Ahter Kutadgu, head of corporate communications for Turk Telekom, told the Anatolia news agency his company had been notified of a court decision to lift the ban.

Kutadgu did not elaborate on the court's reasoning.

"As soon as the court decision lifting the ban reached us, we immediately opened YouTube," he said.

The Istanbul court that ordered the site blocked on Wednesday had said it would lift the ban as soon as it ascertained that videos insulting Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, were removed.

The ban had been condemned by the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders and drew attention to Turkey's shaky record on permitting free expression.

It is illegal in Turkey to insult Ataturk, a revered figure whose image graces every denomination of currency and whose portrait hangs in nearly all government offices.

Several prominent Turkish journalists and writers have been tried for allegedly insulting Ataturk or for the crime of insulting "Turkishness."

An Egyptian appeals court on Monday upheld the four-year prison sentence given to an Egyptian blogger who criticized conservative Muslims and was convicted of insulting Islam and Egypt's president, court officials said.

Abdel Kareem Nabil's sentence last month had been widely condemned by local and international rights groups as a bid to curb free expression.

Nabil, a 22-year-old former student at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, had been sentenced to three years in prison for insulting Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and inciting sectarian strife, and another year for insulting President Hosni Mubarak.

Nabil, who used the blogger name Kareem Amer, was an unusually scathing critic of conservative Muslims. His frequent attacks on Al-Azhar led the university to expel him in March 2006 and caused prosecutors to bring him to trial.

Court officials said Monday that the Appeal Court in Alexandria upheld the earlier sentence. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.

The judge in the original trial found that Nabil had insulted the Prophet Muhammad with a piece he wrote in 2005 after riots in which angry Muslim worshippers attacked a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria over a play deemed offensive to Islam.

"Muslims revealed their true ugly face and appeared to all the world that they are full of brutality, barbarism and inhumanity," Nabil wrote in his blog. He called Muhammad and his 7th century followers, the Sahaba, "spillers of blood" for their teachings on warfare — a comment cited by the judge.

In a later essay not cited by the court, Nabil clarified his comments, saying that Muhammad was "great" but his teachings on warfare and other issues should be viewed as a product of their times.

In other writings, he called Al-Azhar the "other face of the coin of al-Qaida" and he criticized Mubarak, describing him as "the symbol of tyranny."

"The idea that Google has some edge because they've got super-duper rocket scientists may be a little antiquated now," he said.

Describing the two Internet firms as "black boxes" that won't disclose how they rank search results, Wales said collaborative search technology could transform the power structure of the Internet.

Wales, a former futures trader who has become an evangelist for the free sharing of technology, said users could work together to improve search engines, just as Wikipedia users had tweaked and rewritten articles on the sprawling encyclopaedia.

The process of constant improvement would also make search technology less susceptible to spam, he said.

Founded in 2004 and now employing a staff of more than 30, Wikia hosts group publishing sites on a wide range of topics from psychology to the Muppets.

While Wikia gives away its tools free to users, the company requires that sites built with its resources link to Wikia.com, which makes money through advertising. 

Yahoo Inc. and AT&T Inc. are negotiating potentially sweeping changes that could scale back their partnership. Wall Street Journal reports that AT&T wants to trim the scope of the partnership with Yahoo! feeling that its partnership with Yahoo Inc. yields fewer benefits than in the past.

Ataturk founded the modern Turkish republic in 1923 and is highly respected by Turks.

The offending video had been the latest in an ongoing battle between Turkish and Greek YouTube users on the popular video sharing portal where insulting videos and comments have been posted since the beginning of the year according to press reports.

Turkish news agency Anatolia reported Ahter Kutadgu, corporate affairs director of Turkey's main Internet provider, Turk Telekom, as saying "Once we received the court decision revoking the ban, we allowed access to YouTube."

The Turkish court ruled that it would overturn its ban if the video was removed. YouTube removed the video following protesting e-mails from Turkish users according to the Turkish press.

A man has won damages of £750 from an internet company after he was sent a single unsolicited email.

Gordon Dick, an electronic marketing specialist, launched a civil case against Transcom after it sent him an unwanted email on an address that was known only to one company. His case is the first time a British court has set a level of compensation for spam.

It is also the first time that a court in Britain has awarded compensation to an individual complaining about spam, which accounts for three quarters of all emails sent in the UK.

'The courts have shown they are sensitive to putting right these misdemeanours, and the small claims procedures are ideally suited to take low-cost legal action,' said Dick.

Dick, 30, says he was confident of winning the case because he knew the offending spammer had his email address on a mailing list and he had not given permission for it to be handed out.

He says he would have been happy with an apology from Transcom, the firm that breached the anti-spam laws. But he says it responded to his complaint in bullish fashion and told him to go to court if he was not happy.

He did, and was awarded damages in a small claims case at Edinburgh sheriff court.

When he returned to court recently after Transcom failed to pay him, he was also awarded expenses of more than £600.

Dick is now planning to enforce collection of the sum, and urged other people irritated by unwanted emails to take the same action.

He began the case last summer, and has since set up his own web site, www.scotchspam.org.uk, offering advice on how to take legal action, and including a pro forma letter of complaint to send to the spammers.

Dick told the court that his address had been harvested from an email group of which he was a member. The message he received was sent to 72,000 people.

Shares of Alcatel-Lucent rose 2.6 percent after a U.S. federal jury ruled that Microsoft Corp. must pay the French company $1.52 billion for using digital music technology without permission.

The shares rose 26 cents to close at 10.09 euros in Paris, giving Alcatel-Lucent, the world's largest maker of telecommunications equipment, a market value of 23.3 billion euros ($30.7 billion).

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, infringed two patents of Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent with its Windows Media Player, including the version in the new Vista operating system, a San Diego jury said Thursday. Microsoft said it will appeal the verdict.

"The jury's decision, if confirmed, would open the way for Alcatel-Lucent to file a large number of lawsuits against other companies using these patents illegally," analysts Frank Maccary and Eric Beaudet at Ixis Securities wrote in a note.

One of the disputed patents relates to compression of digital audio signals, while the other describes how to encode and play digital music. The jury upheld the validity of the patents and found that Alcatel-Lucent is entitled to more than $759 million for each of the two infringed patents.

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said it licenses technology from a German researcher, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS. Fraunhofer helped develop MP3 audio-compression technology with Bell Labs, once part of Lucent Technologies Inc., which Alcatel SA acquired last year.

The decision allows Alcatel-Lucent to seek an order barring Microsoft from using the patented technology. The victory may clear the way for legal actions against hundreds of companies that rely on MP3, the standard for playing music and sound files on mobile phones and digital-music players.