Ponca City, We love you writes "TechDirt reports that a judge has asked Righthaven to explain why a non-profit organization reposting an entire article isn't fair use. The case involves the Center for Intercultural Organizing of Portland, Oregon, which was sued by Righthaven in August after an entire 33-paragraph Review-Journal story about Las Vegas immigrants was posted on the center's website, crediting the Review-Journal. The nonprofit says it was founded by Portland-area immigrants and refugees to combat widespread anti-Muslim sentiment after 9/11 and it works to strengthen immigrant and refugee communities through education, civic engagement, organizing and mobilization and does not charge subscription fees or derive any income from its website. The interesting thing is that the defendant in this case didn't even raise the fair use issue. It was the judge who brought it up, suggesting that the Nevada judges are being inundated with hundreds of Righthaven cases, and that Righthaven has already lost once in a case that was found to be fair use so judges may want to set a precedent to clear their dockets."

itwbennett writes "The Wall Street Journal has 'a pretty useful section tracking privacy issues, privacy protection tools and the threats thereof from online marketers, from the point of view and on the technical level of a relatively savvy consumer,' says blogger Kevin Fogarty. The downside: He discovered that reading two stories from the WSJ's privacy section left behind deletion-resistant Flash cookies."

tesmar tips a report up at TechCrunch that begins "Here come the robo sports journalists. While people in the media biz worry about content mills like Demand Media and Associated Content spitting out endless SEO-targeted articles written by low-paid Internet writers, at least those articles are still written by humans. We may no longer need the humans, at least for data-driven stories. A startup in North Carolina, StatSheet, today is launching a remarkable network of 345 sports sites, one dedicated to each Division 1 college basketball team in the US. For instance, there is a site for the Michigan State Spartans, North Carolina Tar Heels, and Ohio Buckeyes. Every story on each site was written by a robot, or to put it more precisely, by StatSheet's content algorithms. 'The posts are completely auto-generated,' says founder Robbie Allen. 'The only human involvement is with creating the algorithms that generate the posts.'"

Toe, The writes "In an interesting twist on the free/closed mobile platform debate, Apple's closed platform appears to be at least nominally on the free side when it comes to magazine distribution. Magazines have always relied on the demographics of their subscribers to sell ad space to companies who would want to reach that demographic. This apparently has been a sticking point between publishers and Apple, because the latter is unwilling to allow its tools to expose the vast wealth of data that can be tapped from a modern mobile device connected to a purchasing account. For that reason, the so-called 'Hulu for Magazines,' Next Issue Media, will only be available on Android. Still unanswered: do people even want digital magazines?"

UgLyPuNk tips news that Harmonix, the game developer behind Rock Band and the early Guitar Hero games, will be sold by parent company Viacom, signaling the media conglomerate's exit from the console game market. Quoting Wired: "The news is yet another ominous sign for the music-game business, which exploded seemingly overnight in 2005 with the release of Guitar Hero. ...sales have been in free fall since the dizzying heights of 2008, with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock moving only 86,000 copies in its first week... Thus far in calendar year 2010, the balance sheet seems to show that Harmonix has been a $300 million liability for Viacom. And it doesn’t look like Viacom believes in the long-term future of music games. With any luck, the company will find a buyer that can help Harmonix grow, but it’s hard to imagine a better partner in the music biz than MTV."

mvdwege writes "The popular wiki TV Tropes, a site dedicated to the discussion of various tropes, clichés and other common devices in fiction has suddenly decided to put various of its pages behind a 'possibly family-unsafe' content warning, apparently due to pressure by Google withdrawing its ads. What puzzles me most is the content that is put behind this warning. TV Tropes features no explicit sexual content, and no explicit violence. It does of course discuss these things, as is its remit, but without actual explicit depictions. In fact, something as relatively innocuous as children being raised by two females, whatever the reason are put behind the content warning, even if the page itself doesn't take a stand on the issue, merely satisfying itself by describing the occurence of this in fiction."

takowl writes "It's been a few months since The Times newspaper in the UK (part of the Murdoch stable) hid its online stories behind a paywall. The media watched eagerly to see if people would pay for news online. Now The Times has uncovered its first results: some 105,000 have coughed up online, and another 100,000 print subscribers have access. Naturally, the paper is keen to promote this as a success: some people are willing to pay. The BBC's technology correspondent, on the other hand, reckons: 'it's safe to assume that Times Newspapers has yet to achieve the same revenues from its paywall experiment that were available when its website was free.' Will online subscribers help the Times survive? Will other papers follow its lead?"

itwbennett writes "Kim Dong-cheol is a North Korean with 'a double life,' writes the IDG News Service's Martyn Williams in a story on ITworld. 'In addition to his job as a driver for a company, Kim also works as a clandestine reporter for AsiaPress, a Japanese news agency that's taken advantage of the digital electronics revolution to get reports from inside North Korea,' says Williams. 'When we started training journalists in 2003 or 2004, getting cameras into North Korea was a real problem,' said Jiro Ishimaru, chief editor of the news agency, at a Tokyo news conference on Monday. 'Nowadays, within North Korea you are able to have your pick of Sony, Panasonic or Samsung cameras.' The images they're capturing are 'often startling,' and it 'documents a side of the country the government doesn't want the world to see,' says Williams."

MotorMachineMercenar writes "The Local reports that Julian Assange has been denied a residence permit in Sweden. The WikiLeaks spokesman and Australian citizen applied for residency in August, apparently to gain the freedom of speech protection offered by Swedish laws. When asked about the reasons for the denial, a Swedish official responsible replied, '...secrecy prevails in reference to the grounds for such a decision,' essentially meaning the reasons are confidential. Assange has been recently under investigation for sexual molestation charges, which were withdrawn and then re-instated. WikiLeaks is expected to release up to 400,000 confidential US military documents in the near future, which would be the largest such leak in US history."

itwbennett writes "It comes as no surprise to the vast majority of us who haven't rushed out to buy a 3D TV, but according to a DisplaySearch report consumers aren't doing their part to make 2010 the year of 3D TV, says blogger Peter Smith. And the stats are even worse than Smith imagined they'd be: 'DisplaySearch estimates that 3.2 million 3D TVs will be shipped in 2010. Note, that's shipped, not sold. 3.2 million equates to 2% of all flat panel displays shipped (as far as I can ascertain, that's worldwide shipments). So yeah, there are not many 3D TVs being shipped this year. But wait, that's not the end of the bad news. In Western Europe (the only region where they offered this data point) sales of 3D glasses are less than 1 per 3D set sold. In other words, a lot of Western Europeans who buy a TV with 3D capability don't even bother to buy the glasses to use that feature.'"

cgriffin21 writes "Apple is getting more media attention right now than any other technology company, including Google. Microsoft, meanwhile, is languishing in the shadows like Cinderella on the night of the ball. That's the upshot of a study released Monday (PDF) by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found that Apple was the focus of 15.1 percent of media coverage between June 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010. Google received 11.4 percent of media coverage during the period, while Microsoft garnered just 3 percent."

Americano writes "Wired reports that at least six WikiLeaks insiders, including Daniel Domscheit-Berg, WikiLeaks' spokesman in Germany, have resigned in the past few weeks. Those who have spoken with Wired cite differences and disputes with Julian Assange, and his autocratic leadership style, as the motivation for their departure. From the article: 'Key members of WikiLeaks were angered to learn last month that Assange had secretly provided media outlets with embargoed access to the vast database, under an arrangement similar to the one WikiLeaks made with three newspapers that released documents from the Afghanistan war in July. WikiLeaks is set to release the Iraq trove on Oct. 18, according to ex-staffers — far too early, in the view of some of them, to properly redact the names of US collaborators and informants in Iraq.'"

jamie passes along a humorous article at The Guardian which pokes fun at the shallow and formulaic science journalism typical of many mainstream news outlets. Quoting: In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of 'scare quotes' to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever. ... If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims. This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like 'the scientists say' to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist. ... 'Basically, this is a brief soundbite,' the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. 'The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on,' she or he will continue."

destinyland writes "An online music site has raised over $13,000 to hire a full orchestra to record royalty-free classical music. ('"Although the actual symphonies are long out of copyright, there is separate protection for every individual performance by an orchestra," notes one technology site.') MusOpen has reached their fundraising goal for both the orchestra and a recording facility, and will now record the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky. And because their fundraising deadline doesn't end until Tuesday, they've promised to add additional recordings for every additional $1,000 raised."

An anonymous reader writes "The US press has been pushing for a (much needed) federal shield law, that would allow reporters to protect their sources. It's been something of a political struggle for a few years now, and things were getting close when Wikileaks suddenly got a bunch of attention for leaking all those Afghan war documents. Suddenly, the politicians involved started working on an amendment that would specifically carve out an exception for Wikileaks so that it would not be covered by such a shield law. And, now, The First Amendment Center is condemning the newspaper industry for throwing Wikileaks under the bus, as many in the industry are supporting this new amendment, and saying that Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because 'it's not journalism.'"

Ant writes "Next Media Animation (NWA) became popular due to its animated and sometimes humorous renderings for world news. Their official videos can be found on YouTube." They start by covering the Tiger Woods animation that made these guys known, and then talk about the process and the people behind it. I've attached an Apple video that you might have bumped into recently as well... it's worth the watch if you haven't seen it yet.

An anonymous reader writes "Prepare yourself. A staple of near-future sci-fi—magazine video ads—are now a thing of the present. And which high-tech magazine is leading the charge? Wired? Popular Mechanics? Nope. Successful Farming. The advertisement itself is for a pesticide that protects crops against nematodes. You can see a video of the video here."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that Rupert Murdoch plans to launch a digital newspaper in the US geared specifically to younger readers and to digital outlets such as the iPad and mobile phones. The paper, as yet unnamed, will pool the huge editorial muscle of Murdoch's combined holdings within News Corporation, which include the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the financial wire service Dow Jones, as well as his newspapers in the UK and Australia. Earlier this month, Murdoch said of the iPad: 'It's a real game-changer in the presentation of news,' adding 'We'll have young people reading newspapers.'"

An anonymous reader writes "An anonymous, twentysomething blogger is giving Mexicans what they can't get elsewhere — an inside view of their country's raging drug war. Operating from behind a thick curtain of computer security, Blog del Narco in less than six months has become Mexico's go-to Internet site at a time when mainstream media are feeling pressure and threats to stay away from the story. Many postings, including warnings and a beheading, appear to come directly from drug traffickers. Others depict crime scenes accessible only to military or police."

siliconbits writes "BBC News has shown how straightforward it is to create a malicious application for a smartphone. Over a few weeks, the BBC put together a crude game for a smartphone that also spied on the owner of the handset. The application was built using standard parts from the software toolkits that developers use to create programs for handsets. This makes malicious applications hard to spot, say experts, because useful programs will use the same functions."