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Gannett Co. has reached an agreement to acquire newspaper company Journal Media Group for $280 million, giving the media giant control of publications in more than 100 local markets in the U.S., company officials announced Wednesday evening. Journal Media publications dot the Midwest and South and include the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Memphis (Tennessee) Commercial-Appeal and Knoxville (Tennessee) News Sentinel. Industry experts say the publications are a natural fit for Gannett’s strategy of maximizing short-term profits through managing the decline of publications in less competitive markets.

Circulating on the web tonight: During an appearance on the Alex Jones Show, Drudge asserted that copyright laws which prevent websites from even linking to news stories were being advanced. “I had a Supreme Court Justice tell me it’s over for me,” said Drudge. “They’ve got the votes now to enforce copyright law, you’re out of there. They’re going to make it so you can’t even use headlines.” “To have a Supreme Court Justice say to me it’s over, they’ve got the votes, which means time is limited,” he added, noting that a day was coming when simply operating an...

Kim Davis walked out to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” when she was released from jail Tuesday. A judge ruled that Davis should be released from jail as long as she doesn’t interfere with the licenses that her deputies have been granting. However, she infringed upon Survivor’s rights when she played the 1982 rock classic as she walked on stage to give a speech. Record label EMI has considered suing Davis, as well as her supporter Mike Huckabee, for publicly playing the song without permission. “They are well within their rights to hold a public rally in support of Kim...

The iconic image of the American farmer is the man or woman who works the land, milks cows and is self-reliant enough to fix the tractor. But like a lot of mechanical items, tractors are increasingly run by computer software. Now, farmers are hitting up against an obscure provision of copyright law that makes it illegal to repair machinery run by software. Take Dave Alford. He fits that image of the iconic farmer. "I do farming on the family ranch," says Alford, standing on a piece of grassy earth with a white barn behind him. "I've been farming for the...

Should photographers be able to include copyrighted public building and sculptures in photos without having to worry about payment or permissions? The concept is called “freedom of panorama,” and it’s currently under attack over in Europe.

...This month, painter and photographer Richard Prince reminded us that what you post is public, and given the flexibility of copyright laws, can be shared — and sold — for anyone to see. As a part of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, Prince displayed giant screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos without warning or permission. The collection, “New Portraits,” is primarily made up of pictures of women, many in sexually charged poses. They are not paintings, but screenshots that have been enlarged to 6-foot-tall inkjet prints. According to Vulture, nearly every piece sold for $90,000 each. How is...

Next week, members of the Copyright Royalty Board, three of the most powerful people you have never heard of will decide how to shift millions, heck, billions of dollars from one set of players to another.The CRB is the sole arbitrator of all matters of music royalties and it is about to issue a death sentence to digital music services, like Spotify and Pandora. Every five years, the board reviews royalties paid by digital streaming services. The board's troika is set up as a panel of administrative law judges, Suzanne Barnett, chief copyright royalty judge; David Stricker, economics judge and...

An appeals court today reversed a lower court’s decision compelling YouTube to remove the controversial film Innocence of Muslims, saying that such an act was a violation of the First Amendment. The film, a 13-minute “trailer” created by Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in 2012, sparked outrage among the Muslim community for its depiction of the prophet Muhammad as a pedophile and a murderer, and for a time was thought to be the cause of the attacks against the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya. The initial lawsuit had been filed by Cindy Lee Garcia, one of the actresses in the film, who...

Bad news today for HBO, which is attempting to marry the recent debut of their HBO Now streaming service with season 5 of Game of Thrones. As of last night, the first four episodes of the new season, nearly half of the ten total episodes, have been leaked online to various torrent sites. After appearing online yesterday afternoon, the episodes have already been downloaded almost 800,000 times, and that figure will likely blow past a million downloalds by the season 5 premier tonight.

Will Madonna sue Lady Gaga? Will George Clinton sue OutKast? These idiotic questions became frighteningly legitimate after a jury ruled that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams committed copyright infringement. The jurors decided that yes, Thicke’s 2013 chart-topping single “Blurred Lines” had copied elements of Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give It Up,” and awarded Gaye’s family a walloping $7.4 million. The titles of the two songs in question could not have been more fitting. But it was the lack of detail on exactly which elements were copied that prompted a hard-swallow... The jury was instructed to make its ruling...

For the last year and a half, the music industry has been gripped by a lawsuit over whether Robin Thicke’s 2013 hit “Blurred Lines” was merely reminiscent of a song by Marvin Gaye, or had crossed the line into plagiarism.

WASHINGTON -- Mere weeks into his first term as a U.S. congressman, Republican Rep. Tom Emmer is challenging the right flank of his party. Just after midnight Saturday, Emmer issued a statement calling out Republican House colleagues who don't support fully funding the Department of Homeland Security because of President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration. (snip) "I am disappointed that many of my colleagues chose to put the security of Americans at stake and waste time playing politics," said Emmer, who replaced Rep. Michele Bachmann in January. "Congress has a solemn responsibility. As a body, we should never hold...

If adopted, these proposals will impact record labels, music publishers, producers, royalty collection groups, terrestrial and satellite radio, and music streaming services. In a 245-page report issued on Thursday, the U.S. Copyright Office is throwing its weight behind what would be the most radical changes to how music is licensed in nearly a half century. Many of the copyright laws governing music were first erected at the time that player pianos became popular and have developed through the advent of radio, new recording devices and, most recently, digital networks. Maria Pallante, director of the Copyright Office, believes the law is...

The idea behind copyright was simple – creativity would be catalyzed if individuals were given the exclusive right to profit from their works for a period of time. The law was supposed to strike a sensible balance between financial incentives for creators and social benefits. Early on, that may have been the case, but the law has changed greatly since the first Copyright Act was passed in 1790. Today, copyright does far more to create an information oligarchy than the robust information democracy the drafters of the Constitution and the first act had in mind.

Warner Bros. has filed a lawsuit against a small bar from Amityville, New York, for playing one of their songs without permission. The track in question is not a recent pop song, but the 80-year old love song "I Only Have Eyes for You" which first appeared in Warner's 1934 movie "Dames." giacomoMany bars, pubs and restaurants like to entertain their guests with live music, with bands often playing covers of recent hits or golden oldies. As with all music that’s performed in public, the bar owners are required to pay the royalties, even if there are just handful of...

Wikimedia, the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia, has refused a photographer’s repeated requests to stop distributing his most famous shot for free – because a monkey pressed the shutter button and should own the copyright[.]

"An old rat trap video of mine became a subject of a murder investigation and was presented on NBC Dateline. The only problem was they never got my permission to use my copyrighted content."

Digital television streaming companies are forging ahead with their services following the conclusion of a Supreme Court case against Aereo Inc., despite the media company's loss in a copyright dispute brought on by traditional broadcasters. According to The New York Times, with clearer legal parameters for service delivery, dozens of digital media startups plan to move forward with innovations that offer ways to watch traditional cable broadcasting for a fraction of the cost. "If cable companies believe that their old ways of doing business are protected by the Aereo Supreme Court decision, they are clearly misguided," Dan Nova, a partner...

The Supreme Court ruling on Aereo is out, and the court has ruled against the upstart company and in favor of TV broadcasters. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision that had ruled in favor of Aero, a service that lets you stream live network TV. The court found that Aereo's service violated the copyrights of live network TV stations. "This ruling appears sweeping and definitive, determining that Aereo is illegal," the lawyer Tom Goldstein wrote on SCOTUSBlog. The case will have lasting implications for the way content is delivered online. Aereo's technology uses special...

We sort of expected this to happen after the appeals court for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) held its oral arguments back in December, but CAFC has now spit at basic common sense and has declared that you can copyright an API. As we noted, back when Judge William Alsup (who learned to code Java to better understand the issues in the case) ruled that APIs were not subject to copyright protection, his ruling was somewhat unique in that it was clearly directed as much at an appeals court panel who would be hearing the appeal as it was at the...