Ten (or more) media industry news items you might have missed recently:

1. Raking in $1.6 billion in revenue this year, YouTube dominates as the top online video destination, with much of that audience coming from overseas. Given Disney’s global popularity, its new deal with YouTube might pay off richly then, especially if it can nab viewers via tablets, as a new study indicates that tablet viewing pays off more than desktop viewing of online video in terms of viewer engagement. Just imagine how engaged you’d be by a 52-inch tablet playing Maru videos.

2. Home video spending finally rose this summer for the first time since 2008, and the studios are looking to bolster it even more by considering a 60-day ban on DVD rentals, while Warner Bros. is hoping its Flixster service for the UltraViolet system will move digital product, with the new Harry Potter release as an early test (to mixed reviews thus far). Few in the indie film world seem to care when a movie is released on VOD and theatrically simultaneously, but Hollywood did care about Zediva’s remote DVD streaming service, and that’s accordingly been shut down.

3. Oscar made more changes than the ones you certainly heard about, including hiring a new talent producer and scrapping the ten nominee quota for Best Picture. Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin has tossed its hat into the Best Animated Feature ring and is already playing overseas to big box office. Based on what Peter Knegt says, the upcoming Independent Spirit Award nominees (announced November 29) aren’t likely to also make the Oscar cut.

4. Alexander Payne finally has a new movie coming out next week after a seven-year absence from features, while the master of the long absence, Terrence Malick, is reportedly shooting two movies (!) back-to-back (!) next year. To ensure that studios can afford to make more movies without absences, Gavin Polone suggests that they should take some perks away from stars, but it appears that the logic of perk-removal is leading to an exodus of execs from Twentieth Century Fox.

5. The major studios are supportive of two Congressional bills to rewrite the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and record labels want to see the DMCA rewritten too, but technology groups and musicians are staunchly opposed to the proposed changes. But hey, I’m sure content providers are acting in good faith, right? Like Warner Bros., which admitted to demanding files be taken offline under DMCA rules without actually looking at what those files were, let alone knowing if it owned them (and one of them was actually a web comment, not a file: “A scraper apparently misidentified part of a web comment as an infringing URL, and no one at the studio noticed the mistake.” Ha! Oh, Warner Bros., silly studio.).

6. Reading tablet wars! Barnes & Noble is going after the Kindle with a new Nook, and Samsung is going after both of them with the updated Galaxy Tab, while Amazon is making the Kindle more attractive with the Lending Library, though major publishers aren’t on board. If publishers continue to drag their feet, it seems possible that self-publishing could come along to usurp them. The future might also bring e-textbooks and glowing screens.

7. The music industry just got smaller with Universal and Sony’s split purchase of EMI (Universal got the recording part, Sony the publishing part), though regulators still have to sign off. While Universal can celebrate that, it received bad news that a class action suit against them is moving forth; it accuses Universal of underpaying digital royalties, including on ringtones (which are still a big business). Sony, meanwhile, just has its eye on dominating the music industry.

8. Angry Birds has big sales and big influence, and now has its own store in Finland. And with physical game sales down (though Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 certainly did alright), such phone games are showing dominance. A new study out of Michigan State says playing video games can make kids more creative. Indeed, when I play Angry Birds, I often end up formulating very creative scenarios for demolishing my iDevice.

9. Did you know the internet died last week? Only for a few seconds, and only for Time Warner Cable customers, but still. Most aren’t missing Internet Explorer, and Microsoft is basically reduced to paying users to download it. Wikipedia might need to start paying editors, because many articles are missing citations (this article also cites a German Wikipedia backlog clean-up competition called Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb, which is the coolest word that will ever appear in WAYM).

10. Some of the finer News for TV Majors posts from the past two weeks: All-American Muslim Preview, All My Children on Hold, Covering PSU, Escalating Sports Rights, EAS Glitches, Harmon Responds, Twitter Involvement, AMC’s Laziness, NBC’s Struggles, Streaming Challenge, Student Awards & Scholarship, A La Carte Experiment, Sitcoms in Syndication, Raking in Retrans, TV Set Struggles, Good Wife PSA.

1. While others were watching a movie about its founding, Facebook has been busy attending to other matters: developing a partnership with Skype, improving its photo sharing service, and going all DMCA evil by shutting down an unofficial Let Me In fan group (Facebook reversed the decision after this was publicized, however). Anne Thompson highlights the marketing possibilities of Facebook by featuring some official and unofficial pages for The Social Network, and Alexia Tsotsis addresses the intriguing evolution of the “Like” button, which could have been totally “Awesome” instead.

2. The lawyer going after Hurt Locker downloaders insists illegal file sharing must stop, and many would agree that piracy is hurting independent filmmakers more than the major studios. Another lawyer is leading the fight against piracy of porn movies, with leaders of the porn industry uniting to support action against individual file sharers (hey, that would actually make a good porn premise: knock at the door, it’s a process server in a tight shirt saying, “You’ve been very naughty”). In terms of government action against piracy, a key US bill has been shelved, while France is starting to send threatening letters to pirates, and forty countries have signed an anti-piracy trade agreement. James Myring says the end result of this will be a piracy arms race.

3. AOL went wild with acquisitions this fortnight, snapping up TechCrunch, 5Min Media, and Thing Labs and Brizzly. Too bad for them the media only really cares about what Apple does. Google has also been spending a lot of money on odd things like robot cars and a human-powered monorail (That’s right! Monorail!). Google is also vowing to bring the sexy back to display ads (who knew it had left?), while AOL has studied how consumers react to online ads (unfortunately “sexy” didn’t come up there), and MSNBC has developed a new ad rendering system (no “sexy” there either, but plenty of talk about “performance”).

4. There’s turmoil at Yahoo, Internet Explorer usage is plunging, and MySpace has been surpassed by Twitter, which has a new CEO, Dick Costolo. To get himself up to speed, Costolo might want to check out XKCD’s map of online communities, Lou Kerner’s charts on who uses social media, and CNN’s study of news sharing on social networks. He should also take toddlers much more seriously than John Mayer.

5. DC and Marvel are dropping prices on comics in an effort to boost readership; comics retailers are confident of a positive effect. And to capitalize on wide interest in the TV series launch, the latest Walking Dead comics appear simultaneously in print and digital form (plus Walking Dead novels are on the way). Dark Horse is also planning to capitalize on digital options, the future potential of which a company called ScrollMotion is trying to innovate for the publishing industry.

6. Record stores aren’t pleased with Lil Wayne releasing his next album digitally two weeks before they receive it, but they should be pleased that vinyl sales are actually booming right now, though record stores continue to close across the globe. Wilco and other bands aren’t pleased with fans who come to concerts and record the shows on their phones, especially since some bands make a lot of money or at least generate valuable buzz from live gigs. ASCAP wasn’t pleased with a court ruling that said downloads can’t be counted as public performances, but despite the common impression that the music industry is in dire straits, some things are going quite right and spreading pleasure from fans to music executives.

7. The Academy is thinking of moving up the Oscars to late January, possibly impinging on Sundance in the process. Steve Pond says it’s a terrible idea; David Poland says the idea makes sense. Poland also has some strong words for the Hollywood Reporter in response to its early speculation about possible African-American Oscar nominees, while the foreign language nomination submission process is nearly complete.

8. Better visit your local video rental store before it’s gone: more companies are getting behind streaming, some studios want to shorten video-on-demand windows dramatically, and Universal is testing premium rentals at kiosks. However, Netflix’s streaming content is still minimal compared to DVDs, and Rupert Murdoch thinks collapsed VOD windows would be a big mistake.

9. Despite the removal of the Taliban option from the game, the U.S. military won’t lift its ban on the sale of the new Medal of Honor on its bases, while a Fox News co-host is suspicious of the possible leftist slant of NBA Jam. But Drew Napoli says there’s value in still playing games others say are awful, and even if it turned out awful, I would still totally play Need for Speed integrated with Google Maps. Apparently not awful is FIFA 11, which has become the fastest selling sports game ever.

10. Some good News for TV Majors from the past two weeks: User-Generated Current TV, Apple TV v. Google TV, NBC News Concerns, The Internet Can Help…Mostly, Televisa & Univision, Good #Flow10 Tweets, Google TV’s Partners, ABC Changing Model, Upscale Popularity, Secondary Streaming Reconsidered, NYTF Wrap-Up, We Love the Overnights, Burke Replacing Zucker.

Some good news came from the battlefield that is media and technology policy recently: some important fair use rulings that help to hold off the ever expanding clutches of copyright.  Through a nice (if small) corrective built into the generally heinous Digital Millennium Copyright Act, every three years the Library of Congress rules on exemptions to the anti-circumvention clause that makes it illegal to break technological protections on copyrighted material.  Here are the new exemptions:

• Ripping clips of DVDs for educational purposes and use in documentary and noncommercial works is now allowed under the law.  This extends the previous exemption enjoyed only by lucky film and media studies instructors and their classroom uses to recognize more instructors, non-classroom uses, and students.  Make sure to check out Jason Mittell’s posts here and here for details and what this means for academics.  Beyond that, this ruling is also a big victory for those documentary filmmakers and remix video artists who have to crack encryptions on the existing material they transform for criticism and commentary.

• It’s also now legal to jailbreak your phone, opening up its operating system for other mobile networks and applications.  This ruling is most specifically about unlocking the iPhone for use with carriers other than AT&T and to run apps other than those available on Apple’s tightly controlled iTunes App Store, which is an important limitation on the power that device producers like Apple can have over users.

• Users also now have the right to crack digital rights management in order to run screen-readers on ebooks.  Many publishers technologically restrict the use of text-to-speech functions on computers and devices like the Kindle, so allowing for getting around this is especially key for promoting accessibility for people with print and visual disabilities.

• The ruling also allows for academic security research on video game DRM, in response to concerns over some specific security vulnerabilities.

The legal recognition of these fair uses is a very encouraging development— the result of a lot of great work by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American University’s Center for Social Media, the Organization for Transformative Works, the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, and others.  As Jonathan Zittrain and others point out, though, there are still a number of technological and legal hurdles that remain in the way of these uses— not least, of course, are the technical skills necessary to pick the locks in the first place.  And this is all only good for another two years, when these exemptions will have to be defended at the next review.

The Library of Congress’s ruling is even more encouraging, though, when taken along with two other recent court decisions on copyright.  The first case made some headlines: in June, a federal court threw out Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube.  The summary judgment ruling took a good strong reading of the “safe harbor” provision of the DMCA, finding that Google only hosts others’ content on YouTube and therefore can’t be held liable for the actions of its users.  The second case went relatively unnoticed: the day after the LOC announced its exemptions, a federal appeals court ruled that breaking DRM just to access a piece of software isn’t illegal under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules.  While a rather abstruse case involving medical system software and dongles (yes, dongles), the decision sets a pretty clear and substantial fair use precedent: breaking technological protections on a work is legal as long as the use you make of it is legal.  These cases, though, are likely far from over— expect to see appeals to the Supreme Court in both.  Nonetheless, in the fight for a more balanced approach to copyright regulation (and especially in light of some really scary stuff on the horizon), it’s nice to have some victories to celebrate.