Merck, the manufacturer of painkiller Vioxx, has settled deceptive advertising charges for $58 million and agreed to submit all new television com­mercials for its drugs to the Food and Drug Administration for review for the next seven years. The agency had challenged Merck's direct-to-consumer television ads, which began in 1999.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed to review a case, in which ad-supported freeware company Zango sued spyware removal company Kaspersky Lab in 2007, alleging that Kaspersky interfered with Zango's relation­ships with its customers by deleting Zango's pop-up serving program.

The US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ordered Bernard Fromstein and Judy Provencher to pay more than $49 million for their role in the 2006 Datacom Marketing Inc. case. The Canada-based scheme allegedly used telemarketing call centers to scam American businesses into paying for business directories and listings they did not order.

MySpace has claimed $230 million in damages — the largest anti-spam judgment ever — from Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines for allegedly stealing passwords through "phishing" scams on the social networking site.

Web-based classifieds giant Craigslist has countersued its minority owner, eBay Inc., for allegedly violating federal and state antitrust laws. It claims eBay attempted to use information from its 28% stake in Craigslist to benefit its own classifieds site Kijiji, which launched last year in the US.

Google is being sued by David Almeida, a private investigator who is using Google AdSense to promote his business. Almeida filed charged against the Web giant in federal court last Tuesday claiming the company deceived him and charged for ads displayed on third-party Web sites, a service he claims not to have requested — Almeida alleges that he left the "optional" box blank.

The Federal Commu­nications Commission has conducted two hearings on network management, following Comcast Corp.'s claim that it sometimes delayed file-sharing traffic for subscribers as a way to keep Web traffic flowing. FCC chairman Kevin Martin said that his agency has all the authority it needs to prevent Internet service provid­ers from discriminating against Web surfers and that new legisla­tion is unnecessary.

California state lawmaker Charles Calderon is proposing a tax on music purchases made online. The proposal, AB1956, seeks to tax music downloads by adding sales tax to music purchases made online — increasing the price of the average iTunes download from 99 cents to $1.08.

EBay filed a lawsuit in the state of Delaware against community classified site Craigslist last Tuesday. The online auction site, which bought 28.4% of Craigslist in 2004, claims that Craigslist's two directors, founder Craig Newmark and chief executive Jim Buckmaster, unfairly diluted eBay's economic interest in the company in January.

Canada Post Corporation and FedEx Canada have teamed up to develop Priority Worldwide, a new international express service. The service will be delivered in Canada through Canada Post's retail and commercial networks, and worldwide through the FedEx international delivery network, beginning in Fall 2008.