr. Bernanke, who will give his semiannual report to Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday. The market is anxious for his take on the economy and for clues on how the central bank plans to exit the numerous emergency support programs put in place last fall.

On Monday, the Dow rose for the sixth consecutive session, gaining 100 points to finish at its highest level since January. The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, meanwhile, climbed to its highest finish since November.

Bond prices slipped Tuesday. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, rose to 3.62 percent from 3.60 percent late Monday.

The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices slipped.

Oil prices are up 48 cents to $64.46 a barrel in premarket trading in New York.

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Google is not liable for defamatory material that appears in its search results, a British judge has ruled, a decision that lawyers call significant because of the country’s reputation as a haven for libel claimants.

The decision was in a case involving Metropolitan International Schools, a British company that operates Internet-based training courses. The company wanted to sue Google over negative comments posted by a reader of a technology news Web site; the comments appeared in text blurbs with the results of Google searches related to Metropolitan.

David Eady, a High Court judge, ruled that Metropolitan could not sue Google, saying it was not a publisher of the material. “It has merely, by the provision of its search service, played the role of a facilitator,” he wrote.

Lawyers said the decision, the first of its kind in Britain, was consistent with court decisions in several other European countries. In the United States, search engines are protected from liability for the contents of the results they turn up. Several European countries have extended similar protection.

Still, lawyers said Judge Eady’s decision, published Friday, was significant because of uncertainties over libel law in Britain payday loans. British courts are often seen as sympathetic to defamation plaintiffs, and Web hosting services in Britain have been held responsible for the contents of sites they host.

“It’s significant because it’s consistent with what we thought the law should mean,” said Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer at the firm of Pinsent Masons in London. “If the judge had ruled otherwise, it would have been a terrible decision for search engines.”

Google said the decision “reinforces the principle that search engines are not responsible for content that is published on third party Web sites.

“Justice Eady made clear if someone feels they have been defamed by material on a Web site then they should address their complaint to the person who actually wrote and published the material, and not a search engine, which simply provides a searchable index of content on the Internet,” the company’s statement said.

Metropolitan International Schools could not be reached for comment.

Google Wins British Libel Case

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MUMBAI, India — Like many Indians who came of age in the 1980s, Samir Patil grew up on the comic books published by Amar Chitra Katha. Made up of Indian-style Aesop’s fables, religious parables and biographies of historical figures, they taught him about the great, and lesser-known, stories of India in a didactic format meant for young audiences.

Now, Mr. Patil, a 38-year-old former McKinsey consultant who acquired the publisher two years ago, is betting that he can do the same for a new generation of Indian children who have been raised watching TV, sending text messages and surfing the Web.

He plans to broadcast animated versions of his comics on Indian television starting early next year. He expects the shows to appear first on the Cartoon Network in India, and he is negotiating deals with the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon.

Vodafone, the wireless company, already sells Amar Chitra Katha comics, wallpapers and ring tones. Mr. Patil’s team of software and animation experts in Bangalore recently released an online multiplayer game, The Legend of Katha. Last year, Mr. Patil acquired a company, Karadi Tales, that makes audio books for young children.

In a decline similar to what happened to the Western comic giants like Marvel, the sales and wide popularity of Amar Chitra Katha comics had fallen sharply in the years before Mr. Patil and a partner, Shripal Morakhia, acquired the publisher. Mr. Patil would not say how much they had paid.

The company was losing the war for an audience to satellite television, the Internet and Bollywood. Efforts to animate its stories did not gain much traction under its previous parent, India Book House, a book distributor. (Mr. Morakhia, who previously sold an online stock trading company to Citigroup, owns a majority stake in their firm, ACK Media, but does not have an active management role.)

Now, Mr. Patil hopes to take advantage of a vacuum in children’s entertainment in India’s otherwise bountiful media market. Most television shows that cater to children, for instance, are imported from the United States, Japan and other countries and dubbed into local languages, even though the vast majority of adult programming is produced locally to suit Indian tastes.

Most foreign and local companies have focused their attention on general entertainment, partly because most Indian homes have only one television, so most children often watch whatever their parents and grandparents watch.

But that is starting to change. Businesses are eager to tap into India’s growing youth market; more than 30 percent of the country’s population is 14 or younger. “Advertisers are demanding local content, and they are willing to pay a premium for it,” Mr. Patil said.

Amar Chitra Katha — which translates as Immortal Illustrated Stories — has something of a natural advantage because it enjoys wide name recognition across India and among people of Indian origin overseas. The company, which employs 150 people, sells about three million comic books a year, in English and more than 20 Indian languages. It has sold about 100 million copies since it was founded in 1967 by a newspaper executive, Anant Pai.

Still, the firm that Mr. Patil bought cannot claim exclusive rights to the age-old myths and stories that form the core of its library. Some of those stories have already been turned into lucrative TV and film franchises by others. Mr. Patil acknowledges that he will have to diversify into new stories and characters to succeed.

Other industry officials caution that it will take time for comic book publishers to succeed in other media. Mainstream media companies have traditionally been dismissive of comics and have only recently begun to warm up to them, said Sanjay Gupta, studio head at Raj Comics, a firm based in New Delhi. Raj publishes action books, including the popular “Doga” series about a vigilante who wears a dog mask, which is being adapted into a Bollywood movie payday loans.

“There is still not that much local content” on the air, Mr. Gupta said. “On TV, they have been repeating the same things they have been doing for the last 10 years.”

L. Subramanyan, the chief executive of Chandamama, a children’s magazine publisher based in Chennai, said electronic media provide a “fantastic opportunity” for Indian publishers, but it may take a few years for them to break through.

“Everything requires time, and that time, unfortunately, is expensive,” he said. “A normal animation takes over two years. In those two or three years, nothing comes out except a two- or three-minute promo.”

Mr. Patil said production was well on its way for his first made-for-TV animations, and he expected a limited release in theaters for some of his projects next year.

He attributes the acquisition of Amar Chitra Katha to serendipity. On a sabbatical from McKinsey in New York a few years ago, he was traveling around India when he learned that the company was for sale.

Before the deal came along, he planned to write a book about the history of ideas in India — a project he calls “my Don Quixote mission.” He has put the book aside for now, though he still refers to it frequently.

“I realized that if I don’t take a risk now, I risk forever thinking about the kind of things that we could have done,” he said. “My experience at McKinsey around media and technology convinced me that there is an opportunity to take some of these brands that have been locked into their old worlds and truly rediscover them in other forms.”

His early efforts, which have included a renewed marketing push and an expansion of retail distribution of comic books in bookstores and online, appear to be paying off. Sales were up 40 percent in the last fiscal year and are up about 80 percent in the first three months of the current year, Mr. Patil said. His previous entrepreneurial experience includes starting a technology outsourcing firm in India in the late 1990s that was later sold to NTT, the Japanese company.

Half the purchases from the company’s Web site are shipped abroad. In years past, many Indian immigrants to the United States, Europe and elsewhere loaded up suitcases with Amar Chitra Katha comics during summer vacations back home, hoping the books would help connect their children to their cultural roots.

Given that Amar Chitra Katha is a hallowed brand for many here and abroad, Mr. Patil does not plan to overhaul the comic books based on historical and mythological tales, but Tinkle, a monthly children’s magazine that ACK publishes, has been introducing new stories.

One is based on the adventures of a 12-year-old girl, Nina, who travels around the world with her father, a mapmaker, in the 1950s. She is one of only a few young female characters in Indian media.

Mr. Pai, the 80-year-old founder of Amar Chitra Katha, who still comes into the office most days, expresses amazement at Mr. Patil’s energy. He said he does not wholeheartedly agree with every change and initiative, but he broadly endorses Mr. Patil’s ambitious plans for the publishing house. “The moving finger writes,” he said recently.

“What is really important is providing role models,” said Mr. Pai, whom many Indians, including prime ministers, affectionately call “Uncle Pai.” “A nation marches ahead, provided it has role models.”

In India, New Life for Comic Books as TV Cartoons

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The CIT Group, one of the nation’s leading lenders to small and midsize businesses, was close Sunday afternoon to a deal with some of its major bondholders to help it avert a bankruptcy filing through a $3 billion emergency loan, according to people briefed on the matter.

The company spent the last week appealing unsuccessfully to Washington regulators for more financial help while scrambling to try to raise as much as $3 billion from investors. Still, ratings agencies slashed its debt and its stock was in a virtual free fall. If CIT does not reach a deal by Monday morning, it plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors as soon as Monday afternoon, people briefed on the situation said.

Under the terms of the proposal, CIT would receive $3 billion from some of its main bondholders. The money is meant to give the company several weeks to set up an exchange of bondholders’ debt for equity, alleviating some of the pressure from billions of dollars in obligations.

CIT’s board was scheduled to discuss the proposal on Sunday evening.

The plan was formed after days of round-the-clock negotiations between CIT and its financial and legal advisers, and a group of large bondholders. Jeffrey M. Peek, CIT’s chief executive and the architect of the 101-year-old company’s aggressive yet ill-timed push into subprime mortgages and student loans, was actively involved in the financing talks, according to people briefed on the matter.

It is unclear whether the long-sought lifeline will be enough to give CIT room to make crucial changes to its business at a time when it is unable to obtain financing from the capital markets.

The scope and breadth of the fallout of a CIT collapse also remain unclear. Hundreds of thousands of businesses across the country depend on the company to provide financing for their businesses.

CIT has relied on money that it borrows in the capital markets to make loans to its customers. Once the credit markets froze, the company was in peril.

It is also uncertain how much — if any — of the $2.33 billion in taxpayer money that CIT received late last year will be recouped.

If the plan does not succeed, CIT, with $75 billion in assets, could be the biggest failure of a financial institution since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last fall get a free credit report. Since then, federal regulators have been pumping billions of dollars into numerous banks across the country to prop them up and create some stability in the nation’s financial system.

Last December, when the markets were in turmoil, the Bush administration rushed through CIT’s application to become a bank holding company and gave it $2.33 billion through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

This time, however, when CIT asked regulators for another round of financial help, it found itself the flashpoint in a wide-ranging debate in Washington and on Wall Street over whether CIT had a viable business model. Some officials contended that it did not represent enough risk to the broad financial system to warrant relief, especially as the markets now appear to be on firmer footing.

A third front of the debate was whether, after throwing large sums of money to some of the nation’s largest banks, the Obama administration was doing enough to brace up institutions that lend money to smaller businesses. Many of those large banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America, reported either record or substantially improved results last week.

In the end, the government opted not to provide CIT access to a program through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that has allowed Goldman Sachs and other banks to issue their debt cheaply with the backing of the agency.

Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the F.D.I.C., does not view the program as a bailout solution for banks and financial institutions, a government official briefed on the situation said.

When that door closed last week, CIT executives still held out hope that they would receive approval from regulators to transfer some assets to a Utah bank that CIT controls that has about $3 billion in deposits.

Julie Creswell contributed reporting.

CIT Is Near Deal for $3 Billion Loan to Avert Bankruptcy

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BEIJING, July 18 (Xinhua) — East Star Airlines Co., Ltd. said Saturday here that its current combined debt surpassed 752 million yuan (110.1 million U.S. dollars).

Zhao Changbing, spokesperson of the company, said the announcement was made to counter rumors about the status quo of the company’s assets and debt

Zhao said total assets of the company stood at 1.01 billion yuan internet payday loans.

Established in 2005 in central Hubei Province, East Star Airlines operated more than 20 routes. Its operation was suspended by the industry regulator as of March 15 this year, due to financial difficulties of the carrier.

China’s East Star Airlines reveals $110 mln debts

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