Media Industries Project - Carsey Wolf Center

Regarding the Google Books settlement & book digitization project.

Google's plan to digitize the world's books into a combination research library and bookstore has hit another snag, in the form of a U.S. Justice Department statement that "despite substantial progress made, issues remain" with the proposed settlement agreement of the class action lawsuit The Authors Guild Inc. et al. v. Google Inc.

State governments compete with film subsidies to lure Hollywood productions.

AOL Media president Bill Wilson, who has spearheaded the company's recent push into niche content verticals, is leaving the company.

While you will get to see Tim Tebow during the Super Bowl commercials, you'll be missing out on several studios' blockbuster ads.Commercials were cheaper this year, but the $3 million price tag did not attract many movie studios.

Hollywood studios lost a landmark copyright court case against an Australia internet provider on Thursday, when a court ruled iiNet could not be held responsible for unauthorized downloads of movies using its service.

In the first case of its kind, an Australian court has ruled that an internet service provider cannot be responsible for illegal downloading. iiNet, Australia's third largest ISP, was taken to court by a group of 34 movie production houses. The group included the Australian divisions of Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox. They claimed that iiNet was guilty of copyright infringement for not preventing illegal downloads of films.

A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that while one in 10 adults blogs, only 14 percent of teens do, down from nearly 30 percent in 2006. Surprisingly, they don't seem too partial to Twitter either: The Pew survey found that only 8 percent of teenage Internet users tweet.

Will the next generation read news reports? It looks like it. Some 62% of US internet users aged 12 to 17 are going online for news and political information or find out about current events, said a study conducted by the Pew Research Center published yesterday. During special events such as general elections news consumption rose to 77%.

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.

Internal strife at Microsoft kills innovation

Congressional hearings for the Comcast/NBC case are scheduled for Feb. 4. There are many opponents to the deal, including consumer activists and media watchdogs, Local affiliates are concerned that Comcast could "gradually migrate some or all of the most compelling sports, news and entertainment programming and talent away from free, over-the-air distribution on NBC to its newly owned cable channels that are made available only to paying subscribers, such as Bravo and USA Network."

In case anyone's interested, this weekend is the Santa Barbara Film Festival. There are films, industry panels, and tributes that seem amazing!

A group of experts examine the environmental impact of print media versus electronic media. Counter-intuitive findings. It may be (not for sure though) that newspapers are actually a greener option. They use recycled paper, whereas using the computer uses energy and contributes to e-waste. This just doesn't seem right...

This article talks about how local news programming shouldn't blame Jay Leno for losing viewers, but instead to look at their programming and realize that local news has "become a faceless commodity."

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.

If twitter is a new way to spread news in this digital age, how should we measure impact? This article poses some interesting ideas.

This is from the Radio Television Digital News Association, an "online destination for electronic journalists." This article provides guidelines for electronic journalists who blog or incorporate social media.

Cuban asks why readers would read their local newspaper if their feed shows up on Google News.

The NFL tried to send cease and desist letters to local shirt makers in Louisiana, who were printing shirts that say "Who Dat", in reference to the New Orleans saints. The NFL claimed the phrase "Who Dat" was under copyright. It was determined the NFL held no such copyright.