Seems as though there’s still some life in the old “hot news doctrine” horse yet. The NY Times’s Media Decoder has a brief piece on a dispute between Hollywood news sites Deadline.com and The Hollywood Reporter set for a July 2013 court date. In their joint report, the plaintiff — that would be Penske, owner of Deadline — said it was considering whether to augment its legal complaint with a new claim for “hot news misappropriation,” some of which “occurred as recently as the week of the filing of this Report.” In other words, Penske says...

PaidContent has a brief report on IDG Connect statistics suggesting that iPad owners are buying less physical media. The survey shows that 72% of worldwide professionals polled are buying fewer newspapers, 70% are buying fewer books, and 49% are buying fewer DVDs since owning an iPad. The biggest areas of decline for newspapers are Asia, with 90% of polled buying fewer, and the Middle East, with 80% buying fewer. This represents a bit of a double-whammy for ad-funded media like newspapers and magazines—not only are they getting fewer sales, but they’re also losing the print ad views of the...

On News & Tech, Douglas Page posts a diatribe against “the newspaper cognoscenti who see a terminal disease in every printed newspaper.” He declaims against papers turning digital because a digital newspaper is “just another website” and less attractive to advertisers than a printed publication. He suggests a number of possible ways to keep printed papers relevant in an increasingly electronic world where free news is only a laptop, tablet, or smartphone click away. For example: Adopt a hybrid circulation model. Turn your newspaper into a TMC product and deliver it to the doorsteps...

On Vegas Inc, Steve Green reports that the company’s lawyer, Shawn Mangano, actually showed up in court for the rescheduled hearing (unlike the last one), and complained about the “scorched earth” tactics defendant Wayne Hoehn and his lawyer Marc Randazza have been using to collect judgments against the company. (That’s pretty rich coming from a company which demanded defendants turn over their domain names for the crime of cutting and pasting a few lines from a newspaper article.) Righthaven’s tactics continue to amuse: Righthaven reiterated arguments in its court filing that Randazza is seeking...

PaidContent reported a few days ago that the Associated Press has branched out into digital distribution by making content available through tablet-based reading apps Pulse and Flipboard. The AP is not providing the readers with all its content, but making available “a selection of international and national news and associated images.” This will include special coverage focusing on this year’s Presidential race, in both cases. Given the AP’s past parsimonious behavior, I find it a little funny that it’s taking so readily to social newsreading apps that will let their users share AP content with their friends and on...

Although not a lot can top the last Righthaven story in my book, a couple of post-scripts that have come up since then. First, the Righthaven.com domain name has been sold for $3,300 to an unknown buyer. There’s not anything actually up on that website at the moment, but keep watching. Proceeds will go toward paying off Righthaven’s hefty legal fees. A bit more amusing is the note from a few days ago concerning a January 5th hearing that Righthaven’s main lawyer, Shawn Mangano, blew off. When the judge phoned him to ask why he wasn’t in court, Mangano...

You can stick a fork in Righthaven. It’s pretty much done. The domain name is being sold off, one of the defendants the company sued is asking a court to hold them in contempt (since they have this annoying habit of not showing up for hearings when things go against them), and now Righthaven’s process server—the company that took care of delivering its lawsuit notifications to those people Righthaven sued—is itself suing Righthaven for welshing on $5,670 in fees it ran up during 2010. I have to admit, Righthaven has been very entertaining these last few months. It...

This past week, the Kindle iOS app received an update. We did mention it when it happened, but I think a couple of the features in that update are important enough to go into in detail. First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari...

Oh my. I have the urge to go make popcorn for real and munch on it while I read this story. It looks like Righthaven’s just about reached the end of its rope. Last week, when it turned out Righthaven had less than $1,000 in the bank, one of the courts that issued a legal fee judgment against it issued an order requiring the company to turn over its intellectual property to pay those bills. As of the Monday deadline, Righthaven had not complied, appealed, asked for more time, or declared bankruptcy—it seems to have ignored the order altogether....

On Gizmodo, Jamie Condliffe has a report on a 74-slide presentation by Andrew Rushbass, CEO of The Economist Group. The Economist is one of few newspapers that has successfully implemented a paywall, and in the presentation Rushbass talks about how and why the company was able to do it. What’s more, Rushbass explains that tablet owners are reading more news than before, but reading it in different ways. He calls this the “Lean Back 2.0” paradigm (following the first “Lean Back,” which was paper books, then “Lean Forward”, which was the World Wide Web), and suggests that e-readers...

Righthaven is discovering it has no haven for its rights. PaidContent reports that a Nevada federal judge has issued an order allowing one of the bloggers it sued to appoint a receiver who can auction off Righthaven’s assets to pay his legal costs. About the only assets Righthaven seems to have are the copyrights it’s been using to sue on. The assets in question are the newspapers’ copyrights. Righthaven needs these if it has any hope of persuading an appeals court that it has fixed the original problem that led a court to halt the lawsuits...

Yesterday, when pondering whether newspapers might eventually use free Kindles to rid themselves of print costs, I was reminded that advertising revenue is one of the major issues tying newspapers down to the print format. Which is why I found it interesting when I noticed a Reuters report that the Financial Times expects its online content sales revenues to equal or exceed its print advertising revenues in 2012. The Financial Times is known for its successful paywall strategy in which it allows readers eight free articles per month but requires they subscribe beyond that. It recently launched an HTML5...