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News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch says that the debate over the preeminence and importance of content in the digital era is over. "Content is not only king. It is the emperor of all things electronic," he said, adding that consumers are ready to pay for quality content."

MediaNews is testing a paid-content model at two of its newspapers. The company says it creating new types of content for users, including geo-targeted, personalized, user-generated and aggregated content, and will include classifieds and local directories.

David Moore discusses the issues concerning original premium content and the internet, and suggests a pay model as a means of solving the problem

With the impending arrival of digital books on the Apple iPad and feverish negotiations with Amazon.com over e-book prices, publishers have managed to take some control - at least temporarily - of how much consumers pay for their content.

RealNetworks has agreed to kill its DVD-copying software and pay $4.5 million in settling a copyright-infringement lawsuit filed by Hollywood studios. As part of the settlement announced Wednesday, the provider of online entertainment services also agreed to drop its appeal of a San Francisco federal court ruling that barred RealNetworks from distributing or supporting RealDVD or any other technology that enables the duplication of the studios' copyrighted content. The 2008 lawsuit filed by Viacom and the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that RealDVD illegally circumvented the anti-piracy technology embedded in DVDs. The DVD Copy Control Association, which licenses Hollywood-sanctioned copyright-protection technology, joined the suit later, claiming RealNetworks was also in violation of its DVD CCA license.

Television content will only be accessible online to those who currently pay for cable television.

"In a lengthy article in New York magazine that hit the Web late on Sunday, writer Gabriel Sherman quotes a source high up in the media industry echelon who says Murdoch is "pretty tightly wound up over Google and has been ready to sue them...He doesn't trust them at all." The lawsuit, presumably, would come if Google refused to stop indexing News Corp. search results without paying a fee for them."

Discusses the challenges of charging readers for online news content, including competition between pay and free sites for readers.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday resurrected a possible settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by freelance writers who said that newspapers and magazines had committed copyright infringement by making their contributions available on electronic databases. The proposed settlement was prompted by a 2001 decision from the Supreme Court in favor of six freelance authors claiming copyright infringement in The New York Times Company v. Tasini. After the Tasini decision, many freelance works were removed from online databases. Most publishers now require freelance writers to sign contracts granting both print and online rights. After the decision, the authors, publishers and database companies who were parties to several class-action lawsuits negotiated a global settlement that would pay the plaintiffs up to $18 million.