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World Business Quick Take

■ Internet
Australia to fine spammers
Organizations sending unsolicited junk e-mail, known as "spam," may face heavy fines under new legislation tabled in Australia's federal parliament yesterday, Communications Minister Richard Alston said. The fines, which may reach more than A$1 million (US$650,000) a day, will only apply to e-mails originating within Australia. Alston said the problem had become so serious it required tough action, or spammers could overwhelm the Internet. "A couple of years ago spam was a nuisance. Now it's an absolute menace," he told national radio. "You've got something like 5 billion spam messages a day. "More than half of all e-mails comprise spam, and unless we do something very serious about it then it's going to overwhelm the way in which the Internet and information technology operates."

■ Media
AOL to sell Warner music
AOL Time Warner Inc may auction its recorded-music business after talks to merge it with Bertelsmann AG's music unit nearly broke down, the Wall Street Journal said, without saying where it obtained the information. AOL will likely decide today whether to sell Warner Music, according to the paper. The unit is valued at about US$1 billion, and the company's music-publishing business, which hadn't been included in the Bertelsmann talks, is worth about the same amount, the Journal said. The business may interest UK-based competitor EMI Group Plc, which renewed an earlier offer to buy the unit for US$1 billion, with AOL gaining a 25 percent stake in the com-bined EMI-Warner Music, the paper said, citing a person familiar with the deal.

■ Piracy
Verizon blasts RIAA
Verizon Communications Inc and SBC Communications Inc executives told Congress that the recording industry's use of subpoenas to combat music piracy violates personal privacy and threatens Internet growth. A federal court decision earlier this year that upheld the industry's use of subpoenas "has truly created a Franken-stein monster that Congress never contem-plated," Verizon General Counsel William Barr told the Senate Commerce Committee. Verizon and SBC, the two biggest local telephone companies, are Internet service providers that have received more than 1,000 recording-industry subpo-enas. These subpoenas seek names of customers susp-ected of downloading pirated songs and providing them to others online. Music comp-anies say piracy has cost them US$700 million in sales in the first half of the year.

■ Shipping
UPS plans China expansion
United Parcel Service (UPS), a US-based delivery and logistics company, said yesterday it plans to operate more flights between China and the US as part of its bid to incorporate Shanghai into its global network. UPS president David Abney said the company's China business grew 45 percent in the second quarter of this year, compared with a global average growth of 6.2 percent, and three times higher than the growth forecast for the entire Asia-Pacific region in that period. If UPS's business continues to grow and the company is unable to launch more flights, the current flight load will not be able to meet capacity, Abney said in a statment. The transportation services giant, which moved its China headquarters to Shanghai from Hong Kong in July, currently operates 24 weekly services to and from Shanghai.

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