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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.

More specific legal language on the Net-Neutrality court decision.

"Do American students have First Amendment rights beyond the schoolyard gates? The answer is yes and no, according to two conflicting federal appellate decisions Thursday testing student speech in the online world. "Ultimately, the Supreme Court is going to have to decide if there ever is a time students have full-fledged First Amendment rights," said Frank LoMonte, executive director of Virginia-Based Student Press Law Center. He's one of the attorneys in the cases the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided."

Mass Effect 2 relies heavily on dialog and story to grab gamers, but many playing the game are having problems reading the text.

An withering critic of NBC's decision to limit online streaming of Olympic events to curling and hockey, in what the author describes as an attempt to force viewers into traditionally measurable media.

The University of California at Los Angeles on Wednesday announced that it will continue streaming copyrighted videos in online "virtual classrooms" despite legal objections from an educational media trade group. The university's decision is the latest development in a copyright dispute with the Association for Information and Media Equipment over whether it is legal for the university to convert DVDs from its libraries into a digital format that students can stream from password-protected course Web sites. UCLA considers the practice "essential," since it allows students to watch the videos on their own computers and on their own time, rather than having to gather in a classroom. Many educators at other colleges have watched the case with intent, waiting to see what implications, if any, the spat might have on their own institutions' use of streaming video.

As I write this, I have just finished my first playthrough of Heavy Rain. I have, by turns, felt my heart pounding and my muscles aching; questioned my decision-making and morality; laughed where the game's creators intended, and in other places they didn't; I felt genuine surprise, alarm, sadness and joy. It's been a long time since a videogame made me feel any one of these emotions.

The FCC says it will uphold the lifting of the partial ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership until new decisions by new commissioners are put in place.

"The time is ripe for media vultures to make their move. In 2007, the court blocked the FCC's attempt to change the rules of ownership. Now it is reconsidering that decision. 'A three-judge panel of the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, which had put the stay in effect…ordered the FCC and consumer groups to 'show cause' by mid January (2010) why the stay should not be dropped.'"

Google faces problems related to privacy and copyright protection in Europe. Google's most immediate challenges may be in Italy. This month a decision is expected in a trial in Milan, where four Google executives have been charged with defamation and privacy violations in a case involving videos posted on a Google Web site showing the bullying of an autistic boy.Italian prosecutors accuse Google of negligence, saying it was too slow to remove the video. But Google sees a political dimension. One of the four executives, Peter Fleischer, Google's chief privacy counsel, called the case part of "an attack on a decade of progress" for Internet companies in Italy. In Germany, German publishers have persuaded the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel to support a new kind of copyright protecting journalistic content on the Web. Analysts say the measure, which has not yet been introduced, could require Web companies like Google to buy special licenses to cite content published elsewhere.

"With a midnight deadline looming on a threat to pull the plug on Cablevision's 3.1 million customers in New York a day before the Academy Awards, there's still no word on whether ABC's parent company and the cable operator have reached a decision."

"The context of this decision is interesting, in that the issue arose in the restructuring of Nassau Broadcasting, where its creditors were to take a controlling position in the company in exchange for a release of some of the company's debt. However, the new ownership position of its creditors, where their interests became attributable for the first time, required multiple ownership reviews in several markets, as these same investors were owners, or holders of significant debt (triggering an EDP issue) in other companies holding radio or TV licenses in nearby markets."

""Over the past several decades, our industry has consolidated from literally dozens of independent entrepreneurs and suppliers, including many writer-owners making innovative and groundbreaking programming to a handful of large media conglomerates most often controlling content from start to finish," Wells said. The result, he said, is that decisions on which shows go on television are based more often on money than quality. "

Pepsi decided to pay millions for an online ad campaign that would "engage and interact with customers for months" rather than pay millions for 30 seconds of ad time during the Super Bowl. They also got a ton of free advertising from news agencies who reported on this decision.

"Taiwanese regulator the National Communications Commission (NCC) has revised its mobile TV licensing plans, announcing that, contrary to its previous announcement, only one concession will be awarded in 2010. As reported by CommsUpdate on 18 January 2010, the NCC revealed that it planned to award two operators concessions for mobile TV services, allocating each licensee 6MHz in the 600MHz frequency band across which it will deliver 18-20 programme channels using either the Qualcomm-developed MediaFLO or DVB-H as its mobile TV standard."

The Toronto-based startup Thoora promises to gauge how well individual news stories are doing by analyzing and calibrating real-time data from blogs, mainstream news sources and Twitter. Thoora's software uses more than 100 attributes to determine not only the most popular content but also the highest quality, using measures such grammar and spelling and the authority of sites that link to the content.

Discussion of whether Google will leave China with comments from Chinese bloggers and media analysts.

Interesting opinion: net-neutrality doesn't matter because the market will sort it out.