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The music industry in Sweden has filed for the Stockholm District Court to enforce a ruling from last October that would require the founders of The Pirate Bay (a file sharing site) to pay a fine of 500,000 kronor (US$ 71,000) if the site was not shut down.

Newsday is striking back after reports earlier this week poked fun at the small number of paying subscribers that Newsday.com has attracted since the site put up a pay wall three months ago. The news organization's top executive responded via a memo to staff on Thursday explaining why the paid model is not a disappointment.

PARIS - Google said on Monday that it faced antitrust complaints in Germany from newspaper and magazine publishers who want the company to pay for using article snippets in its Web news service and search results.

"News Corp. agreed to pay $70 million for a stake in the media company owned by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, one of its largest shareholders. The New York media conglomerate will take a 9.1% stake in Rotana Group, with an option to double its holdings in 18 months. Corp. will have two seats on Rotana's six-person board. The investment gives News Corp its first significant foothold in the Middle East, where it expects economies to grow quickly."

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.

Many broadcast networks are pushing cable TV providers to pay for transmission fees for NFL games.

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

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

FreeAllMusic.com offers free downloads in exchange for active engagement with ads. "iTunes meets Hulu." Says that rather than paying for songs, viewers select among a menu of ads to watch. Leads to active engagement and better retention, which allows charging higher ad rates.

The Obama administration is backing $675,000 in damages a Massachusetts student must pay the Recording Industry Association of America for file sharing 30 songs.

Michael Roston think the New York Times is onto something with the new model they introduced yesterday, but believes that articles written to protect the public interest musn't charge if it to achieve it's goal. "Presumably, the New York Times still produces reported news that looks out to protect the public interest. If that news is being produced, it should be available to the public, regardless of whether or not they pay for it. It's difficult to educate members of the public about really important things they need to be aware of when you're hitting them up for a $3 day pass or something"

Popular 80's band from Australia ruled to have infringed on the copyright of an old children's campfire song, "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree" for their hit, "Men Down Under." The court ruled on Thursday (February 4) that Men at Work copied the children's song in "Down Under" and must pay the copyright owner years of royalties. Sinclair, who wrote "Kookaburra" died in 1988, but her publishing company, Larrikin, owns the copyright for the ode to the native Australian bird and filed a copyright-infringement suit last year against the band.

This article talks about the new economic model for online news sources (the pay for what you use model that the NYT will switch to in 2011), and how it will actually be implemented on a user's screen.

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."