Group items tagged

"Gawker Media, the eight-year-old online publishing heavyweight founded by Nick Denton, announced its first acquisition on Monday: the New York boldface name guide CityFile."

The federal judge overseeing the proposed settlement of a class-action lawsuit filed against Google by groups representing authors and publishers heard from a handful of supporters and a parade of objectors to the deal at a hearing Thursday in Manhattan.

"J.K. Rowling has been named in a lawsuit alleging she stole ideas for her wildly popular and lucrative "Harry Potter" books from another British author. The estate of the late Adrian Jacobs added Rowling as a defendant in a lawsuit it filed in June against Bloomsbury Publishing PLC for alleged copyright infringement, according to a statement released by the estate's representatives, who are based in Australia."

In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.

Google is preparing to unveil a new social networking component for its Gmail Web service, according to reports published Monday. The service, The Wall Street Journal says, would add tweet-like status updates into the Gmail interf

Forget the last 10 years of post-Napster industry annihilation - Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) is now seeing growing income from both music sales and music publishing - but only if you factor in overseas sales; the U.S. business is still in rewind...

Facebook is denying it illegally breached the privacy of its users in a proposed $9.5 million settlement to a class action challenging its program that monitored and published what users of the social-networking site were buying or renting from Blockbuster, Overstock and other locations.

Former children's laureates Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling authors Jeffrey Archer and Louis de Bernières and critical favourites Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson have all opted out of the controversial Google book settlement, court documents have revealed. Authors who did not wish their books to be part of Google's revised settlement needed to opt out before 28 January, in advance of last week's ruling from Judge Denny Chin over whether to allow Google to go ahead with its divisive plans to digitise millions of books. The judge ended up delaying his ruling, after receiving more than 500 written submissions, but court documents related to the case show that more than 6,500 authors, publishers and literary agents have opted out of the settlement.

New York Times Co posted a higher-than-expected quarterly profit on Wednesday after slashing costs, but the newspaper publisher warned that print advertising will continue to decline in the current quarter.

Lawrence Journal-World is offering unemployed people in the area a 13-week subscription for just $1. "We want to ensure that residents experiencing difficult times are able to stay connected to the news and be aware of job opportunities and advertising specials published in the paper each day," said Chris Bell, Journal-World circulation director. Is this sincere?

A very small number of news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Newsday, already charge online readers, each with a system developed largely in-house, and The New York Times announced recently that it planned to do the same. But with advertising plummeting, many other publishers eager for a new source of revenue are considering making the switch, despite the risk of losing audience and advertising.

In another blow to Google's plan to create a giant digital library and bookstore, the Justice Department on Thursday said that a class-action settlement between the company and groups representing authors and publishers had significant legal problems, even after recent revisions.

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.

"The holding company of MediaNews Group Inc., the publisher of dozens of newspapers including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News, plans to file for bankruptcy protection as soon as this week, according to people familiar with the matter."

Publishers and broadcasters have always called on freelance journalists. But a generation ago, if they used material from another organization, it was usually limited to a handful of large, well-known and respected ones like The Associated Press or Reuters. With established newsrooms shrinking, a raft of smaller news outlets have cropped up in the last few years, selling or simply giving news reports to the traditional media - groups like ProPublica, Global Post, Politico and Kaiser Health News.

Video games are becoming more like movies every day, so it's not surprising to see publishers facing the same kinds of idea theft lawsuits that frequently irritate Hollywood.

For more than 70 years, royalty payments for air time have flowed to the songwriters and music publishers but not to the musicians or record companies. Now there is a renewed drive to revisit that arrangement, and in recent weeks the volume of the discussion has increased several decibels.

ROME-Google Inc. on Wednesday said it will scan ancient Italian literary texts ranging from Galileo Galilei to herbal medicine manuals as part of the Internet company's first publishing partnership with a national government. The deal involves digitizing up to one million books held in the National Libraries in Rome and Florence.

Interesting interview that highlights how we may miss normality when we highlight diversity in reporting.