Pulitzer Prize medals stolen from paper

This isn’t 100% on topic, but it’s fascinating somehow. Someone stole three Pulitzer Prize medals from Newsday — and three medals that could be the ones stolen were sold at auction last week.

3 comments October 4th, 2007

Would AT&T be liable under Zucker’s plan?

If Jeff Zucker had his way and AT&T filtered its pipes for copyrighted material, AT&T might actually become liable for that content. LR commenter Amanda in the post below points us to a section of US copyright law (USC 17 Chapt. 5 § 512) that says:

(a) A service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief, … for infringement of copyright by reason of the provider’s transmitting, routing, or providing connections for, material through a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider… if - (2) the transmission, routing, provision of connections, or storage is carried out through an automatic technical process without selection of the material by the service provider; (3) the service provider does not select the recipients of the material except as an automatic response to the request of another person; … (5) the material is transmitted through the system or network without modification of its content.

A layman’s read of that says that ISPs aren’t liable for copyright violations, as long as they don’t start messing with content. I’ll let the lawyers tell me if Amanda’s suggestion is way off base. I just thought it was an interesting point worth bringing to your attention.

1 comment October 4th, 2007

Zucker is an ‘AT&T puppet’

Writes Terry Heaton about NBCU CEO Jeff Zucker’s comments that AT&T and other ISPs should filter their lines for pirated content: “This is one of the most dangerous and desperate things I’ve ever heard come out of the mouth of someone who, among other things, is charged with certain responsibilities vis-a-vis the First Amendment. And the REAL PROBLEM is that this line was likely penned by the Telcos, not Zucker or his writers…. AT&T would LOVE to filter the web.”

7 comments October 4th, 2007

News Corp. warns YouTube. In other news…

Let’s see. YouTube is testing filtering technology that they’ve been promising for, like, forever. They’re being sued by Viacom. And News Corp. and NBCU are preparing to launch Hulu. Shocking I know, but New Corp. CEO Peter Chernin has this to say, “YouTube could do a much more aggressive job about taking down content that is a copyright violater…. It’s pretty safe to say that they [Google] have the technology available…it’s publicly available and I haven’t yet heard a lot about Google being technologically constrained.”

1 comment October 4th, 2007

Performance-based ads growing faster than CPM ads

Online ad spending is still growing at a torrid pace, although the rate of growth is beginning to slow. For Q2 of this year, online ad spending hit $5.1 billion, up 25.4 percent over the same time last year, according to IAB. Here’s the nugget: “Perhaps surprisingly, this year’s record growth has been driven largely by performance based advertising, despite all of the discussion surrounding the flood of brand dollars headed to the web,” writes MediaWeek’s Mike Shields. Performance-based deals hit the 50 percent mark, compared to 45 percent for CPM-based deals. Of course, search is the big driver there, but lead-generation is growing as well. (This should be a continued concern for media sites that only sell on CPMs and sponsorships.) Also, the big 10 sites (Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) hauled in 70 percent of ad dollars in Q1-Q2 of this year. As we’ve written before, scale matters.

Add comment October 4th, 2007

Top traits for hiring new people

I just returned from a three-day seminar with Paradigm, a highly-respected sales training firm, and they recommend that managers ensure that new account executives are “adaptable” and “resilient” before hiring them. In fact, these two traits should be at the top of the list in the hiring process because the media world is changing so quickly. Wouldn’t it be interesting to apply this same thinking when hiring for new journalists? That adaptability and resiliency are just as important as storytelling skills, for example? Of course, those traits not as easy to identify as watching a resume tape and looking at online writing examples (both of which should be required for reporters, by the way), but it means we need to ask job candidates to explain specific examples of how they’ve flexed with change and bounced back from failure.

10 comments October 4th, 2007