Media

The agreement is subject to court approval. Penguin settled a similar claim with the Justice Department in December.

A few times each year the RIAA looks back on proceeding months and tries to assess whether its anti-piracy actions are bearing fruit. In more recent times the public face of these assessments have included appraisals of companies that the recording industry feels should be helping to solve the problem. Time and again the main focus has fallen on Google, along with a recurring report card stating “can do better”. While softer in tone, today’s announcement is not much different. Brad Buckles, RIAA executive vice president of anti-piracy, begins with a short summary of recent history. A year ago the RIAA stepped up its efforts to remove links to infringing content indexed by search engines. They have done so in increasing numbers and this week reached a magic number – 20 million takedowns on Google alone. A similar number have been sent to underlying sites too, making a total just shy of 40 million notices. It’s a losing battle. “Every day produces more results and there is no end in sight. We are using a bucket to deal with an ocean of illegal downloading,” Buckles complains. According to the RIAA executive the problem is compounded by what he describes as a “controversial interpretation” by search engines who insist that DMCA takedown notices are directed at specific links of infringing content. This, Buckles says, leads to a situation where content is simply reposted by sites as quickly as it’s removed. The RIAA anti-piracy boss says that while he accepts that search engines have no way of knowing whether links are infringing or not the first or second time around, after receiving “a thousand notices for the same song on the same site” they should have received the message loud and clear. “Isn’t it simply logical and fair at some point to conclude that such links are infringing without requiring content owners to keep expending time and resources to have the link taken down?” he questions. Of course, this suggestion – that search engines should begin to act pro-actively after a point – passes the buck and potential blame onto the shoulders of third parties that also have better things to do. One of those third parties, Google, received a more considered appraisal today. The RIAA has publicly chastised and patronized the search engine on a number of previous occasions, but today the music group applauded the search engine for its efforts so far. Nevertheless, in common with all previous appraisals, the RIAA concludes that Google must still do better. But the real problem, the RIAA explains, lies with the system. Far too much time is being spent taking down illicit content which is detracting from music making. The blame for that can be laid squarely at the door of the DMCA. “As the Congressional review of the DMCA gets underway, there should be a strong focus on what notice and takedown was supposed to accomplish. The DMCA was intended to define the way forward for technology firms and content creators alike, but some aspects of it no longer work,” says Buckles. “How could we expect it to? It was passed before Google even existed, or the iPod, or peer-to-peer file-sharing or slick websites offering free mp3 downloads. It was after the DMCA that Napster, and Grokster and Limewire and Grooveshark and Megaupload, to name just a few, came on the scene. In particular, it’s time to rethink the notice and takedown provisions of the DMCA.” In parallel the RIAA feels that its anti-piracy burden should be lightened by other Internet companies helping out the recording industry. ISPs, payment processors and advertisers all have a part to play and voluntary initiatives already in place are a sign of things moving in the right direction. However, if real progress is to be made, the group says, those voluntary agreements must have teeth. “We’ve seen what good can happen when there is cooperation among Internet pl

After passing NBC in the ratings race back in early February, CBS never looked back, cruising to an easy win among total viewers and the two major demographics. Per Nielsen, CBS will close out the 2012-13 broadcast TV season with an average prime-time delivery of 11.9 million viewers per night. The network beat runner-up ABC by 4 million viewers, giving it the largest margin of victory in 24 years. CBS also cleaned up in the dollar demos, averaging a 2.9 among adults 18-49 and a 3.8 with the 25-54 set. This marks the first time in 21 years that the Tiffany Network has emerged victorious in the 18-49 race. With 34 weeks of ratings data on the books (tonight marks the official end of the 2012-13 campaign), each of the five English-language broadcasters is down versus the year-ago period. Thanks to the Super Bowl and a robust lineup of hits like NCIS, The Big Bang Theory and Elementary, CBS dipped just 3 percent in the 18-49 demo. Things were dicier at Fox, which dropped 22 percent to a 2.5 rating, snapping its eight-year winning streak. After getting off to a hot start in the fall, NBC cratered in the absence of Sunday Night Football and The Voice—the show went on a three-month hiatus from Dec. 18-March 25—and fell out of the running for good on week 19. The Peacock concludes the season with a 2.4 in the demo, down 4 percent versus 2011-12. ABC again finished last among the Big Four, averaging a 2.2 in the demo, a decline of 12 percent. The CW’s 18-49 ratings (0.7, down 13 percent) are effectively irrelevant, given that the network guarantees deliveries of women 18-34 and adults 18-34. The Spanish-language broadcaster Univision was the only major network that did not lose ground, averaging a 1.5 in the demo—flat versus last season. Along with the ratings erosion, the networks all aged up to varying degrees. CBS remains the oldest net, reaching a median age of 56.2 years, up from the year-ago 55.6. ABC is the next-grayest net (53.3 years, up from 52.3), while NBC is a hair shy of the big 5-0 (49.6, up three-tenths of a point from 49.3). Fox aged up from 46.2 to 46.6 years, while the CW’s median age jumped 12 percent from 37.1 to 41.7 years.?? For the second consecutive season, NBC’s Sunday Night Football was the biggest draw in prime time, averaging 21.4 million viewers and an 8.2 in the dollar demo. The Sunday national games on Fox actually outdrew everything on the tube, delivering an average 24.8 million viewers. CBS also put up gaudy numbers with its late NFL broadcasts, averaging 23 million viewers per game. After SNF, the top-rated broadcast series were: CBS’ The Big Bang Theory (5.3), Season 3 of NBC’s The Voice (4.3), Season 4 of The Voice (4.2 through the first 18 episodes) and ABC’s Modern Family (4.2). All deliveries are calculated from Nielsen live-plus-same-day ratings data, which is statistically consistent with the C3 currency. Leaving off the current season of The Voice (eight episodes remain), Fox’s American Idol (3.8) claims the No. 5 slot. Modern Family’s Season 4 finale airs tonight. Of the 36 scripted series that debuted this season, 23 will not return for a second season. CBS renewed one of its five new shows (Elementary); Fox returned two (The Mindy Project, The Following); NBC gave a vote of confidence to a pair of dramas (Revolution, Chicago Fire), ABC brought back two (Nashville, The Neighbors) and the CW renewed three (Arrow, The Carrie Diaries, Beauty and the Beast). NBC was particularly unforgiving, killing off five freshman comedies (Go On, The New Normal, Guys with Kids, Animal Practice, 1600 Penn), canceling the Dance Cook sitcom Next Caller before it ever aired, and relegating Save Me to a May 23 start date. No decision has been made as to Hannibal’s status. The biggest winners from this year’s crop of newcomers? Fox’s The Following (2.6 in the 18-49 demo), NBC’s Revolution (2.6 with two episode

The sitcom, which is likely to have additional episodes produced, has Mr. Crystal playing a once-great comic who tries to revive his career.

Derek Willis, interactive news developer for The New York Times, wrote a blog post about a different way to use analytics. Willis says he’s interested in tracking and mapping who is citing and quoting the work of major news outlets (like The New York Times). The idea behind linkypedia is that links on Wikipedia aren’t just references, they help describe how digital collections are used on the Web, and encourage the spread of knowledge: “if organizations can see how their web content is being used in Wikipedia, they will be encouraged and emboldened to do more.” When I first saw it, I immediately thought about how New York Times content was being cited on Wikipedia. Because it’s an open source project, I was able to find out, and it turned out (at least back then) that many Civil War-era stories that had been digitized were linked to from the site. I had no idea, and wondered how many of my colleagues knew. Then I wondered what else we didn’t know about how our content is being used outside the friendly confines of nytimes.com. That’s the thread that leads from Linkypedia to TweetRewrite, my “analytics” hack that takes a nytimes.com URL and feeds tweets that aren’t simply automatic retweets; it tries to filter out posts that contain the exact headline of the story to find what people say about it. It’s a pretty simple Ruby app that uses Sinatra, the Twitter and Bitly gems and a library I wrote to pull details about a story from the Times Newswire API.

Rediff.com has sold its stake in Adnear (previously known as Imere), a location based company which it had bought a minority stake in, in 2009, for $1.14 million, Rediff.com has disclosed. In November 2012, AdNear had raised Rs 35 crore (around $6.2 million at current levels) from Sequoia Capital India and Canaan Partners. AdNear offers location based mobile advertising solutions in India, Singapore, Australia, and other Asia-Pacific countries, and leverages precise location, behaviour, and profiling of consumers, to assist advertisers in reaching relevant audience. At the time that Rediff funded the company, it had among its products, a buddy finder application called Ohe! Rediff Chairman and Founder Ajit Balakrishnan said that, responding MediaNama’s query on the stake sale on its conference call, that “It started out as a location sensing app on mobile. They have ambitions to grow very fast and they got a couple of big private equity companies to invest. Intially we had thought that we would…our investment has always been strategic, in the sense that if somebody finds success, we expand. We thought we would take a step back, because there is a general re-focusing of everything that we do. Mobile location sensing has other solutions than what Imere has, so I think, we said it’s fine, we wish you well, and we go our separate ways.”

The book, which is set for publication next year, will detail her experiences with life-threatening illnesses.

On BBC News developers’ interesting blog on how they’re integrating responsive design into BBC products, the team has posted about how they handle one of the trickiest issues of responsive design — how to deal with images. How can your web page be smart enough to download big, beautiful images when on a big desktop screen and small, optimized ones for a smartphone? This is an area where standards are still unsettled and there are a lot of competing best practices. The BBC approach involves hardcoding only the first image on a page in the HTML markup and bringing in others selectively via JavaScript. Also: As the BBC News site publishes MANY articles everyday, many images are published too. BBC News has an automated process to create 18 different versions of each published image.

Fan fiction — fan-written stories featuring characters drawn from pop culture properties, like a tale in which Chewbacca and Boba Fett become star-crossed lovers in 1950s New Jersey — is a huge phenomenon. On one end of the scale, the Fifty Shades of Grey books started out as fan fiction and became the publishing success of 2012; on the other, hundreds of thousands of people put their favorite characters into unusual situations in stories posted free on hubs like Archive of Our Own and FanFiction.Net. The problem with fan fiction as a publishing business is that it’s of questionable legality. The creators of those characters — the writers of movies, TV shows, and books, or the corporate entities that control their rights — don’t want people selling new stories involving them. (Chewbacca’s love for Boba Fett was always a forbidden love.) And making the licensing arrangements necessarily to publish fan fiction for a profit was generally too much of a bother for anyone to pursue. The result was that turning fan fiction into a business has been somewhere between impractical and impossible. Amazon took a big step toward slicing that Gordian Knot today by announcing it had made licensing agreements with three fanfic-popular properties — Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and Vampire Diaries — that will allow fics for those properties to be published for the Kindle, with revenue split between the author and the rightsholder. More deals are on the way. The new Kindle Worlds platform will enable any author to publish stories based on these characters and then make them available for purchase through the Kindle Store. Amazon will then pay royalties both to the author of the fan fiction and the original rights holder. The standard author’s royalty rate — for fiction that is at least 10,000 words in length — will be just over a third (35 percent) of net revenue. This has major monetization potential — if fan fiction communities used to getting their fix for free (and in an open, episodic environment) buy into the idea of paying for it (or others getting paid for it). Family self-promotion alert: If you’re interested in the subject of fan fiction, you should look into Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World by University of Utah professor Anne Jamison, which will be published later this year. (And edited by my wife, Leah Wilson.)

Under a new deal, the network will continue what has already become a 35-year tradition.