It seems that YouTube’s traffic numbers for music videos might not be quite as accurate as many had hoped, with Warner Music Group pointing to some fairly questionable numbers.

YouTube does have its own music service...

Word comes via Cnet that Warner Music saw a massive spike in the number of unique visitors to its various different YouTube videos between over the course of December and January, with reports indicating that it had managed to more than double its traffic, seeing views around the 47 million mark in a month. Still, all might not be as well as it seems from that description…

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It seems that piracy lawsuits are a gate that swings both ways with Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal now facing some fairly hefty bills to remunerate artists whose content, it seems, they’ve pirated.

Usually we tend not to see what happens on the far side of the table, with most of the media attention surrounding record labels and piracy centred quite firmly on the poor souls dragged into court by apparently merciless megapulishers, but now we’re told that record labels are facing the fairly substantial sum of $6 billion in damages to be paid to artists they’re found guilty of pirating roughly 300,000 tracks from.

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Just days after the news that YouTube had finally sorted out its six-month-long disagreement with UK music collection group PRS and will be displaying copyrighted music videos to UK customers again, it seems as though YouTube will be putting together a movie rental service.

Word comes via TomsHardware that YouTube is currently in talks with movie studios in an attempt to wrangle a deal that would see the Google owned company streaming movie rentals to users. The report has it that YouTube is engaged in talks with Lion’s Gate, Sony, MGM and Time Warner. It’s hard not to wonder whether or not big studios will be able to overcome previous issues with YouTube and forge an agreement, but if there’s enough money going then it seems unlikely they’d turn it down.

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Swedish authorities have ordered The Pirate Bay’s ISP to take the site down, an order with which the supplier, Black Internet, hastily complied in order to avoid a hefty fine. At the time of writing, The Pirate Bay is entirely inaccessible.

Eircom users likely won’t see a revival of The Pirate Bay, given that it’ll likely take more than a week to sort out the whole business and Eircom is to begin blocking The Pirate Bay from September first. That said, for the rest of us it’s not looking so hot either. The Pirate Bay’s downtime is set to continue until its case with publishers end. TorrentFreak is reporting that those publishers include Disney, Universal, Warner, Columbia, Sony, NBC and Paramount.

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