Google has entered the market for offering online storage space. Their new service, called Google Drive, will be in direct competition with rival cloud storage services like Dropbox, Apple's iCloud and Microsoft's SkyDrive. The search giant will offer 5GB (gigabytes) of storage for free for those wishing to keep their photos, documents and other files online. Keeping things in the cloud means users can access their files from any computer anywhere in the world, as long as it has Internet access. At the top end, Google will offer 16TB (terabytes) of space – at a price of $799.99 a month. Sixteen terabytes is sufficient to store 16,000 movies. For most people, the free 5GB option will be more than enough space. Google senior vice-president of apps Sundar Pichai said the launch of Drive was an important step for the company. He wrote on a blog post: "Drive is a central place where you can create, share, collaborate and keep all of your stuff.…You can take all your data, regardless of which device you're on, and make it seamlessly available to you." Some industry insiders believe Google's entry into the cloud storage market could shake it up. Richard Edwards, an analyst at the research firm Ovum, said Google's move could stir Facebook into action. "Facebook doesn't have a cloud service but this may prompt it into an acquisition," he said. He added: "If Facebook was to buy Dropbox, that would be a game-changer."

A court in Hamburg, Germany has ruled that the video-sharing site YouTube is responsible for videos on its site that are posted illegally. The ruling said YouTube must do more to prevent posters uploading copyrighted music videos to the site. The case was brought to the courts by the royalty-collecting organisation Gema, which represents over 64,000 German musicians and songwriters. Gema has been fighting YouTube in the courts since 2010. The group accuses YouTube of using music online without paying royalties to those who produced the tunes. YouTube may be forced to pay royalties for all the video clips on its site. This could prove extremely costly for Google, the owner of YouTube.

The court said it did not consider YouTube to be the copyright violator, but the user who uploaded the song. It did say, however, that YouTube must implement stronger filters to block copyrighted material. YouTube representatives say the site is not responsible for what users post to it. They claim those who post copyrighted material are at fault and that the YouTube site is simply a platform for sharing. A spokesman said: "We remain committed to finding a solution to the music licensing issue in Germany that will benefit artists, composers, authors, publishers and record labels, as well as the wider YouTube community." Currently, around 60 hours of videos are uploaded to the YouTube site every minute.