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

1) Surprisingly, the biggest news items of the past two weeks come from the ‘dying’ world of publishing. The ‘Time’ in Time Warner is officially breaking off as Time Warner has announced a split with its magazine division, Time Inc. The spin-off will make Time Inc. an independent, publicly traded company, currently the number-one magazine publisher in the U.S, featuring People, Sports Illustrated, Forbes and of course, Time. But Time Warner isn’t the only conglomerate making bold publishing moves, as News Corp. is creating a new publishing-focused company, still named News Corporation, granting it a healthy starting-allowance of $2.6 billion. This has led to multiple reactions from the industry with fears of possible layoffs at Time.

2) Staying in the world of magazines, Next Issue Media has expanded beyond Apple to launch on Windows 8 and Microsoft products like the Surface. Following a subscription model for unlimited access to over 80 magazines, Next Issue has been called both ‘Hulu’ and ‘Netflix’ for magazines. (The jury is still out on which one we are all going to call it. Post your suggestions in the comments below!) CEO Morgan Guenther is aiming for 1 million subscribers in the next 18 months.

3) Back to battling conglomerates, new information in the legal battle between Cablevision and Viacom has come to light. To catch you up, at the end of February, Cablevision filed an antitrust suit against Viacom, arguing against the mass media giant’s method of bundling its less performing cable networks with must-watch ones claiming, “The manner in which Viacom sells its programming is illegal, anti-consumer, and wrong,” in what may very well be the least self-aware statement ever made by a corporation. Now, Cablevision is claiming Viacom was threatening a $1 billion penalty if Cablevision refused the lower-tier networks. More on this irony as it develops.

4) The release of EA’s highly anticipated reboot of the SimCity video game franchise may go down as one of the biggest disasters in the industry’s history (though nothing touches the unforgettable landfills of Atari E.T. cartridges). Utilizing EA’s already highly controversial always-online DRM protection, SimCity became unplayable for thousands of players due to server issues and shut-downs. An alleged EA employee blasted the company on Reddit, expressing frustration and disappointment over the launch. EA responded by increasing server capacity and offering a free game, but many have not been assuaged, especially after computer modders/hackers revealed the game can function offline, but EA refused to allow that capability despite the massive amount of server failure.

5) In more video game news, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) and the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) have announced a new campaign to educate parents on the industry’s ratings system and parental controls. This comes as a response to increased media scrutiny, particularly in the possible connection between video games and violence in teens and young adults. In a related move, the ESRB has changed its policy on game marketing, following a model similar to Hollywood in that publishers may show trailers for Mature (M) rated games to a wide audience, as long as a green slate (a la movie trailers) precedes the footage.

6) Hulu’s future is in question, as Disney and News Corp. are discussing strategy for the online streaming service, with the implication begin one may buy out the other’s stake (which would be another third. The final third is primarily owned by Comcast, who is barred from management decisions to a federal regulatory agreement). The talks appear to be centered around the companies’ divergent views on Hulu’s primary operation, with News Corp. favoring the paid subscription model of Hulu Plus while Disney wants to focus on advertising-based revenue from free streaming.

7) News from the ‘upfront-line’: upfront season has begun! Cable and smaller broadcasting divisions have already begun the annual process of selling airtime to advertisers. Two of the more newsworthy reports come from NBC News Group, where Matt Lauer joked about recent negative reports on his image and Today’s slipping ratings, and Disney Kids, pushing the use of multi-screen viewing patterns and, much more importantly, the upcoming summer spin-off “Girl Meets World.” We demand Mr. Feeny!

8) At the box office, the past two weekends played Jekyll and Hyde for Hollywood, providing them their first flop and first mega-success of 2013. Two weeks ago, Jack the Giant Slayer brought in an estimated $28 million domestically, just 14% of its nearly $200 million budget, though it shows promise in Asia. Last weekend, however, Oz: The Great and Powerful proved to be just that, bringing in over $80 million domestically and $150 million globally. While this is good news for a Disney, who started planning for a sequel before Oz‘s release, it is better news for the entire domestic box office, as current year totals are 17% behind 2012.

9) Unionized healthcare workers at the Motion Picture Television Fund hospital stated their intention to strike for three days starting this Monday, March 18. MPTF responded with intentions to hire replacement workers for the strike. Talks fell through this past Wednesday, and the union plans on following through with their strike.

10) A new study from Carnegie Mellon‘s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics, published on March 6, draws the conclusion that since the shutdown of piracy-giant Megaupload, legal digital movie sales and rentals have increased, drawing a distinct correlation. Their findings show, “a positive and statistically significant relationship between a country’s sales growth and its pre-shutdown Megaupload penetration.”

And finally, The Silly Side, the news stories too inane not to share:

• A countersuit has been filed over the Fifty Shades of Grey porn parody (Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation). Smash Pictures (really) is claiming Universal’s lawsuit is unjustified on the grounds that due to its being originally published online as part of a fan fiction series, it is technically in the public domain.
• Please don’t turn off your smartphones. App, a new horror film from the Dutch studio 2CFilm, involves utilizing a free interactive app movie-goers can use during the screening, that adds complimentary information and scenes that are activated by audio cues in the film.
• Russell Crowe saw a UFO and posted a video of it. That’s really all I have to say about that.

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.

1. The Supreme Court will consider if the sale of violent video games to children should be outlawed, thus deciding if video games are more like movies or more like pornography. Millions of Boy Scouts await the ruling with great interest. This debate is playing out elsewhere: Rob Fahey says concern in the UK about video game effects has died down in recent years (replaced, of course, by concern over social media effects), while in Australia, gamemakers are frustrated that the highest age rating is 15+, and they feel that without the addition of an 18+ rating, they have to censor their content for adult gamers.

2. paidContent has a striking chart of the decline of music sales, but Glenn Peoples at Billboard says this is similar to a dip in the 1980s and, like then, sales will rise again with innovation. Gordon Smith says it’s the internet, not radio, at fault for music’s decline; We All Make Music considers the challenges musicians have with promoting themselves over the net; and fans debate whether the indie band Grizzly Bear writing an ad for a commercial is selling out or just doing what has to be done.

3. New York Magazine’s Logan Hill observes that the internet is taking music videos in audacious new directions, and Vulture provides a list of 14 music video directors to watch. A number of music videos grabbed attention this fortnight: Christina Aguilera released a Lady Gaga-esque video for “Not Myself Tonight”; Miley Cyrus got dirrty in “Can’t Be Tamed”, and M.I.A. got people talking and even yanked from YouTube with “Born Free”.

4. Mashable showcases a social media stats video that contains some grabbers, like that if Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. Given what Facebook has been doing to its privacy settings in recent years (which Matt McKeon puts in a striking image form), I don’t want to live in that country. Tim Jones looks at how deceptive Facebook’s interfaces are, and while Jeff Jarvis says Facebook actually has an opportunity to turn around the privacy outrage by actually listening to it, Ryan Singel calls for the creation of an alternative to Facebook.

5. Christopher Mims says Twitter is the future of news, but it’s looking like a lot of people will go uninformed in the future, then, as a study says 87% of Americans are aware of Twitter, but only 7% use it. Teens in particular say they hate it and the celebrities who use it. 17-year-old Arya Zarifi says in the latter article, “It’s something for adults who feel like it makes them hip or something.” Arya, I use Twitter; I don’t feel like it makes me hip or something. However, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being played out on Twitter, now that’s hip. Or something.

6. Apple didn’t come off so well this fortnight. There was the lost iPhone debacle, Apple’s shutdown of the Lala music service, which the AV Club says makes it that much more likely that iTunes “will one day control all the music in the world,” and the Ellen incident. What also got techie keyboards tapping was Steve Jobs’ dismissal of Flash. Dan Rayburn accuses Jobs of being disingenuous, while Christina Warren says it’s not Apple but HTML5 which is dooming Flash, with Scribd’s ditching of Flash for HTML5 as an example.

7. In Hollywood news, Kevin Maher explains Hollywood’s 1980s remake obsession (at least we don’t have to worry about any more Rambos); Matt Zoller Seitz stirred up a lot of dust with his anti-comic book movie position; and studios are ramping up cross-promotional efforts. In indie news, Anthony Kaufman wonders where the under-30 audience for indie cinema is, Michael Cieply looks at the process of rebuilding indie cinema, and Peter Knegt found six cases where indie documentary distribution has gone right, but Michael Moore fears for the future of documentary with a recent federal court ruling. In film criticism is dead news, Pete Hammond says theaters and studios can’t survive without critics.

8. Movie Gallery is shuttering its doors, while Bloomberg’s Tiffany Kary says it appears bond holders expect Blockbuster will go that way too, but one man thinks he can save Blockbuster. Redbox rentals are shooting up, and Chuck Tryon responds to a Redbox publicity piece about the  labor involved in keep Redboxes running.

9. Megan McArdle considers the theory that file-sharing is killing the entertainment industry, while Nate Anderson reports on a study that says file-sharers are the industry’s biggest customers and also points to India as the most consumer-friendly copyright country. The US has dropped further down on that list with the FCC ruling that lets the MPAA enforce the blockage of copying capabilities for first-run video-on-demand movies. Cory Doctorow says this is a ridiculous decision that opens to door for corporate control over all of our electronic devices in the future; David Poland is not so outraged.

10. The best News for TV Majors links of the fortnight: FCC Internet Control; Lost Ending; TV Future; CBS & CNN; Soap Lessons; Dramas Dominate; Economist Series; MSNBC Following FNC Lesson; FlowTV Conference; Gender Imbalance; Sets Statistics; Reclaiming the Multi-Cam; Sports on Cable.