Viacom Appeals YouTube Ruling

Viacom appealed Friday its unsuccessful $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google’s YouTube in a case testing the depths of copyright-infringement protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. (If the June ruling) survives, is a boon for internet freedom — and a decision that would make it more difficult for rights holders to protect their works. (The judge) ruled that YouTube, which Google purchased in 2006 for $1.8 billion, had no way of knowing whether a video was licensed by the owner, was a “fair use” of the material “or even whether its copyright owner or licensee objects to its posting.” The DMCA’s “safe harbor” privilege comes with another price. The law demands intermediaries such as YouTube to take down content in response to a notice from rights holders, without evaluating the claim for reasonableness or accuracy, or considering the fair use rights of users.

Read more at Wired

Newspapers' Ad Revs Dip

While other media appear to be embarking on a tentative recovery, the third quarter of 2010 brought no respite for newspapers, which saw total advertising revenues slip 5.4% to $6.1 billion compared to the same period last year. This was due entirely to a 7.1% drop in print advertising revenue, to $5.4 billion. The print decline was only partially offset by a 10.7% increase in digital ad revenue, to $690 million.

Read more at Media Post

Scientific Journalism

The New Yorker has a profile of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. In the article, Assange endorsed the idea of what he calls as “scientific journalism” as the new way of doing journalistic work. He’s asserting that like any scientific study, anyone who makes a claim about something needs to publish the dataset that he or she used in arriving at the said finding.

Read more at Technorati

Charity to give away 1,000,000 books

A UK-based charity plans to give away a million books - 40,000 copies each of twenty-five selected titles - on March 5 next year. If you live in the UK and Ireland you can sign up as a book-giver - 20,000 will be selected and each will receive a box of books to hand out."

Read more here.

U.S. Mobile Ad Revenues

BIA/Kelsey is releasing a new report that shows that U.S. mobile advertising revenues will grow from $491 million in 2009 to $2.9 billion in 2014. During the forecast period, BIA/Kelsey expects U.S. mobile search ad revenues to grow from $59 million to $1.6 billion, U.S. mobile display ad revenues to grow from $206 million to $803 million, and U.S. mobile SMS ad revenues to grow from $226 million to $562 million.

In terms of the local breakdown, BIA/Kelsey expects U.S. mobile local advertising revenues to grow from $213 million in 2009 to $2.03 billion in 2014. This represents 44 percent of total U.S. mobile ad revenues in 2009, growing to 69 percent in 2014. BIA/Kelsey defines mobile local advertising as ads that are targeted based on a user’s location.

Read more at Tech Crunch.

Google to Launch E-Book Venture

Google Inc. is in the final stages of launching its long-awaited e-book retailing venture, Google Editions. Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.

That's a different approach from Amazon.com Inc., which is estimated to have as much as 65% of the market. Users of its proprietary Kindle device can purchase books only from an Amazon store. Digital book sales are expected to more than triple to $966 million this year, according to Forrester Research, from $301 million in 2009.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.