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A German court has ruled that online video platform YouTube must install filters to prevent users from uploading some music videos whose rights are held by a music-royalties collecting body.

German news agency dapd reported that the Hamburg state court on Friday mostly sided with Germany’s GEMA, which represents about 60,000 German writers and musicians.

GEMA took Google Inc.’s YouTube unit to court over 12 temporarily uploaded music videos for which no royalties were paid.

YouTube has maintained that it bears no legal responsibility for the uploaded content _ saying it checks and sometimes blocks content when users alert the firm about alleged violations of laws.

It was not immediately clear whether the ruling will be appealed.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below Payday advance.

BERLIN (AP) _ A German court is set to rule on whether the online video platform YouTube is responsible for the content of videos uploaded by its users.

GEMA, a German music royalties collecting body, took Google Inc.’s YouTube unit to the Hamburg state court over 12 uploaded music videos for which no royalties were paid.

YouTube maintains that it bears no legal responsibility for the uploaded content _ saying that it checks and sometimes blocks content when users alert the firm about alleged violations of laws.

A ruling Friday in favor of GEMA could be a major blow for YouTube because experts say that millions of videos on its platform could be affected.

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Avon Products Inc. says it has tapped one-time Johnson & Johnson executive Sherilyn S. McCoy as its new CEO as the struggling beauty products company looks to regain its past luster.

McCoy will take over the post from Andrea Jung, who will stay on as executive chairman.

Founded in 1886, Avon became a fixture in households across the country as its legions of “Avon ladies” went door to door selling makeup to family, friends and acquaintances.

But North American sales have dropped and its profit has shrunk easy to get unsecured personal loans. Investors and analysts had blamed Jung for being slow to react to declining results and wrap up a bribery investigation that began in China and spread elsewhere.

Avon said Monday that the 53-year-old McCoy will become CEO and a board member effective April 23.

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Japan is setting stricter, clearer safety guidelines for nuclear power plants to ease public concern about restarting reactors idled after the disasters a year ago.

Facing a national power crunch, the government is anxious to restart two reactors in Fukui, western Japan, before the last operating reactor of the 54 in the country goes offline in May.

But the government has faced strong public opposition due to the meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant, and local leaders are reluctant to give their approval.

Authorities say the new safety guidelines are more extensive than past “stress tests,” which were essentially computer simulations meant to test how reactors would cope in the event of major earthquakes, tsunamis or other emergencies. Many questioned the objectivity of the tests and whether they guaranteed the plants’ safety, even though two reactors passed the tests.

If utilities can show they meet the new guidelines, authorities hope the public will be convinced that the reactors are safe to restart, including the two in Ohi, Fukui prefecture.

The new guidelines, based on 30 recommendations adopted last month by the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, require nuclear power plants to install filtered vents that could reduce radiation leaks in case of an accident, as well a device to prevent hydrogen explosions, among other steps. No deadline is cited by which these steps must be taken.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said the government can order utilities to restart reactors regardless of local opposition, because obtaining residents’ consent is not legally required.

The plan will be officially announced later Friday after Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and three Cabinet ministers in charge of nuclear crisis management finalize the measures pay day advance.

All but one of Japan’s 54 reactors have been shut down for inspections, required every 13 months. None have been restarted since the March 11, 2011, tsunami set off meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant.

The reactor on the northern island of Hokkaido goes off line in early May. If none of the reactors are restarted, Japan could face power shortages this summer. Before the crisis, Japan depended on nuclear power for one-third of its electricity.

To make up for the shortfall, Japan has expanded production at conventional gas- and oil-fired plants.

But officials in cities and towns near Fukui are requesting explanations for the rush.

“Why rush? It’s too soon to decide. I think they should gain understanding from the public first,” said Yukiko Kada, governor of Shiga prefecture bordering Fukui.

Toru Hashimoto, the outspoken mayor of Osaka _ a top shareholder of Kansai Electric Power Co. that runs the Ohi plant in Fukui _ criticized the government for compiling the new guideline in two days.

Economy and Trade Minister Yukio Edano said earlier Friday that many of the safety measures have been already taken and the new guidelines aim to set even higher standards.

Fukui, home to 13 reactors clustered in four complexes along the Sea of Japan coast, is called Japan’s nuclear alley.

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Stocks are opening lower after the Federal Reserve signaled that it may be less willing to provide more stimulus to the U.S. economy.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 121 points to 13,079 shortly after the opening of trading Wednesday.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 12 points to 1,401. The Nasdaq composite slipped 32 points to 3081.

Minutes from the Fed’s last meeting, released late Tuesday, started a sell-off that began in the U instant payday loan.S. and extended overseas.

Encouraged by job growth, the Fed’s policy makers seem more willing to allow the economy to move forward on its own. The U.S. and overseas governments have worked actively to prop up economies damaged by the global downturn.

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Japan must avoid delaying an overhaul of the tax system to prevent government borrowing costs from spiraling in the next decade, the new chief of the country

The International Monetary Fund wants measures attached to a potential loan to Egypt to have

Former Gannett Co. CEO Craig Dubow’s received a severance package valued at about $32 million after chronic health problems prompted his resignation from the largest U.S. newspaper publisher.

The owner of USA Today and more than 80 other U.S. newspapers disclosed the details of Dubow’s compensation in a regulatory filing late Friday. A contract that Dubow signed in February 2007 guaranteed he would receive his full pension, stock awards, a severance payment and other benefits if he became disabled.

Dubow resigned last October after six years as CEO and 30 years with the company. He stepped down after taking two medical leaves during 2010 and 2011 to deal with hip and back ailments.

Dubow’s final compensation package includes $12.8 million in retirement benefits, $6.2 million in disability benefits and a $5.9 million severance payment, according to the filing. Gannett stock options and restricted stock, which Dubow had accrued during his years of employment with the company, were also part of the package. Those stock awards are valued at nearly $7 million.

Separately, Gannett will pay $25,000 to $50,000 annually for a $6.2 million life insurance policy covering Dubow and another $70,000 annually for benefits such as health insurance, home computer and secretarial assistance and financial counseling. He will receive most of these benefits for three years unless he goes to work for a competitor, according to the filing.

Dubow’s tenure as Gannett’s CEO coincided with deep cutbacks in staff, triggered by a sharp decline in print advertising, the main source of revenue in the company’s publishing division. Gannett’s revenue from print advertising plunged from $5.2 billion in 2005 to $2.5 billion last year no fax pay day loan. Gannett’s stock price plummeted by 86 percent while Dubow was CEO, dropping from $72.69 to $10.45.

The shares have rallied under Dubow’s successor, Gracia Martore, amid hope by investors that a recently introduced program to charge readers for online access to most of Gannett’s newspapers will boost profits. Gannett’s stock ended the week at $15.21, a 46 percent gain since Dubow’s resignation. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index is up nearly 21 percent during the same stretch.

Martore was Gannett’s chief operating officer before Dubow’s departure. Martore declined a raise when she became CEO last year, according to Gannett’s filing. Instead, she agreed to maintain her salary of $900,000, the same amount that she had been receiving as Gannett’s chief operating officer. Even before she was named CEO, Martore was working under a contract that entitled her to a $950,000 salary, but she voluntarily lowered it to $900,000 beginning in 2010 in recognition of the tough times facing Gannett.

Martore’s compensation, including a bonus and the estimated value of stock options, totaled $4.7 million last year.

Gannett is the second major newspaper publisher in a week to disclose a large severance payment to a former CEO. The New York Times Co. said its former CEO, Janet Robinson, got a package valued at about $23 million after she retired at the end of last year.

Dubow, who was 56 at the time he resigned from Gannett, is a member of The Associated Press’ board of directors. His term ends in April.

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The company behind the lightning-fast processor in the new iPad thinks it can soon become the predominant microchip business in the world.

Chips designed by ARM (), the British microprocessor company you’ve probably never heard of, are in a stunning 95% of the world’s mobile phones and tablets, including the new iPad Apple announced this week. ARM’s chips represent 30% of the entire semiconductor market sales, which is nearly double Intel’s 16%, according to IHS iSuppli.

But ARM’s ambitions are even grander.

"We want to see that doubled to 60%," said Warren East, ARM’s CEO, in an interview conducted at last week’s Mobile World Congress. "We think we’ve got the right sort of technology for everything from very, very tiny intelligent sensors, through the consumer electronic swathe, right through to servers."

ARM is in a unique position in the chip industry because it doesn’t actually make microprocessors. Instead, ARM designs chips and licenses those different architectures to more than 300 companies around the world, including giant players such as Samsung, Nvidia (), Texas Instruments () and Qualcomm (, Fortune 500).

The company is particularly successful in the rapidly growing mobile market, partially because it is good at what it does, but also because of the dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time.

ARM got its start in 1991 designing modem chips for cell phones. They were fairly limited microchips that were built for one purpose: to communicate with cell towers without sucking up too much of the phone’s battery. But around the turn of the century, handset manufacturers began to realize that there was excess computer power left over in those ARM-based chips that could be used to build a user interface.

Soon after that realization, the "feature phone" was born, which ultimately evolved into the modern day smartphone. Taking advantage of the situation, ARM now designs chips for two purposes: the same-old modem processor and an applications processor that controls the user interface for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS and the like.

Demand for ARM-based chips has risen sharply of late, as the cell phone architecture made its way into disk drives, printers, cars, Internet-connected TVs, microcontrollers, and tablets. This year, Hewlett-Packard (, Fortune 500) is introducing its first server running on ARM-based chips, and Microsoft (, Fortune 500) will release a version of Windows 8 that will run on tablets powered with processors designed by ARM.

As a result, ARM’s share of the overall semiconductor market has soared, doubling in just three short years. Smartphone and tablet sales will continue to help ARM’s share rise, and the new markets ARM is entering could help the company arrive at its goal of doubling its share again three years from now. For instance, IHS iSuppli predicts ARM will grow its share of the PC processor market to 22% by 2015, up from practically nothing today.

Meanwhile, semiconductor behemoth Intel (, Fortune 500) tried — and failed — for many years to get a foothold in the mobile marketplace, as ARM’s 21-year old expertise in power management gave it a leg up.

But recently, Intel scored some big wins after finally convincing handset makers that its chips could play nicely in mobile. Global telecom giant Orange and Indian carrier Lava announced last week that they are planning on shipping a device based on an Intel reference design next quarter, and Lenovo launched a similar phone last month.

Motorola Mobility (), which is being acquired by Google, said last month that all of its future devices will run on Intel chips. And Chinese smartphone giant ZTE said last week that it too would soon begin to ship phones with Intel inside.

Despite Intel’s deep pockets and recent surge, ARM isn’t fazed. The company believes its power-sipping, mobile-friendly architecture will ultimately become the world’s most pervasive.

"Intel’s offerings today are better than they were years ago, and undoubtedly there are going to be some Intel design wins," East said. "But I look at the capabilities of those products and see the same kind of capabilities that were in ARM products several years ago." 

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Asian exporters, battling a slump in demand, are calling for their central banks to intervene after capital inflows contributed to the best start to the year since 2006 for the region

Stock indexes swung from gains to losses and back again Tuesday afternoon, after the Federal Reserve cautioned that Europe’s financial crisis still poses a threat to the world’s economy.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 7 points, or 0.1 percent, to 12,028 as of 3 p.m. Eastern time. It had risen as high as 126 points earlier Tuesday after two strong auctions of European debt reassured investors.

The Federal Reserve portrayed the U.S. economy as slightly healthier but cautioned that it remains vulnerable to the European debt crisis. “Strains in global financial markets continue to pose significant downside risks to the economic outlook,” the Fed said in a statement.

The Spanish government was able to sell short-term debt at much lower interest rates Tuesday compared with a month ago, a signal that markets are becoming less fearful about the government’s ability to repay its debt.

In its first sale of short-term bills, the European Financial Stability Fund raised 1.9 billion euros ($2.6 billion) from investors at an average rate of 0.22 percent. That’s below the rate Germany pays for the similar bills. “This is an amazing success,” Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics, wrote in a note to clients.

The Dow sank 162 points Monday when Moody’s and Fitch warned that the fiscal agreement reached last week among European leaders fell far short of what was needed to contain that region’s debt crisis.

The Commerce Department reported Tuesday that retail sales rose for the sixth straight month in November. Sales increased just 0.2 percent, below what analysts had expected. But the government also revised the previous month’s slightly higher. That was the encouraging part, said Tim Hoyle, director of research at Haverford Investments. “It reassures you that the economy is going in the right direction,” Hoyle said cash advance to savings account.

Energy companies led the market higher as crude oil rose back above $100. Exxon Mobil Corp. rose 2 percent, Chevron Corp. 1.5 percent. Drugmaker Pfizer added 2.1 percent, the most of the 30 companies in the Dow. Pfizer said it plans to buy back up to $10 billion of its own stock.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 2 points, or 0.2 percent, to 1,233. The Nasdaq composite fell 14 points, or 0.5 percent, to 2,598.

The Vix, a measure of stock market volatility, fell to 25. It has dropped 10 percent in December. The index remained above 30 from early August until last week. Hoyle said a sustained fall in the Vix usually is followed by a rise in stock prices. The recent trend “sets us up for a little Santa Claus rally between now and the end of the year.”

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note fell to 1.95 percent from 2.02 percent late Monday after an auction of new 10-year notes drew strong demand.

Urban Outfitters jumped 6 percent, the most in the S&P 500 index, after the retailer said its sales were rising faster than analysts were expecting. The Philadelphia-based company owns Urban Outfitters stores, Anthropologie and Free People.

Sprint Nextel Corp. rose 1 percent as it looked like its rival AT&T Inc. would be unable to pull off an acquisition of T-Mobile USA. Sprint agreed to drop a lawsuit against AT&T now that the deal appears to be in jeopardy. Sprint had been lobbying to stop it.

Electronics retailer Best Buy plunged 15 percent. The company said its third-quarter income sank 29 percent as it cut prices on tablets and TVs to drive sales and traffic during the busy holiday season.

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