MSN and Control Room will stream Elton John’s “Happy Birthday, Elton�? concert live in its entirety as part of a multiyear, global, live content distribution agreement forged last fall. Fans who are unable to attend the sold-out concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden can watch Elton perform songs spanning his career live on MSN for free or watch it on-demand for the ultimate convenience.

This is a celebration on a grand scale for Elton John fans around the world as the entertainer celebrates 60 years, and 60 performances at the legendary Madison Square Garden. Currently fans can go to MSN at http://music.msn.com/eltonjohn to view 60 photos highlighting his career and ever-changing fashion statements. The Elton page includes music videos, photos, album covers and highlights spanning Elton John’s 40-year career.

“Happy Birthday, Elton�? can be viewed on MSN, beginning March 25 at 8:30 p.m. EDT. Visitors can listen to samples from Elton John’s entire back catalog of nearly 500 tracks, which includes 90 singles and 32 albums.

Activist groups sued the parent company of Comedy Central on Thursday, claiming the cable network improperly asked the video-sharing site YouTube to remove a parody of the network’s “The Colbert Report.”

Although the video in question contained clips taken from the television show, MoveOn.org Civic Action and Brave New Films LLC argued that their use was protected under “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

They said Viacom Inc. should have known the use was legal and thus its complaint to YouTube to have the video blocked amounted to a “misrepresentation” that is subject to damages under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as early as Thursday that they are creating an online video site to compete with Google Inc.’s YouTube, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Quoting unidentified people close to the negotiations, the newspaper said the new site would be stocked with television shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends.

The site has deals to place videos with some of Google’s biggest Internet rivals, including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL and News Corp.’s MySpace, the newspaper said.

A federal judge on Thursday dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography, striking down a 1998 U.S. law that makes it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access “harmful” material.

In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech.

“Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection,” wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall.

The law would have criminalized Web sites that allow children to access material deemed “harmful to minors” by “contemporary community standards.” The sites would have been expected to require a credit card number or other proof of age. Penalties included a $50,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Malaysian movie pirates have put a bounty on the heads of two sniffer dogs who busted a fake DVD ring with a seizure of discs worth about $3 million, media and officials said on Thursday.

Lucky and Flo, two female black Labradors deployed by Malaysian authorities in their crackdown on pirated movie DVDs and music CDs, carried out their first major successful operation in Johor state on Tuesday.

The New Straits Times said syndicate bosses had offered an unspecified reward for the killing of the two dogs.

“As a result of the extent of loss to the pirate syndicate, we have information from the domestic trade ministry that the Johor syndicate is intent on killing Lucky and Flo,” said Neil Gane, an official of the Motion Picture Association.

“The Malaysian authorities are taking this threat seriously and the security around the dogs’ current location has been beefed up,” he told Reuters.

When video game maker Jim Greer approached Silicon Valley investors to give him nearly $1 million for his start-up. he had an irresistible pitch: “It’s video games meets YouTube.”

He named the site Kongregate.com and last June began inviting game developers and players to test it. After Christmas he opened the site to users of all stripes, who can submit and play games free of charge.

So far, the advertising-supported site offers 300 games that are rated by players, who chat online as they play.

“Not all of them are gems, but the top 100 are,” said Greer, 36, who founded the company with his younger sister Emily, 32, and offers game makers a share of the site’s advertising revenue.

Reed Hoffman, founder of business networking site LinkedIn and a former PayPal executive, said timing played a big role in his decision to become an investor in the company.

Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash software, which is used to make those Web ads that wiggle and shake, has made it easy for developers to quickly churn out fun games. At the same time, advances in Web technology have spurred all kinds of new ways to rate and share information online.