By David Kravets

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad.

Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.

“We believe it’s the best solution out there,” Gibson says. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.

Read the full post here…

Get to know more about us, as our star intern, Yanise takes the Hot Seat to answer Proust’s Questionnaire, popularized by James Lipton on “Inside the Actors Studio” at www.facebook.com/icarusfilms

By Avinash T.R. (From the Bodisathva blog)

Avinash Sorab: As I am concerned with an alternative tradition of documentary film making in India I have noticed lot of similarities in style (particularly in the interviews of War and Peace) with the documentary of Marcel Ophuls The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) in French. What is your opinion about it? Do you know the film? Are you influenced by his style?

Anand Patwardhan (AP): I saw Sorrow and the Pity and other Marcel Ophuls films like Hotel Terminus (on the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie) many years ago. I am of course an admirer of his work but am not sure if we have any similarity in style, though it is possible that when you admire a film, a little bit of it stays with you forever. Another film I admired in those days was The Battle of Chile by Patricio Guzman. Perhaps what is common in these works is the scale of the issues they tackle, the attention to detail and the understated humanist sympathies of the filmmaker, which while never hidden are never loudly proclaimed.

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How Google’s music-streaming venture will change the gadget and entertainment worlds forever.

By Farhad Manjoo

While the iPod has come to symbolize the digital music age, it’s iTunes that’s allowed Apple to control the musical marketplace. iTunes has a nice interface, it’s easy to learn, and it’s ubiquitous—it ships with every Mac, and it’s one of the most downloaded Windows programs around. Other companies may make great phones and music players, but they don’t have the desktop software to sync your music, apps, and photos. That’s why Palm worked up a hack last year to connect its phones to iTunes—and why Apple quickly shut down the workaround.

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By David Carr

For half an hour last Thursday afternoon, CNBC was the most exciting place on television. Watching Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer try not to freak out — they acquitted themselves nicely — while the market tumbled like a drunken rag doll down a long staircase was amazing television.

The rest of the time, as when the market is not suffering the largest drop within a single day of trading? Um, not so much. Even if you are an avowed business bobble-head, most of the time, CNBC and other financial channels are a kind of wallpaper. Business people mostly live in narrow verticals. If you follow and trade in uranium, it’s not going to pop up all that often on the linear channels of television.

So Thomson Reuters is trying to change television. Its new product, Reuters Insider, is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners. The service, which will begin Tuesday, is something like a You Tube for the financially interested, albeit one that is available only to Reuters subscribers, who pay as much as $2,000 a month.

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By Joseph Plambeck

At the ripe age of 28, Jon Zimmer is sort of an old fogey. That is, he is obsessive about the sound quality of his music.

A onetime audio engineer who now works as a consultant for Stereo Exchange, an upscale audio store in Manhattan, Mr. Zimmer lights up when talking about high fidelity, bit rates and $10,000 loudspeakers.

But iPods and compressed computer files — the most popular vehicles for audio today — are “sucking the life out of music,” he says.

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From the International Documentary Association

On Monday, April 26, reply comments were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) concerning preservation of the open Internet and the broadband industry. The comments were submitted for the International Documentary Association, Film Independent, University Film & Video Association, Independent Filmmaker Project, IFP / Chicago, IFP Minnesota and National Association for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC).

The comments were prepared by Jack Lerner, Annie Aboulian and Daniel Senter of the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic, under the guidance of attorney and former IDA Board President, Michael Donaldson.

The following is a summary of the reply comment filed with the FCC. A PDF of the complete 59-page document can be downloaded here:

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From the L.A. Times Technology Blog

Apple’s iPad can do movies, music, e-mail, apps and rich Web browsing. And of course, e-books. Should Amazon just put its comparably basic e-reader, the Kindle, to sleep?

Not so fast. Sleep experts say using the iPad before bed can affect sleeping habits unlike most other e-readers.

The difference? Devices like the Kindle, the Nook (the top part of the screen that displays books) and popular e-readers from Sony use a technology called e-paper. It simulates the look of an actual printed page and does not emit light. That means, unlike the iPad, you can effectively read in direct sunlight. (Beach, anyone?)

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Yank iPad apps unless Apple cedes complete control over the right to publish

By Ryan Chittum, posted at Columbia Journalism Review

The Nieman Journalism Lab’s Laura McGann has a disturbing report that ought to perk up every news organization that sees Apple’s iPad as part of its future.

McGann talked to Mark Fiore, who won a Pulitzer this week for his trenchant editorial cartoons. Apple has denied his iPhone (and thus iPad) application because in the mega-corporation’s own words, “it contains content that ridicules public figures” and violates its license, which says (emphasis mine):

Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

“Ridicules public figures” is pretty much top of the job description for editorial cartoonists, who have been a critical part of our free press for a couple of centuries longer than investigative reporters have.

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