For the first time, Apple’s iTunes has forged a deal to sell TV episodes of many HBO shows including “Deadwood,” “The Sopranos,” and “Sex and the City.”

Entertainment industry executives have floated all sorts of ideas to tackle piracy at the Internet service provider level. Some Hollywood suits have proposed that ISPs filter their networks for pirated content, while others have asked Congress to order colleges to consider filters.

Facing pushback from three of the four major record labels, music search engine Project Playlist has hired former RIAA CEO Jay Berman as a consultant, CNET’s News.com reports. <

The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation convinced the FBI to back down from a demand for information about a user of the nonprofit digital library Internet Archive.

With money no obstacle, Google and Viacom apparently are prepared to battle indefinitely about whether YouTube is legally responsible for pirated clips that appear on the site.

Zango is one of the largest adware companies still in business and has one of the most checkered pasts. For years, advocates complained that the company used suspect methods to install its ad-serving software on consumes’ computers. For years, Zango said it was doing the best it could to police affiliates, who allegedly violated company policy by drive-by installations.

Talks between Yahoo and Microsoft might have ended this weekend, but the overall Silicon Valley landscape still appears very much in flux.

The RIAA suffered a major blow in court this week, but that hasn’t stopped the organization from pressing forward with lawsuits against individuals. In fact, the group appears to be accelerating its efforts against college students. In the last two weeks, the RIAA has sent some universities up to 20 times the typical number of notices about infringement, according to press reports.

Craigslist and eBay were always strange bedfellows. From the time eBay took a 28% stake in the profit-eschewing Craigslist, it was all but inevitable that the companies would end up in litigation. Last week, eBay pulled the trigger, suing Craigslist for allegedly diluting the value of eBay’s interest in the company to less than 25%, which meant that eBay lost some rights regarding its ability to elect a Craiglist director.

Now that Web users are increasingly connecting via broadband lines at home, look for Internet service providers to start competing with each other by boosting speed.