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The graffiti artist who gained notoriety on YouTube with his daredevil tagging exploits pleaded guilty today to nearly three dozen felony vandalism counts and was released from jail after serving time since last May, prosecutors said. Cyrus Yazdani, one of Los Angeles' most prolific taggers, who is known in the tagging world as "Buket," admitted to 32 counts with the special allegation that damage exceeded $50,000. Judge Steven J.

YouTube is being blocked by Brazil's second-largest fixed-line telephone operator in response to a judicial order banning a steamy video of supermodel Daniela Cicarelli, the telephone company said Monday. Brasil Telecom said it blocked access to YouTube across a wide swath of Latin America's most populous country late Friday after receiving the order. The widely viewed video shows Cicarelli and Brazilian banker Renato Malzoni in intimate scenes along a beach near the Spanish city of Cadiz.

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. has subpoenaed YouTube, Google Inc.'s video-sharing site, to reveal the identity of a user who uploaded four episodes of the TV show "24" ahead of their airing. The subpoena filed Jan. 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California requests that San Mateo, Calif.-based YouTube help identify the subscriber so that Fox can stop the infringing immediately. The subscriber also uploaded 12 episodes of "The Simpsons."

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube Inc., said his wildly successful website would start sharing revenue with its millions of users. Hurley said one of the major proposed innovations was a way to allow users to be paid for content. San Bruno, Calif.-based YouTube, which was sold to Mountain View, Calif.-based Google Inc. for $1.65 billion in November, has become an Internet phenomenon since it began to catch on in late 2005. About 70 million videos are viewed on the site each day.

Viacom Inc.'s demand Friday that YouTube remove more than 100,000 clips from the popular online video site is more than brinksmanship at the bargaining table. It's a battle of the brands. The entertainment conglomerate's insistence that YouTube remove such coveted content as highlights from "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" signals that it believes these brands have enough cachet to attract an online audience, with or without YouTube.

Google Inc.'s YouTube.com agreed to display warnings on its website in Japanese not to upload copyrighted materials to the popular Internet service, a group of Japanese media firms said Tuesday. The decision comes as a part of ongoing talks between YouTube and the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, which last year pushed the San Mateo, Calif.-based company to erase 30,000 video clips from its pages because of copyright infringement.

The videos started popping up last month on YouTube. In one, secretly videotaped by a student, a teacher at Malibu High School loses control of the class and raises his voice while students laugh at him. In another, teenagers make fun of fellow students, who also appear to be taped without their knowledge. The videos have roiled the high school and sparked a debate among students, parents and administrators about what to do.

No wonder YouTube is so popular. All the effort to boost children's self-esteem may have backfired and produced a generation of college students who are more narcissistic than their Gen X predecessors, according to a new study led by a San Diego State University psychologist. And the Internet, with all its MySpace and YouTube braggadocio, is letting that self-regard blossom even more, said the analysis, titled "Egos Inflating Over Time."

YouDunk is coming to YouTube. The NBA on Monday unveiled plans to cooperate with YouTube.com on a partnership that will encourage fans to post online videos of their best real-world basketball moves. The league also agreed to share a limited amount of proprietary game and behind-the-scenes video footage with YouTube, an online video-sharing website owned by Google Inc. The YouTube deal surfaced less than a week after the league announced that fans soon will be able to use the NBA.

British Broadcasting Corp. has begun showing excerpts from its news and entertainment programs on the YouTube video-sharing website. In an agreement that analysts described as a key step for both the BBC and YouTube, the British broadcaster is offering three branded channels on the site, including one showing as many as 30 news clips a day. The deal gives the BBC access to millions more viewers and gives YouTube the credibility of the venerable British broadcaster.