It’s now conventional wisdom to expect advertising declines of 20 percent or more as the big media companies deliver this season’s earnings reports. But the giant ad holding companies that make and place those ads aren’t getting beaten up quite as badly. In fact, they’re all delivering remarkably similar results.
Video site Veoh, one of the biggest players in the “who will be the next YouTube” competition, is restructuring the company, laying off a good chunk of its staff and replacing CEO Steve Mitgang with founder Dmitry Shapiro. Shapiro says the company, which has been primarily focused on playing video and selling ads on its own site, will now be concentrating on a new “Video Compass” player that users will have to download onto their Web browsers in order to use.
EMI Music Group, which sued Web music start-up Project Playlist nearly a year ago, has dropped its suit and will start providing its catalog to the site, which offers free streaming music. The settlement, in conjunction with an earlier deal struck with Sony’s Sony Music Entertainment, means that Project Playlist now has deals with two of the big four music labels. But Warner Music Group and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group are still suing the company.
Just in case any of you Web publishers haven’t picked up on it yet: The New York Times would like you to stop using the stuff it pays to produce. The latest example: The paper has asked design blog Apartment Therapy to unpublish all the Times’s photos it has run so far this year.
Viacom hauled Google into court over copyright violations at YouTube two years ago. So what’s happened since then? Not much, says Philippe Dauman. But he does say that his son continues enjoy working at the company he’s suing.
Discovery Communications, the cable network best known for bringing you fare like “Shark Week”, says that Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader violates one of its patents. How so? Discovery says Amazon ripped off a system it designed to let it sell digital books over the Web.
The AP fires back at Shepard Fairey, the artist whose iconic Obama poster riffs off (or rips off, depending on your perspective) one of its photos. Click through for the court filing, and a handy picture gallery.
Want access to Facebook’s user base, which has now cracked 150 million? Then you’re going to need to play by Facebook’s rules.
Last week Facebook sued Power.com, a social network aggregator, because the company allowed Facebook users to plug into the site without actually visiting Facebook itself. Today, instant-messaging aggregator Meebo is unplugging itself from Facebook rather than face the same kinds of legal problems.
A rare bit of good news for the embattled music label CEO: A New York court says he doesn’t owe former Simon & Schuster boss Richard Snyder for helping him figure out how to buy Warner Music a few years ago.
Sony’s music label will pay a $1 million fine as part of a settlement with the U.S. government in an online privacy case. Which makes it the second big label to get slapped for violating a 1998 law.
Yesterday, I suggested that the SEC may have finally muzzled Mark Cuban by filing insider trading charges against him. But I’m quite glad I’m wrong. Cuban can’t help himself, and has already begun waging a high-profile campaign against the regulators who are suing him.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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