Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ legendary television and radio broadcaster — whose career goes back so far it includes calling games Jackie Robinson played in the 1950s — is still the best in the business when it comes to old broadcast media. But on Wednesday night, the Dodgers officially turned over their Twitter account to him during the team’s game against the Yankees.

I’ve been listening to Vin’s voice my entire life. It was on the radio at my grandparents’ house as far back as I can remember, on my own television as a teenager and through college, and lately on my iPad via MLB.TV. As broadcast technology for watching baseball has evolved, Vin has remained the same as ever: the steady, grandfatherly guide through a three-hour game. But digital media wasn’t something he’d really attempted yet.

So I was curious how the delightfully retro, human baseball encyclopedia would do with the thoroughly modern social media format. (Especially since the way he deliberately sounds out Twitter during broadcasts (“Twit-terrr”) conveys mostly wry amusement.) In truth, his “Tweetcast” struck me mostly as a gimmick by MLB.

But not long after his first tweet appeared in my feed, his classic game welcome, “It’s time for Dodger baseball!,” it was clear we were in for some social media magic.

It's time for Dodger baseball! -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 19, 2013

Why is this a big deal? First, any 85-year-old taking his first stab at tweeting in front of 305,000 people (with the promise of being retweeted thousands of times over) is pretty great. But he’s also really good at it. Almost perfect, you might say. The folks who are the best at tweeting can pack a lot of information into 140 characters, easily engage with their community, and most importantly, actually have something to say.

Vin Scully did all of those things Wednesday. Importantly, he stayed with what he does best: calling the game…

Now here's Puig, watch his head. That last at-bat he was swinging wildly. Whoa, did that get him? Yeah. -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 20, 2013

Got him at second base. What a play, wow. Andre Ethier just made a really good play. Right on the money to Ramirez. -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 20, 2013

…and fluidly mixing in amusing trivia, apropos historical references and his own memories. I mean, I had to stop myself from favoriting every. single. tweet.

Two of the biggest thrills: One would be Larsen's perfect game, and the other would be the Dodgers winning the '55 World Series. -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 19, 2013

The closest was Mickey Mantle. They say it went 118 feet in the air and missed about 18 inches from clearing the roof. -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 19, 2013

I once played against George H. W. Bush. He played 1B for Yale, and I played CF for Fordham. We both went 0-for-3. #TrueStory -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 20, 2013

Vin had plenty to say. But like his broadcast trademark, he didn’t say or tweet too much. He paced his tweets every few minutes, adding color, and always coming back to the game. And in Wednesday’s game, his old-timey references were particularly on topic: the Dodgers were playing in New York City, his former home. When he joined the team, the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn.

I'm looking at Yankee Stadium and it looks so different from the old one. -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 19, 2013

He basically tweeted like he broadcasts — but with one huge social media bonus: the ability to engage directly with his audience. And this is why I think Vin on Twitter was so perfect and such a treat for fans — of the Dodgers, of baseball, and of him. Especially these kinds of interactions:

.@rober_dean Being a traditionalist, I don’t like the DH. -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 20, 2013

.@steveu16 I’ve learned to watch with my eyes and not my heart. -#VinScully—
Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) June 20, 2013

Vin talks to us all game long, all season long, but very few people get to talk to him. And Wednesday night, the Twitter format allowed him to do just that without taking away from his game coverage.

In the middle of a disappointing Dodgers season, this was definitely a bright spot: to see a guy who remembers when television wasn’t even invented absolutely master our new broadcast medium.

@Dodgers, can you let him tweet every night? Please RT.

• Melcher Media: VP, Business Development (New York)
• The World Golf Hall of Fame & Museum: Manager, PR & Media Relations (St. Augustine, Fla.)
• McGladrey: Director of Business Valuation — Financial Advisory Services (New York)
• Target: Product Manager, Digital Commerce Technology (San Francisco)
• Gannett Co., Inc.: Online Editor (Wilmington, Del.)

We also have listings from companies like MEDSEEK, Akamai Technologies, JP Media and more. Click here to see what else is on our job board.

That means it will be possible to get Sirius XM feeds in a Ford: the live channel feed delivered from the heavens and an on-demand programming and tailored MySXM music streams from a cellular connection passing through your smartphone. It appears customers can opt for either both services, depending on which subscription or subscriptions they buy.

Horace Dediu made some calculations and plotted all of the data on a chart over at his Asymco blog:

Source: Asymco

Based on these latest numbers, Dediu calculated how much iTunes users spend per year on different types of media. He says it’s “about $9/yr on Software, $2/yr on books, $16/yr on apps $12/yr on music and $4/yr on video.”

On one hand, this chart backs up something we already know: that iOS apps — via a growing number of iPhone and iPad users — has been driving those iTunes account signups. As new subscribers arrive, the category of spending seeing the most growth is apps, at $16 per user, per year. In 2008, when the App Store opened, users were only spending about $4 per year apiece on apps; that number has quadrupled in almost six years.

But what’s interesting is that even though Apple says there have been 1 billion TV episodes downloaded and 380 million movies, that number spent per user is still relatively small, hovering around $4 per user, per year. (That’s about the price of one movie download on iTunes, btw.) And that’s even with the advent and growth of the Apple TV.

Ebooks are still the smallest category, and also Apple’s newest. However, the fact that so little — just $2 per user, per year — is spent on them in iTunes makes Apple’s recent claim that it has 20 percent of the ebook market seem a bit questionable.

Many of the ad innovations have been a hit with brands and the trade press. But what they haven’t done is stanch a troubling decline in the Times‘ digital ad revenue. What’s the problem? To get a better idea of how the Idea Lab fits into the Times‘ operations and the company’s revenue strategy, I dropped by for a chat with Todd Haskell, the group’s VP of advertising.

Haskell began by explaining that the Idea Lab was spun off in 2010 from the Times’ R&D Lab, a blue-sky experimental forum, in order to create practical products for advertisers in a short time. He described recent examples:

• A Prudential campaign that invited readers to pull up the front page of the New York Times on the day they were born. The ad format, which drew on pre-existing Times’ archival tools, was a hit on social media. Here’s a screenshot:

• A Wisk campaign that was derived from a Times’ culture story about how Picasso painted over canvasses. The original story invited readers to wave their mouse over a Picasso photo to reveal what lay underneath. For the detergent ad, Wisk asked readers to use their mouse to undercover underlying dirt stains. According to Haskell, those who did spent an unusual amount of time fussing over the ad. Here’s a screenshot (you can touch up Picasso here and play with stains here) :

• The Times‘ city guide app, The Scoop, inserted a Citibank map for New York City’s new bike-sharing program

• A National Geographic campaign drew on the “Times Machine” (which Haskell says is normally used only by “history geeks”) to provide historical backdrop for its Killing Lincoln show

According to Haskell, the New York Times‘ digital story-telling machinery is appealing to companies as a way to convey heritage and complicated brand stories. He adds that clients like Prudential say they have had tremendous response to their campaigns, including huge lifts from social media.

But despite the promise of such ad tools — and clever platform tools like Ricochet and Sparking Stories – the Times’ overall ad performance is limping. Recent earnings results show that digital ad sales are not just flat but actually declining — a troubling development at a time when digital revenue is supposed to stabilize the company as it faces a permanent decline in its print business.

Haskell says the company has been unable to pre-sell all its inventory, and attributes the overall ad challenges to two factors — “an explosion of inventory from social channels” (read Facebook) and the rise of automated or “programmatic” buying which lets advertisers purchase digital ads on real time exchanges.

New York Times Idea Lab, photo by Rani Molla

He predicts, however, that the new formats will help woo brands back from the programmatic trough; he adds that the Times‘ reader data and performance metrics will also persuade companies to spend more money. Finally, Haskell also sees programmatic as an opportunity as well as a threat — the Times is offering customers who make premium buys a chance to participate in a private exchange of Times ad inventory (where prices will stay higher since the Times ad slots aren’t sloshing around with shady fly-by-night websites like Toothbrushing.net).

All of these questions will be sitting on the doorstep of the Times’ newly minted head of sales. The company announced the new position in April, but says its still having a good long look for candidates.

The survey was conducted by Northwestern University in Qatar, and involved interviews with more than 10,000 people from Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates (which includes Abu Dhabi and Dubai). Although the Arab television networks Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were the top source of news in most of the countries that took part in the study, on average Facebook was the third most popular.

If you look more closely at the numbers, the average for Facebook is hugely influenced by Tunisia, where more than 50 percent of all respondents said the social network was their number one source of news — in Bahrain, only 11 percent said the same, while Facebook’s ranking in the UAE was 10 percent and in Qatar it was 3 percent. The only countries to mention Twitter were Bahrain, where 8 percent gave it as a top source, and Saudi Arabia where it had 3 percent.

Social media is much more influential

Northwestern journalism professor Justin Martin, one of the researchers who did the study, told the media news site Journalism.co.uk that “if you look at the percentages of internet users who are active on social media sites, it’s much higher than the United States and Australia or Western European countries.” Martin said that this fits with earlier research that shows Arab countries are much more social in their use of media than many Western nations:

“Arabs, maybe more than any other culture around the world, have these anchored communities where they receive and share news and information and they tend to go there often for news and they tend to trust the information from their anchored communities.”

As a number of media theorists have described, social media’s effect on our news consumption is in some ways a throwback to the way news used to be consumed and distributed before newspapers existed — when coffee shops and other social outlets were the main source of information for communities (it’s also not clear from the study how much of what is shared on Facebook is news from a traditional source such as a newspaper or television network).

What is clear from the study is that people in some Arab nations don’t trust the traditional media much at all, which could also be driving them towards social networks as a source of news: in Egypt and Tunisia — both of which experienced revolutionary uprisings as part of the Arab Spring — only a quarter of those surveyed said they thought the media was a credible source.

Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social-media use influenced the revolutions in Tunisia and other Arab countries, and how social networks helped to overcome some of the barriers that kept popular dissident movements in those countries from turning into revolutions in the past.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Richard Engel / NBC

Feedly has also launched a web-only version, which it says was the top user-requested feature. Feedly already had Chrome and Safari apps, but this means that users of other browsers, like Internet Explorer, can access the service.

Finally, the fact that Feedly’s now operating in its own cloud means that developers can build apps for it. In its blog post, the company announced the first Feedly apps — including an IFTTT (if this then that) Feedly channel that lets you “connect your feedly account to 63 other services (including Evernote, Google Drive, Gmail, Pocket, Instapaper, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.),” social media management platform Sprout Social and RSS readers for various platforms from companies like Nextgen Reader, gNewsReader, Press and Newsify.

Meanwhile, we’re planning a guide to Google Reader alternatives to help you prepare for the switch, if you haven’t switched over to a new service already. If you were a die-hard Google Reader user, what product are you using now — or are you clinging to Google Reader until the bitter end? Let us know in the comments.

HBO Go is only available to HBO subscribers, so this isn’t a solution for cord-cutters. However, it’s good for those who want to access to the cable channel’s backlog of content: customers can watch any of HBO’s shows at any time via the HBO Go channel on Apple TV. HBO Go has already been available for Apple’s mobile devices and on competing platforms Roku and Xbox 360.

WatchESPN is also a subscriber-only channel. Those who are signed up via their local cable provider can watch programming on Apple TV from across the company’s channels: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN3, curated clips from ESPN.com and others.

There are some limitations, however: DirecTV and Charter subscribers won’t be able to watch HBO Go on Apple TV, and DirecTV and Dish subscribers similarly will not be able to access WatchESPN on the device, AllThingsD reports.

Three other channels are also coming. The U.K.’s SkyNews will be viewable on demand or live in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland. Programming from Japan’s Crunchyroll, an anime and news channel, will be available worldwide one hour after airing. Music channel Qello has free and paid subscriptions available.

None of this makes Apple TV a viable cable replacement for fans of premium content and live sports, because Apple TV still requires that pesky cable subscription. However, Apple is slowly but surely broadening its living room play to compete with Xbox, Roku and others. Apple’s longterm TV strategy is still very much TBD, but this is a good move toward getting Apple customers used to the idea of watching their favorite content via the Apple TV and not live via a cable TV subscription.

With the announcement of new content, Apple also gave the latest stats on iTunes downloads: 1 billion TV episodes and 380 million movies have been purchased in total. Meanwhile, 800,000 TV episodes and over 350,000 movies are bought each day.

This post was updated with more information at 7:30 a.m. PT and again at 8:45 a.m. with details about cable subscriber limitations.

The launch was announced in a blog post Wednesday, which read in part:

“We gave Rdio Unlimited subscribers an early screening of Vdio, our online television and movie service, but starting today, you don’t have to be an Rdio listener to buy, rent, and share your favorite movies and shows with friends.”

Vdio launched a beta test of its service in April, limiting access to users who were also subscribing to Rdio’s music service, which is run by the same company. That requirement is now gone, but there are signs that Vdio and Rdio may be even more closely connected in the future. Rdio’s outgoing CEO Drew Larner recently told Bloomberg that he is helping the company to look for a new chief executive to “expand efforts to sell combined music and video subscriptions.”

That idea shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who has followed Vdio for some time. The video was originally developed by a separate team as part of a stealth startup, with plans to launch a subscription offering that would compete directly with Netflix. Those plans were eventually scrapped, most of the original team were let go, and Vdio was aligned more closely with Rdio.

But the idea to eventually offer some kind of video subscription lived on. Asked about it, Rdio’s VP of Product Malthe Sigurdsson told me in April that a subscription component “is something we would love to do.”

Netflix didn’t give any details about catalog size or pricing of the service, but instead pointed out that Dutch consumers will have access to “Hollywood, local and global TV series and films,” including Netflix originals like House of Cards and the newest season of Arrested Development.

Picking the Netherlands as the next target for international expansion should appease Netlix investors, some of whom have been concerned about the costs associated with the company’s international ambitions. After crossing the border to Canada in 2010, Netflix made a big splash with an expansion into almost all of Latin America and the Carribean in 2011.

Last year, the company doubled down on international markets by expanding to the UK, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Netflix now has a total of seven million subscribers outside of the U.S., but some markets have proven more difficult than others. Latin America, in particular, has been challenging, to the point where analysts have asked Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on the company’s most recent earnings call whether he’d consider pulling out of some of the countries.

Hastings answer was no; but Netflix has long tried to address those concerns by tieing any international expansion to global profitability. The company has also said that it intends to expand into only one additional market in 2013, which means that people in markets like Germany, France or Spain have to wait until at least 2014 before they’ll get access to Netflix.

On Tuesday, some of this behind-the-scenes drama broke out into the open, during a Twitter battle between Greenwald and Vanity Fair writer Kurt Eichenwald — a debate that throws into sharp relief some important differences between the Guardian writer and some of the others writing about the NSA story.

The argument started when Eichenwald, who has written a number of books about political and social issues, said the NSA program had been around for 10 years and asked when “the fearful” thought it had been used against them (these are excerpts from a Storify collection, which is here, but embedding the Storify widget here doesn’t seem to be working at the moment):

Eichenwald’s tweet got a response from Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute — who tweets under the handle @normative — and then Greenwald responded to them both (in a comment clearly aimed at Eichenwald), questioning the fact that some writers call themselves “journalists” and then demand secrecy:

The Vanity Fair writer responded with a series of tweets that mimicked the phrase Greenwald used in his comment — suggesting that the Guardian writer knows nothing about national security, that “having a single source constitutes having knowledge” and that government secrecy is necessary:

Greenwald then suggested that Eichenwald’s comments made it sound like “you work for the Pentagon,” and that this was clearly the point of the Vanity Fair writer’s approach to national security issues — and questioned his use of NSA officials as sources:

To this, Eichenwald suggested that just because someone has additional information on a story, it doesn’t mean that they have been “compromised,” and Greenwald accused the Vanity Fair writer of “parroting what gov’t officials tell you and calling it journalism.”

The Guardian writer said Eichenwald should “go be a spokesman for the Pentagon” and that this would be more honest than his current approach to the topic, and Eichenwald said that Greenwald didn’t understand the reasons for classification rules and that based on his personal attack, “the gloves are off.”

Greenwald responded that he knew plenty about the NSA, having written about it for seven years, and that he had also written a book about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

At this point, Eichenwald said the Guardian writer was “arrogant” for arguing that anyone who disagreed with him was beholden to the government, and Greenwald responded in kind:

While this might seem like just a lot of carping and bickering between two journalists, the issue at the core of this Twitter tiff is clearly Greenwald’s status as an outsider on national security issues — something that I (and others, including journalism professor Jay Rosen) have argued made it possible for him to move to the forefront of the reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks.

That outsider status has also made him a target for those within the traditional national-security establishment, however — a group that Eichenwald would likely fall into — because they perceive him as overstating the Snowden documents or not fully understanding them, and of attacking the government for a program that they believe has a valid purpose.

And perhaps they are also more than a little jealous that Greenwald is getting attention for a story they knew about but didn’t report much on, until the Snowden leaks threw the doors open and let all that sunlight in.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Abysim

Such letters, which the government uses to obtain phone and internet data about foreign nationals, are currently subject to an automatic gag order that forbids companies from disclosing their very existence.

On Tuesday, Google said it is filing a petition to the secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The petition, embedded below, notes that the search giant has already received information from the FBI to publish the number of so-called National Security Letters it receives — these are similar to FISA letters but cover US citizens.

The Google petition comes as a brouhaha continues to rage over the revelation of secret government programs, such as PRISM, that collect meta-data on phone and internet users.

The controversy has not only let to questions about the expansion of government surveillance under the Patriot Act, but has also led the various tech companies ensnared in the dragnet to claim vociferously that they are standing up for their users. The nature of this advocacy has led to tension between some of the companies — Google and Twitter, for example, have suggested that alleged victories claimed by Microsoft and Facebook against the government are misleading.

In its filing, Google also repeated its criticism of the Guardian and Washington Post for misleading reporting — and says that the disclosure of the FISA requests are necessary to help it refute false accusation leveled by the media.

“Google reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading requests in the media, and Google’s users are concerned by the allegations,” the company wrote, several times singling out the Guardian and the Post.

If Google’s petition is successful, the company’s semi-annual Transparency Report will include two new categories that reveal: the number of FISA requests received; the number of accounts each request covers.

Here’s the filing:

Google 1st Amendment FISA

First up, Amazon announced it’s added “more than a thousand books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows to Kindle FreeTime Unlimited,” its monthly subscription streaming offering for kids. Not surprisingly, Amazon didn’t provide subscriber numbers — though Kindle VP Peter Larsen said “the vast majority of our customers who take advantage of our one month free trial of FreeTime Unlimited choose to subscribe and enjoy our content library built just for kids.”

Of course, Amazon’s announcement refers to the Viacom shows that it grabbed exclusive rights to after Netflix lost them: “Among the content on FreeTime Unlimited are “exclusive Nick Jr. favorites from Viacom such as Dora The Explorer, Go, Diego, Go!, Blue’s Clues and The Backyardigans.”

Then Netflix announced that it’s launched a separate section of its site called Netflix Families, which “helps parents with the daunting task of entertaining kids this summer.” The site offers family recommendations in different categories (“family movie night,” etc.) as well as videos from parents about how they are “embracing the ease and flexibility of Netflix.” And Netflix notes that “Netflix works on almost any device with a broadband, WiFi or mobile data connection” — while Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is only available for the Kindle Fire.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / jwblinn

The main goal of BBC Labs is to find startups that the BBC can work with on commercial partnerships. The startups in the program don’t get funding, but over a six-month period get access to office space, and more importantly, get access to the BBC’s huge network and BBC execs working on its digital content.

Jenny Fielding, who heads up of digital ventures for BBC Worldwide (the company’s venture arm) and also leads BBC Labs, told me during the event that her metric of success for BBC Labs is whether a significant number of the startups that go through the program can seal a commercial deal with the BBC. She noted that “We’re about three out of six for the first class of startups.” Startups from the first class that were able to do deals with the BBC include video tagging company wireWAX, and mobile learning startup KO-SU.

For the startups, the key to the program is landing the BBC as an anchor customer. Howard Kingston, founder of Future Ad Labs, one of the companies in the second batch of BBC Labs, told me that a deal with the BBC could “make” a company at a very early stage in the company’s life.

All of the startups in the BBC Labs program come from London’s emerging tech scene, which is receiving growing attention from the major U.S. internet players, the U.K. government, new and seasoned entrepreneurs, and the world’s venture capitalists. There’s hundreds of web and mobile startups that have emerged from London in recent years, including some well-known firms like car service Hailo, and gaming company Mind Candy. In part because of this, we’ll be holding our second-annual Structure:Europe event in London in September (more info on that here and more info on the Structure:Europe Startup Zone here).

Here’s the six startups that the BBC Labs chose for its second summer accelerator program:

1). Future Ad Labs: The company has created a new kind of captcha that brands can use to create interactive games and content. The idea is that there are 300 million captchas completed every day, and that content is a valuable and under-utilized space for brands. The company’s “playcaptcha” is a captcha that guarantees user engagement, Kingston said in his short pitch to the audience.

2). The Backscratchers: The Backscratchers is a free-to-use freelancer community for the creative industry. Freelance photographers, writers, musicians and artists, and designers are hand-picked and filtered by the company, and the startup makes a cut off when a freelancer is hired by a creative agency.

3). Peekabu Studios: The startup develops software that enables any video camera to be able to recognize an object or an image. The company can use the image recognition software to create branded experiences. For example, a food network show could use a spatula (or some cooking item) as a image-recognition password to open up a branded game.

4). Animal Vegetable Mineral: The company creates content for the intersection of television and gaming. One brand they’re likely trying to emulate is Rovio’s Angry Birds, which broke out across TV and even film.

5). Social Spree: This startup is working on a service that tracks social media engagement across platforms and helps content providers manage and boost social media activity.

6). Oddizzi: Oddizzi is a content company that makes educational material for schools internationally. The characters Odd and Izzi teach children different lessons.

The lawsuit, filed in New York earlier this month, claims BuzzFeed owes more than $3.6 million in damages as a result of the soccer pic appearing on 64 sites around the web. According to Eiselein, who uploaded the original image to Flickr, BuzzFeed is liable for “contributory infringement” because the site’s viral news model encourages readers to share the content they find:

BuzzFeed Inc .. gathers items from around the internet, posts them on their website and encourages their visitors/readers to share them … BuzzFeed uses this fact to help convince potential advertisers to place ads on the Buzzfeed site in hope the ads will get a “viral lift” …

BuzzFeed, Inc actively encourages its users to share content, regardless of whether or not that content is owned by, or licensed to, Buzzfeed.

The complaint (embedded below) points to dozens of little known websites where the photo allegedly appears, in addition to the original BuzzFeed page which is still online but is now titled “The 29 Funniest Header Faces.”

The soccer suit is not BuzzFeed’s first brush with copyright law. In October, a paparazzi agency filed a lawsuit after a BuzzFeed staffer (the same one who made the soccer montage) posted copyrighted pictures of Katy Perry and a topless Kathy Griffin. BuzzFeed, which declined to comment, settled the case early this year.

The copyright issues poses a threat to BuzzFeed and similar websites, including Upworthy and For the Win, which have an editorial model based on finding content — especially images — that readers are likely to share on social media.

Last year, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti explained to the Atlantic that the site pays to license images from companies like Reuters and Getty, but that it also pulls from amateur sites like Tumblr and Flickr. In these cases, the provenance of the images can be unclear — in some cases, the photographer has made them available for public use while other times the author is simply unknown.

Peretti also claims that, in any event, BuzzFeed’s photo montages are fair use under copyright law because they are “transformative” (which is one factor in the first part of a complicated four-part fair use test).

In the soccer case, it’s unlikely that the self-represented photographer “contributory infringement” theory will succeed on a legal basis — if he does, the case would throw a large chill over the sharing culture that has become a fixture of the social web. More likely, the case will just show once again how traditional copyright law — and its frequently abused enforcement tools — is ill-fitted for the digital age.

You can decide for yourself if the original soccer image is worth $3.6 million by looking at it here.

Eiselein v BuzzFeed

What’s Trending wants to use the new cash infusion to scale its production and invest in ad sales and multi-platform distribution. The funding comes as a kind of validation that What’s Trending’s YouTube strategy is working. What’s Trending originally launched in 2011 as a web format for CBS, but severed ties with the network soon after and briefly tried its luck as a weekly pop culture show online, only to turn into a daily YouTube format a year ago.

The funding announcement comes just a day after news broke that Fullscreen Networks has raised an undisclosed amount from the Chernin Group, Comcast Ventures and WPP, and adds to a number of funding announcements for YouTube-based businesses in recent months. Which goes to show that — despite all the recent talk to the contrary — at least investors still think there’s money in producing content for YouTube.

Speaking of which: Bedrocket’s Lerer came to our recent paidContent Live conference to share his thoughts about investing in digital media. Check out the video below:

• Fortune lists Apple’s witnesses for this week, with a reminder that all of their testimony has to be wrapped up by Wednesday because summations take place on Thursday and there’s no court on Friday. “Then Judge Cote will have to write her decision. The best estimate I’ve heard for how long she’ll need is three weeks, give or take a week.”
• Apple SVP Eddy Cue took the stand for most of the day Monday and was questioned by both DOJ and Apple attorneys. Publishers Marketplace reports, “Cue, as he did on Thursday, did not offer much in the way of relevant information that would affect the price-fixing case on either side. Instead his testimony provided lots of Steve Jobs nostalgia, with additional tidbits on the late Apple chief’s active involvement in the creation of the iBookstore and the agency model.”
• A lot of the questioning has centered around emails that Jobs wrote at the time of the launch of the iBookstore. In one, Jobs wrote “Wow, we have really lit the fuse on a powder keg.” The New York Times reports, “Mr. Cue said Mr. Jobs was remarking on the company’s ability to ’cause ripples’ in the e-book industry, which was then largely dominated by Amazon.”
• Jobs had the idea for virtual page curls in iBooks and chose Winnie the Pooh as the free book that came with every iBooks app. (AllThingsD)
• After Apple VP Keith Moerer said last week that Apple has 20 percent of the U.S. ebook market, Cue said it has “grown 25 percent” from what he claimed was a 20 percent market share in 2010, i.e. that it is now at 25 percent, Publishers Marketplace reports. (It seems implausible that Apple had 20 percent of the ebook market in 2010.) Also, “Apple is apparently neck-and-neck with Barnes & Noble for the number-two spot after Amazon: ‘I believe it’s close. I’ve heard at different times we go back and forth,’ said Cue.”
• Mac vs. Windows! “Both parties showed their evidence on a projector screen. Apple’s legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents, stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on specific paragraphs. In contrast, the Justice Department’s lawyers could show only one piece of evidence at a time. One video that [DOJ attorney] Mr. Buterman played as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make his point.” (NYT) Apple Insider notes that the DOJ was using HP computers.

In this video case study, Pearson gives an example of a student struggling with the quadratic equation. Through the use of intelligent APIs, the digital textbook automatically senses that the student is struggling and quickly provides a solution by offering supplemental learning material that can then be monetized without leaving the textbook application.

Innovation like this often requires IT departments and business users to put competing priorities aside and collaborate. For many large organizations, this can be a challenge. But a company-wide API strategy allowed Pearson to identify similarities within these business groups, allowing for less marginal work and more opportunity to create new digital experiences to monetize content.

Watch the full paidContent Live panel discussion to learn more about how API strategies can help transform your business.

But even more than that, Foust — who writes about counter-terrorism and used to work for the American Security Project — argues that these errors mean the Guardian (please see disclosure below) and Post stories were rushed into print with little or no regard for the facts, and suggests this is part of a regrettable trend towards breaking news without spending enough time to verify what is being reported. But is that really fair?

Both sides have their version of events

In fact, much of the evidence Foust provides to counter the Guardian seems to be based on a foundation just as shaky as anything the newspaper reported. There may be some well-founded doubts about former CIA staffer Edward Snowden’s credibility on some aspects of the PRISM program, but Foust seems to take as gospel public statements from NSA officials and others in the Obama administration, as well as anonymous sources who are quoted by other outlets — and ignores evidence that contradicts his own conclusions.

Ryan Singel, a former Wired editor who now runs a startup called Contextly, notes a few of these cases in comments posted on Foust’s piece, which appeared on Medium (where comments appear alongside the sentences to which they refer). For example, Foust says the Guardian incorrectly stated that other phone companies have also had their data collected by the NSA, not just Verizon — a claim he scoffs at. But as Singel notes, there are reliable reports that other companies have been part of the same program.

Foust also questions the Guardian‘s statement that this type of data collection wasn’t envisioned by the Patriot Act, and therefore came as a surprise to many, but as Singel points out in a comment, even one of the authors of the Patriot Act says the law was never intended to permit that kind of mass surveillance. And while Foust says the collection described is arguably legal, Singel makes the case that it could well not be, based on a recent decision from the Supreme Court.

The idea that the NSA program gave the spy agency “direct access” to the servers of companies like Google and Facebook is another Foust target: he points out that subsequent reporting showed the PRISM system may well be just a way of automating the production of data under FISA court orders, rather than providing indiscriminate access to tech company servers. But he ignores the fact that the kind of lock-box system the New York Times and others described could easily fall within the term “direct access.”

It’s not a single story but a process

The point is that the stories the Guardian and Post reported were just the beginning of an evolving story about a top-secret program — one whose details are sketchy at best, and one whose very existence was likely to be denied by not only the NSA but plenty of other sources who were happy to answer phone calls from journalists with their own spin on events.

The reality is that some or all of the stories we’ve seen about PRISM and the NSA would likely never have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for the Guardian and Post reports. Does this qualify as “journalistic malfeasance?” Hardly. In some ways, it’s a perfect example of the idea of news as a process rather than a finished product — reports about a secret document trigger a host of other reports, and eventually more of the truth emerges.

Is it messy? No questions. Have there been mistakes? Yes (and it’s true that some of those probably haven’t been identified as transparently as they should have been). But it’s hardly malfeasance.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / wellphoto

DreamWorks has deep experience with kid-focused content. It has already launched multiple successful television offshoots of blockbuster children’s movies. The first, Penguins of Madagascar, launched in 2009 after the success of the company’s Madagascar movie franchise, and will launch a new season this summer on Nickelodeon. In fact, every single one of the company’s four animated television series for both Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network has been renewed and continues to draw views from pint-sized fans who can’t get enough of their favorite characters.

Even better for Netflix, its first series under the deal with Dreamworks, Turbo: F.A.S.T., piggybacks on the soon-to-be-released Turbo — giving the streaming service plenty of room to develop the show around a fresh audience and a new character. That could lay the foundation to move other successful DreamWorks’ properties to Netflix, beyond the 300 hours of original programming included in this deal.

The deal  – which also helps fill a void Netflix created when its partnership with Viacom fizzled out – stands to round out its successful programming for adult viewers, namely House of Cards and the revival of Arrested Development. By banking on already-known characters like Shrek and Po, Netflix creates more likelihood that moms and dads will make the subscription service a fixture in households. And that could help establish the company full time in the kids programming arena, where it’s tried to gain a foothold over the last few years.

Time Warner Cable felt compelled to publish the post after a number of customers had mused in recent months that the ISP was behind the sub-par performance of their YouTube videos. The supposedly damning evidence? Users had discovered that blocking a few IP numbers vastly improved their experience.

Time Warner Cable’s blog post doesn’t go into the IP number blocking, but explains the core of the problem this way:

“The internet is not as simple as one wire connecting a website’s servers to a customer’s home. Traffic originates in countless places, heading toward billions of end-user destinations. Each network that carries web traffic is itself a collection of a number of complicated technological and business relationships. As traffic flows from one area of the internet to another, it passes through this network of technologies, agreements and protocols and culminates in each particular user experience.”

In other words: It’s all about peering, and where in the network content is cached — which, as Time Warner Cable suggests, is as much about business as it is about technology. Case in point: Netflix has been trying to get ISPs to join its own Open Connect content delivery network and install its OpenConnect caching servers on ISPs’ networks.

The video service is arguing that this would greatly improve customers’ streaming experience while keeping down costs for ISPs, and Netflix is even willing to install and maintain these machines for free. However, getting U.S. ISPs to join has proven difficult. Not only are companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast operating their own TV services, which makes them Netflix competitors, but they also want Netflix, Google and others to pay for distributing so much traffic on their networks.

Netflix has started to take this peering fight to the court of public opinion. The company is publishing a monthly ISP speed index, and launched a new Super HD video quality level that is only available to customers of ISPs that have joined Open Connect. Time Warner Cable has responded to this by alleging that Netflix is discriminating against its customers – a charge that Netflix unsurprisingly denies.

Google has thus far kept quiet in this peering fight. But the fact that its users resort to blocking IP numbers to get better quality levels on certain ISPs, as well as Time Warner Cable’s new denial, makes it clear that even for YouTube users, the peering wars are far from over.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Swetlana Wall

We’ve written extensively about why Digg is launching an RSS reader and how the company’s knowledge about news junkies and early tech adopters will help inform its approach. Betaworks, the NYC-based incubator and investor, purchased Digg last summer and has been working on revamping it since then to be the ultimate social news source.

The RSS reader will launch in beta next week on both desktop and mobile, and the team at Digg said they would be working on adding an Android app and integration with other news reader services very soon.

Here’s how the company described it in the blog post Monday:

“And so next week we will begin rolling out Digg Reader, version 1. We’re doing the launch in phases because, as you might have guessed, RSS aggregation is a hard thing to do at scale, and we want to make sure the experience is as fast and reliable as possible. Everyone will have access by June 26th. With all this in mind, we thought now would be a good moment to come up for air and share a little bit about the product you’ll see next week, and what else we’ll be adding over the next few months.

Given the compressed time frame for this sprint, we decided early on that we needed to focus on one type of user. We asked ourselves who had most to lose from the shutdown of Google Reader, and the answer was fairly obvious: the power user, the people who depend on the availability, stability, and speed of Reader every day. The good news is that these users are also the most eager to contribute to the development process. (Over 18,000 people signed up to provide feedback on the product.)”

The first piece was a column by NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan on the weekend, about the recent explosive NSA revelations, which were reported primarily by the Guardian — a relative newcomer to the U.S. news scene. Sullivan was responding to a number of reader comments asking why the Times had missed this particular bombshell, and wondering whether the newspaper had been approached but had chosen not to publish the story.

News will find its own outlet

As Sullivan explains in her piece, the NYT apparently wasn’t contacted by Snowden. But it’s understandable that some readers would wonder whether the paper had decided not to go with the story, since something similar happened in 2005 with another story about government surveillance: at the urging of the Bush administration, the Times sat on the story for more than a year — something Edward Snowden said influenced his desire not to go to the newspaper with his NSA leak. As Sullivan notes:

“The delay hasn’t been forgotten. The video journalist Laura Poitras, who worked on the N.S.A. stories in both The Post and The Guardian, said the earlier delay by The Times influenced Mr. Snowden’s decision on where to take his information. What’s more, when a video or article released anywhere can go viral in minutes, the outlet is less important.”

Meanwhile, in a separate piece published Sunday, NYT media writer David Carr talks about another story that got away: in this case, the story about Toronto mayor Rob Ford and his alleged crack-smoking behavior, which appeared first on Gawker — and then subsequently in some of Toronto’s major newspapers, which had apparently been working on the story for some time.

Like Sullivan, Carr notes that certain news stories don’t wait for traditional journalistic organizations to get around to reporting them — that “big news forges its own path,” as he puts it. And he also notes that this is just a more recent version of something that has been occurring for some time:

“Traditional news organizations used to be free to break news — or not — in their backyard and on their chosen beats. Now they have to be looking over their shoulder — at everyone. And in virtually every aspect of culture, from business to technology to fashion, the big guys now compete with a range of Web sites that break their share of news through obsessiveness and hyperfocus.”

The path of least resistance

The “hyperfocus” that Carr mentions is an important point. As I argued in a recent post, the Guardian likely got the Snowden leaks in part because of the obsessiveness and focus of Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer-turned-blogger who has devoted much of his writing to cataloguing the government’s malfeasance related to WikiLeaks and whistle-blower Bradley Manning — a point that journalism professor Jay Rosen made in a recent post as well.

In the not-so-distant past, the New York Times was one of the main platforms for breaking this kind of news, and perhaps even the main platform. But given its behavior in cases like the pre-Iraq war reporting of Judith Miller and in the case of the 2005 surveillance story, it’s not surprising that leakers like Snowden might decide to take their story elsewhere — and there are plenty of other outlets for that information, including places like WikiLeaks.

Carr is right that “big news forges its own path.” In a sense, it is like water, which takes the path of least resistance. The New York Times and other outlets used to be the water company, but they are no longer the only outlet — and if they provide too much resistance, the news will flow elsewhere. Whether that is ultimately good or bad for journalism remains to be seen, but it is a fact.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / SoulAD and Flickr user Jan-Arief Purwanto

Against this backdrop, it’s worth noting an annual report, conducted by Kantar Sports Media and Sporting News Media, that shows a rise in mobile consumption and other trends in sports media. Here are some highlights:

• Thirty-five percent of America’s 170 million fans are using mobile devices to follow sports, which is up from 21 percent in 2011 and reflects overall web trends; 23 percent of these are using mobile to watch video

• Fifteen percent of people who watched live games online admitted to using ”unofficial” (read: pirated) streaming sites

• Only seven percent of fans are watching through connected TVs, including gaming consoles, but this number consists heavily (47 percent) of fans between 18 and 24

• Twenty-five percent of fans follow sports on a social media platform, with Facebook being the most popular

• Overall, men follow sports more than women but females make up 51 percent of sports fans on social media

My quick takeaway is that the mobile and social media numbers seem low, but I’m probably underestimating the overall proportion of older Americans who prefer to watch sports on TV without fiddling without their phone at the same time. It may also reflect the leagues’ ongoing reluctance to make games available online.

The report was put out by an industry group and was compiled through online surveys (so take it with a grain of salt); you can find more here.

B&N reduced prices fairly drastically for Father’s Day, discounting its Nook tablets between $70 and $129. That was a big drop for a week-long promotion. But B&N said Monday that the slashed prices are sticking around for … well, at least for awhile, with no end date given, though it’s apparently still “limited-time pricing.”

So the 7-inch Nook HD tablet now starts at $129, down from $199, and the 9-inch Nook HD+ tablet now starts at $149, down from $269. The devices were both launched less than a year ago.

Nook Media President Jamie Iannone said this is to “help our customers gear up for a great summer reading season … We’re thrilled to keep in place our best prices ever and deliver great value to make reading more affordable.” But it’s not a great sign for the health of the Nook tablet business: If customers were snapping up these tablets, B&N wouldn’t have to slash their prices. To be sure, the 7-inch tablet market is crowded, but Amazon’s most basic 7-inch Kindle Fire is still $159 with ads and $174 without, while Google’s Nexus 7 starts at $199 (for 16 GB; the Kindle Fire and Nook HD start at 8 GB). The iPad Mini, meanwhile, starts at $329.

Plus, combine the price cuts with the multiple rumors that Barnes & Noble plans to phase out the Nook tablet line by the end of fiscal year 2014 (which would be a year from now) and it starts to look as if B&N is trying to clear out stock. (The company has already phased out the lower-end Nook Tablet and Nook Color.) We may get more answers from the company’s next earnings report, which comes out June 25.