Author: Jeff John Roberts

Bloomberg LLC, which supplies news and data to the world’s financial elite, has been embroiled in a growing uproar over its reporters’ use of the company’s technology to report on client activity — leading the New York Times to proclaim that Bloomberg admitted to “snooping” on clients.

In case you missed it, the controversy began on Friday, when the New York Post reported that merchant bank Goldman Sachs was annoyed that Bloomberg reporters were tracking employees’ log-on activities. The matter soon gained steam when BuzzFeed reported that Bloomberg brass had long known about the practice, and with the news that the Fed and Treasury were investigating the situation.

The company stonewalled at first but on Sunday, Bloomberg News editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, addressed the situation in detail:

“Our reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary. I am sorry they did. The error is inexcusable,” wrote Winkler in a blog post. The rest of the post, however, amounted to a pushback; Winkler explained that the practice was nothing new, and that reporters only tracked “mundane” information.

As bad as voicemail hacking?

So what to make of all this? Did Bloomberg engage in sinister “snooping” (one NYU journalism prof has already compared the incident to the infamous phone hacking conducted by News Corp in Britain)? Or is just this a tempest in a teapot egged on by Bloomberg’s competitors in the news media?

The answer is somewhere in between. On one hand, Bloomberg reporters didn’t do anything approaching the UK scandal — monitoring bankers’ log-in activities is nothing like breaking into a dead girl’s voicemail. Moreover, the Bloomberg “tracking” appears to have done little more than confirm if someone still worked at a certain company. As a source told BuzzFeed’s Peter Lauria, “LinkedIn Pro is more useful and has better information for finding sources and helping to break news.”

All this suggests that some of the the fuss is not about what Bloomberg reporters actually did, but instead from the secretive nature of the company itself. This is reflected in a Quartz report that characterizes Bloomberg as “a black box” and portrays a data-obsessed, almost cult-like corporate culture.

News and power of the platform

On the other hand, the Bloomberg episode does raise ethical concerns over how proprietary platforms — including not just Bloomberg but also LinkedIn or Facebook — should handle customer data for news purposes.

The issue isn’t just academic. More and more, platforms are relying on news (think of “LinkedIn Today”) to keep users on their sites. And, as Bloomberg journalists know, customers’ activities on those platforms can be a source of news — and better yet, a source of exclusive news.

The question is where this all this should stop. Would you like reporters to know when you suspend newspaper to go on vacation? Probably not. Would you like your cell phone carrier to use the location of your calls as a source of news? Definitely not. The Bloomberg episode, therefore, appears to be less of a snooping scandal than it is a cautionary tale about what can happen when the line between a company’s news and data gathering operations get blurred.

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Bitcoin lost more than half its value last month but there’s more interest in the cyber-currency than ever. While Bitcoin stories used to be restricted to tech and science sites, they’re now a fixture of the financial press and even consumer news sites.

Last week, for instance, brought a fresh spate of news that suggest more people are treating Bitcoin as a serious form of money rather than a science fiction experiment. Here’s a roundup (if you want to meet people backing Bitcoin, come to our free meetup in San Jose on May 16):

Bitcoin is becoming more liquid

Gift card site Gyft has started accepting Bitcoin as payment. The significance here is that average consumers now have a forum to use their Bitcoins on a wide variety of familiar consumer brands. As Techcrunch noted, other merchants’ Bitcoin announcements (like that San Francisco cupcake shop) are largely marketing gimmicks; the Gyft news creates a real source of practical liquidity.

This development also coincides with the arrival of mini-machines that convert cash to Bitcoins and the first ATM for the currency in San Diego.

Real investors are starting to take Bitcoin seriously

Last month’s collapse, which saw Bitcoin fall from $266 to $105 in a single day, rattled speculators and undermined faith in the currency’s viability.

But that hasn’t deterred investors — including big and respected ones like Andreessen Horowitz — from putting more money into new BitCoin ventures. This week, the WSJ reported that Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures is investing $5 million in Coinbase, a service that provides an online wallet and easy conversion between BitCoin and traditional currencies.

Bitcoin is getting easier to understand

BitCoin discussions were once the province of quants, libertarians and cyber-geeks. Now, people are explaining how the currency is made and how it works in easy-to-understand stories. Last week, for instance, Forbes reporter Kash Hill kept a day to day diary of how she lived on BitCoin (albeit with difficulty) in San Francisco for a week.

Meanwhile, Wired’s Robert Macmillan offers a cogent account (including a video) of how his office now has a Bitcoin machine quietly mining away while using less power than the coffee maker.  (For an excellent general primer on BitCoin, see my colleague David Meyer’s “Yes, you should care about Bitcoin, and here’s why” from last month).

The government wants a piece of Bitcoin

Despite its newfound respectability, Bitcoin is still catnip for criminals, hackers and market manipulators. This notoriety led the financial crimes division of the Treasury Department to issue guidelines about Bitcoin and money laundering.

Now, Commissioner Bart Chilton of the CFTC — the agency that regulates futures contracts  – says he’s thinking of regulating BitCoin. Chilton cited the currency’s volatility and  said the government should make sure it’s not a “house of cards.”

Regulation will be tricky, however. As I explained last week, Bitcoin’s status as a currency, not a security, means it’s beyond the purview of the SEC. And while the CFTC might regulate some types of Bitcoin transactions, its overall power is limited.

“Only derivatives. We can regulate any Bitcoin future, option or swaps. I’ve not said we could regulate the actual currency–although for all I know some might have reported such. The currency could be regulated by Treasury or the Fed,” Chilton said in response to an email query.

Meet the engineers and entrepreneurs behind Bitcoin

On Thursday, May 16, GigaOM is hosting experts — including CEOs who use Bitcoin everyday as well engineers from Facebook and Google — to explain where Bitcoin is going next. The meet-up, which costs exactly zero Bitcoins thanks to our friends at Ribbit Capital, is taking place at the San Jose Tech Museum from 6 to 9 — with time for cocktails and networking.

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The Financial Times is now making its content available through Flipboard, the popular reading platform that lets users draw on their social networks to assemble content from a variety of publications or create their own magazine.

The partnership, which comes a year after a similar deal between Flipboard and the New York Times, will grant full access to FT subscribers and limited access to registered users. Casual visitors will be able to read a smattering of FT blog posts and cultural stories.

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of the FT.com, said by phone that the deal will involve the FT and Flipboard sharing advertising revenue, but would not disclose what the exact revenue split is. In the past, the ad splits have been a source of contention for some publishers, including Condé Nast, which left Flipboard last year over the issue.

Grimshaw also said that the FT is exploring selling subscriptions through Flipboard, and would be willing to share some of the proceeds with the platform. This is significant because the FT made waves by leaving iTunes in part due to the 30 percent commission (or “vig,” as the Brits call it) that Apple takes from every publisher.

So why is the FT willing to partner up with Flipboard so soon after leaving Apple? Grimshaw says the difference lies in how the two platforms treat customer relationships.

“The issue is not so much a percentage, it’s the relationship between publisher and audience. Paying a 30 percent finder’s fee is okay. Paying 30 percent in perpetuity and not knowing who the customer is not okay.”

The Flipboard partnership also reflects the fact that the FT and other publishers are keen to get their stories in as many places as possible at a time when readers are consuming more and more content on mobile. As for the future role of Flipboard, which some describe as a “giant iceberg” in the way of publishers, Grimshaw had this to say:

“I think the really interesting aspect to the platform is the way they’re giving readers the ability to create a bespoke user experience. I personally think this is going to be a strong strand in publishing and consumption of news in the digital space.”

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Charlie Ergen, the mercurial chairman of satellite TV provider Dish Network, said Thursday that he would prefer to work with incumbent televisions players to continue a dual-stream revenue model rather than striking up a new partnership with upstart mobile-TV company Aereo.

The comments came during a Thursday call on Ergen and other Dish executives took questions about the company’s latest earnings results, which fell short of analysts’ expectations.

While most of the call was dedicated to Dish’s high stakes bid for Sprint, which would give it the chance to offer mobile-broadband-TV packages, analysts also asked Ergen about his company’s ongoing spat with broadcasters. In recent months, Dish has incensed the networks by selling “the Hopper,” a popular product to skip commercials, and touched off rumors that it might buy Aereo, which allows viewers to watch TV on their phones for $8 a month.

On today’s call, however, Ergen sounded more conciliatory.

“We admire what [Aereo is] doing. We indirectly get a benefit as it puts downward pressure on retransmission consent fees.. But all things being equal, we’d prefer to work with the broadcasters,” he said. The broadcasters are equipped to do something themselves. We’re more likely to work with existing partners.”

The rhetoric is part of a complicated dance between pay TV providers, including Dish, and content owners over the spiraling cost of programming; in this struggle, services like the Hopper and Aereo have become a source of leverage for Dish.

On the call, Ergen repeated his call for smaller cable “bundles” and more a la carte offerings.

“At the end of the day, if the bundle price gets too high, [consumers] will find other ways to do it — they’ll use small antennas, they’ll steal programming.”

Ergen added that he believes the traditional dual stream model for TV, consisting of subscription and advertising revenue, will continue thanks to new mobile opportunities. In particular, he said that mobile viewing opened the prospect of valuable local-based ad targeting that will result in tailored ads being delivered to the living room, tablets and smartphones.

He added that some “forward looking broadcasters” were already on board in exploring new bundle opportunities with Dish.

“I’ve never met a programmer or broadcaster that was against making more money.”

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A small New York publisher that uses the label “ibooks” has struck out in its lawsuit against Apple, after a New York court on Wednesday held that the publisher’s mark was not distinct and that consumers would not confuse the two companies’ products.

The case began in 2011 after Black Tower Press, a publisher of sci-fi and fantasy titles, filed a trademark suit in response to Apple’s announcement that it would use the word “iBooks” to describe software that allows users to purchase online books. Here’s a look at the two marks:

Black Tower came into possession of the “ibooks” mark in 2006 by purchasing the assets of another publishing company that had used the word for an imprint that sold millions of sci-fi and horror books in the early 2000′s. Neither Black Tower nor its predecessor, however, obtained a registered trademark for the word.

Apple, on the other hand, did obtain registered trademark rights. It first obtained a license to use “iBook” from another software company in 1999 to describe a line of colorful computers; in 2010, Apple bought the other company’s trademark entirely.

In a detailed decision, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote explained that the word “ibooks” was simply descriptive of books sold on the internet, and that Black Tower had not acquired any distinctive meaning in the word — only in the word and lightbulb logo used together.

Cote also wrote that she was granting summary judgment to Apple for a second reason: that no consumers would be confused by the two companies’ products:

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Google and the Authors Guild resumed an eight-year battle on Tuesday morning before the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges pressed both sides to provide a straight-up answer as to whether Google’s decision to scan millions of books amounted to “fair use” under copyright law.

On the surface, the hearing was supposed to determine if a lower court made a mistake last year when it ruled that the case could proceed as a certified class action, meaning that the Authors Guild can seek damages from Google on behalf of every writer whose book was scanned.

The three appeals court judges, however, appeared less interested in the technical aspects of class actions than they were in tackling “fair use” — a four part test that examines whether a given activity (in this case Google’s book scanning) should be exempt from copyright.

“Shouldn’t we address that first?” asked Judge Pierre Lavel, a noted fair use scholar, adding that the issues in the case appeared to be “out of sequence.”

Lavel and fellow judge, Barrington Parker, appeared sympathetic at times to Google’s position that the book scanning is transformative and acts as a discovery method, rather than as a replacement for book sales. They suggested that the lower court should address the fair use issue sooner than later.

“If the case is continued, you could face decades of litigation,” said Parker. “This project, with potentially enormous value for our culture, has this great cloud hanging over it.”

Judge Leval also suggested that the book scanning may be analogous to a famous fair use case known as “Perfect 10,” in which a California case held that showing thumbnail images in search results is fair use — even though the entire image is reproduced.

One or many lawsuits?

Google’s lawyer, Seth Waxman, reiterated Google’s position that the scanning is transformative but argued that the court should decertify the class, and require the plaintiffs to proceed individually — rather than as a unified block.

The search giant’s position is that the millions of authors in question have very different perspectives on the scanning — and that many of them support it. The latter, Google says, shouldn’t be forced into a lawsuit they don’t support. In its earlier filings, Google produced a survey that said many authors like the idea of having snippets of their books appear in the company’s search results.

The appeals court, however, appeared reluctant to break the case into multiple baskets of plaintiffs, and questioned if this would lead to separate cases for every type of book.

“You’re going to have to get this resolved. Are you going to have 5, 10, 20 different lawsuits? Poetry, science, math table ligation?”

The Authors Guild, meanwhile, wants to go ahead with the fair use ruling, at trial if necessary, without distinguishing the different types of books and authors at issue — a potentially risky proposition for the Guild too.

The court drew a laugh when it asked the Guild’s lawyer, Robert LaRocca, if the group would be comfortable betting the whole fair use ruling on a sample scanned book of Google’s choosing.

The judges also asked LaRocca to the explain why some authors where supporting Google’s; he described them as “a very, very vocal group out at Berkeley.”

What next: some possible end games

It’s risky to read legal tea leaves from the questions judges ask. But, in this case, the appeals court appeared to be strongly considering remanding the case for a ruling on the fair use question — a decision that could then be appealed back to the Second Circuit.

The situation, however, is complicated by internal judicial politics. Specifically, the lower court judge who would have to take up the fair issue is Denny Chin — who now sits on the Second Circuit as a colleague of the three judges who heard today’s hearing. In the past, Chin has shown more sympathy to copyright owners than Leval; the trick for the appeals court, then, would be to hand the case back to Chin with obvious guidance, but without upbraiding his handling of it so far.

There is also, of course, the question of money. Google has enough cash to litigate to the Supreme Court and back without breaking a sweat. The Authors Guild, on the other hand, may be feeling stretched as it pays for the appeals in the current case, while also pursuing a parallel case, known as Hathi Trust, against a group of university libraries.

At the Tuesday hearing, the Authors Guild’s attorney said paying up would cost Google just 90 days of earnings — or around three billion dollars. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s not going to happen.

First, Google can litigate this thing till the cows come home. Second, the actual amount at issue is much less than the extravagant multi-billion dollar figures flashed in numerous headlines. As I’ve explained before, the Authors Guild is seeking $750 per scanned book — but the actual number of books that would qualify is far fewer than the overall number of what Google has scanned.

Another possible outcome is that the appeals court agrees with Google’s request to decertify the class. This would likely force the Authors Guild to pack up and go home, leaving the handful of individual author plaintiffs to take on Google’s mighty lawyer machine out of their own pockets — game over, in other words.

Finally, the two sides may enter settlement negotiations (if they haven’t already) to permit the Authors Guild to enjoy a symbolic victory and, possibly, recoup some of their legal fees, while letting Google appear as a good guy. But don’t count on this, especially, if Google believes it can win the fair use ruling.

To read more background and insider details on the whole saga, see my e-book: “The Battle for the Books: Inside Google’s Gambit to create the world’s biggest library.”

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Viral site BuzzFeed launched a new content vertical on Wednesday called “Community” that consists entirely of user-submitted content.

While BuzzFeed has relied on reader content for years, the new vertical will increase the visibility of such contributions. It will also increase the chances of a viral pay-off from the site’s high-tech publishing tools. The new “Community” section includes a formal submission process that permits users to submit one post per day until their (what else) “Cat Power” increases, which will allow more frequent submissions.

“Community has always been a huge part of our site — some of our best posts have come from community submissions — and now we want to reinvent community for the social web,” editorial director Scott Lamb said in an email statement.

BuzzFeed’s decision to expand the scope of user-generated offerings comes at a time when media outlets are increasingly looking to commenters as a source of talent and future hires. My colleague Mathew Ingram explained the phenomenon well earlier this week in “Want a job at Gawker Media? You can get a head  start by being a regular commenter.”

The new section is consistent with BuzzFeed’s improbable quest to become more serious and more inane at the same time. In recent weeks, the site has been at forefront of major news stories like the Boston bombings while also churning out its regular fare like “14 cats who think they’re sushi.”

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AOL’s latest quarterly earnings, posted early Wednesday morning, showed ongoing growth in its content and advertising business as the company posted a 2% gain in revenue from a year ago and earnings per share of $0.32.

The profit was at the low end of the average of $0.32 – $0.34 that analysts had been predicting, while AOL’s $538.3 million in revenue was slightly above expectations.

Update: the market does not like the EPS. AOL share prices are off more than 10% this morning.

Overall, the numbers reflect an ongoing turnaround at AOL, which for years had been depending on its legacy dial-up subscription business for profit as its content and advertising business struggled. In March, CEO Tim Armstrong said recent results validated the company’s focus on content.

The most encouraging sign for the company may be a 14% growth in revenue in its so-called brand group, which consists of its in-house media properties like the Huffington Post, AOL.com and TechCrunch. AOL networks, which represent its third-party advertising service, was also up 8%.

The biggest question for the company remains profit where the company continues to depend on its shrinking legacy business to pay the bills. Both the ad networks and brand group continue to lose money, in part because sites like Patch.com continue to be a drag on earnings. This is reflected in the following screenshot, showing revenue and adjusted OBITDA:

If there is a dark spot here, it is the fact that, notwithstanding revenue growth, AOL still depends on its historic business of selling dial-up subscriptions. While losses in the brand group shrank by 71%, they are still losses — and the tech-heavy AOL Networks, in which AOL has invested significantly, is losing money too. Here’s how the company’s earnings release explains the profit situation:

“While significantly improved, Brand Group Adjusted OIBDA remains negative reflecting our investment in Patch and in our editorial and engineering staff at our core brands and in our sales force domestically and internationally […] AOL Networks Adjusted OIBDA decreased year-over-year due to higher research and product development costs primarily related to continued investment in Adlearn Open Platform (our demand-side platform) and the launch of AdTech MARKETPLACE (our supply-side platform).”

Update: an earlier version of this story cited analysts’ prediction as $0.32; I’ve updated to also to refer to a separate consensus account of $0.34

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Nine months into her tenure as Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer offered some insights into what might lie ahead for the company and its mish-mash of products. Speaking at a Wired Business conference in New York City, Mayer emphasized the role of video but downplayed the role of Google Glass and the prospect of a Facebook-style takeover over smartphone homescreens.

“We want to have a portfolio approach — no one is going to use the whole suite of products,” said Mayer, adding that Yahoo is fine with an à la carte approach where different users pull up two or three of what the company calls its “daily dozen” tools such as stocks or weather.

Speaking with Wired’s senior writer, Stephen Levy, Mayer also addressed the role of video; the company has earned some buzz in this area with announcements that it acquired the rights to Saturday Night Live clips and that it will be putting out original shows like “Losing Your Virginity with John Stamos.”

This appears to be part of what Mayer calls a “tiered approach” in which Yahoo will put out a small tier of original content alongside a larger tranche of curated content from across the web, as well as encouraging user-generated fare on Flickr.

The CEO also addressed, once again, her diktat to curtail working from home — a controversial decision that’s provided nearly endless grist for debates over gender and workplace.

“I didn’t mean for it to be an industry narrative,” she said. “We were just saying it wasn’t right for us right now … Everyone at Yahoo works in teams [and] stopping “causes drag.”

She added that the policy has lots of exceptions and been really well-received inside the company, and argued that it has produced a “Reese’s peanut butter effect” that can only happen when disparate people run into each other on the job.

In response to Levy’s question about search, Mayer said she “believed in it” and “understands it” (which is no doubt true after her long tenure at Google) but that the company will continue to hitch its wagon with Microsoft on the search front for the time being.

As for a description of the company’s “moonshot,” Mayer said it was to be on billions of screens. And, in a note that may give hope to exasperated investors, she added that she wants the company to return to faster-than-market growth.

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When bombs in Boston went off last month, Jill Abramson went in minutes from being a “joyous executive editor” at a ceremony celebrating the New York Times‘ recent Pulitzer Prize wins to overseeing a major story.

Abramson is familiar with working on major news events, including 9/11, but said her primary concerns were different this time.

“In Boston, what was first and foremost was making sure our standards were understood,” Abramson said at the Wired Business conference in New York City on Tuesday.

Abramson said that, for major stories in the past, the only focus was the next day’s paper. This time around, she was preoccupied with ensuring that no one at the paper seized on one of the many thinly sourced rumors flying around on social media.

Abramson, speaking with Wired editor-in-chief Scott Dedich, also addressed other recent trends in media, including a popular marketing trend.

“Native advertising seems to be for the conference set. It’s the buzz word of 2013,” she said, pouring cold water on a term popularized by BuzzFeed and others.

Abramson spoke of the “months and months and months” of effort that went into producing the NYT’s Pulitzer Prize-winning multimedia story “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” but didn’t address how the paper will fund such projects in the future. She did note, though, that technical virtuosity isn’t enough for great journalism.

“I think that what a new editor needs first and foremost, and this sounds old-fashioned, is that gut sense of what’s a great NYT story.”

The discussion didn’t touch on a widely panned Politico report that Abramson was losing the newsroom, but did address her role as first female executive editor of the Times. She said that there was no point being the first woman in anything if there wasn’t going to be a second, but said she was pleased with overall gender roles at the Times.

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The Obama Administration has reportedly selected Nicole Wong for the the new job of chief privacy officer. Wong, who has worked as a senior lawyer for both Google and Twitter, has a reputation in the tech and legal community for defending online freedom.

The appointment, which was reported by CNET and has yet to be confirmed, comes at a time of growing public concern over data collection tools that scour everything from smartphones to shopping records, and make it easy for companies and governments to collect information about individuals.

The Obama Administration’s decision to appoint Wong may therefore represent an attempt by the government to find new ways to balance the power of data with preserving liberty and privacy.

During her time at Google, Wong fought the governments of Turkey and Pakistan over YouTube censorship, and she has also worked with The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a respected cyber-advocacy group.

Wong’s appointment also comes at a time when Google chairman Eric Schmidt has been calling attention to the growing threat of governments using Western technology to spy on and oppress their citizens.

Wong, who joined Twitter last November, is the second long-time Google lawyer to be hired by the White House in recent months. The Administration recently hired former Googler Michelle Lee to head the troubled Patent Office.

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Good news, baseball fans — you’ll be seeing more highlights of your favorite team right on your local website’s sports section as a result of a new partnership between Major League Baseball and NDN, a video wire service backed by Yankees great Reggie Jackson.

The deal, announced on Tuesday, involves MLB delivering customized video bundles to hometown media outlets after a game ends.

“If you’re reading a column from Dan Shaughnessy on Boston.com about Dustin Pedroia’s game wining home run, you can access video highlights right at the story page level,” said Greg Peters, CEO of NDN, by phone.

The partnership also means extra revenue for publishers like the NY Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The papers, along with radio stations, get the video content for free and earn a cut of the advertising revenue that NDN sells for the videos.

Jackson is involved as a frontman and an investor (other includes Google’s Eric Schmidt and actor Bill Murray) and as a veteran of the tech scene.

“I’ve played in the tech world for a long time be it with Microsoft, Cisco or Google. The tech bug hit me about 15 or 20 years ago,” Jackson told me by phone. “I understand the value of participation and the value of attracting eyeballs.”

For Major League Baseball, which is licensing the clips to NDN for an undisclosed amount, the deal represents a way to make money from local highlights without undercutting its core product. According to Kenny Gersh, an SVP at MLB Advanced Media, the league is providing about 30 seconds of game footage along with “ancillary content” such as post-game interviews.

Gersh added that the deal also makes sense because many fans prefer to get baseball news through a local beat writer. So far, the

In the bigger picture, the partnership shows the ongoing rise of syndication services like NDN and NewsCred. These companies have found a niche as middlemen, removing the friction of licensing amongst copyright owners, advertisers and publishers.

Reggie Jackson fans: here’s a vintage (non-baseball) clip of Mr. October:

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The Marketplace Fairness Act, an internet sales tax measure that supporters say will help mom-and-pop retailers compete with online retailers, passed the U.S. Senate by a 69-27 margin on Monday and will soon go before the House.

The law calls for internet retailers with more than $1 million in annual revenue to collect sales taxes from out of state shoppers. State governments claim it will help them collect billions in unpaid revenue while brick-and-mortar retailers, who also support it, say it will level the playing field by forcing online competitors to collect tax.

Opponents of the law, which include libertarians and states like Oregon that have no sales tax, complain it will lead to regulatory burdens tied to collecting tax from numerous state and local governments. Supporters counter that the task will not be that onerous because the law would require states to provide merchants with free tax collection software.

For consumers, the law means paying more sales tax on online purchases. Right now, consumers typically pay only if the online merchant is located in their home state.

The bill will now go to the House where conservatives say they will oppose the bill; they may not succeed, however, as politicians from both parties have argued that the bill does not impose a new tax but instead helps collect taxes that are already owed. The Obama Administration supports the proposed law.

eBay, one of the law’s prime opponents, said in a statement that it will keep pushing for merchants who collect less than $10 million to be exempt.

To understand more about the law, see GigaOM’s primer on who’s for it and who’s against.

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Aereo, the controversial service that beams over-the-air TV to mobile devices, is going on legal offense against the broadcasters that are trying to shut it down. On Monday, Aereo asked the U.S. District Court in Manhattan for an order stating that it does not infringe on the broadcasters’ copyright.

The move comes as Aereo, which recently won a major appeals court ruling on nearly the same issue in New York, prepares to offer its service in Boston and 22 other markets as soon as this month. CBS and other broadcasters have vowed to sue to stop Aereo in those new markets, a threat that appears to have led it to file the new court action. (The new filing, reported by AllThingsD, refers to recent public statements and Twitter feeds by CBS executives, including one that says “we’ll sue”).

So what exactly is the meaning of Aereo’s new lawsuit? Here’s what one copyright expert familiar with the issue had to say:

Aereo’s decision to file a separate declaratory judgment action at this stage is unorthodox. They’ve prevailed on a preliminary injunction motion at the district and circuit court level — which means that both the Southern District and the 2d Circuit have ruled they are likely to succeed on the merits — so it’s unusual to seek a declaratory judgment on the same issues.

Recall that the appeals court decision from last month already protects Aereo for the immediate future in the U.S. Second District, a territory that covers the states of New York, Vermont and Connecticut. This means that the new declaratory action Aereo is seeking will not really change any facts on the ground but could give the company another favorable verdict — but not one that will determine its fate in Boston (which is in the First Circuit) or any of the other legal jurisdictions where Aereo plans to open shop.

The most likely explanation, then, is that the move is part of the increasingly pitched PR battle between Aereo and the broadcasters who, in another recent appeal, accused the upstart of creating “havoc” and “massive disruption” in the television industry. The broadcasters have also threatened to pull their signals altogether and distribute their channels, including Fox and ABC, only on pay TV.

Aereo, for its part, argues that its technology, which assigns every subscriber a personal antenna, is akin to private viewing through a DVR system.  The company’s CEO, Chet Kanojia, has accused the broadcasters of extracting exorbitant fees by forcing viewers to accept cable bundles stuffed with channels they don’t want to watch.

Aereo’s new lawsuit, therefore, gives it a way to gain the upper hand on the media message (for a short time at least) – and possibly pick up some additional legal language from a judge who has taken the company’s side in the past.

In the bigger picture, the Aereo fight is part of a great game over the future of the TV industry. Aereo, which is backed by a major investment from media mogul Barry Diller, has also been the subject of acquisition rumors by satellite provider Dish. Broadcasters fear that an alliance between the two companies could provide an end-run around the existing system that requires cable and satellite providers to pay for use of the over-the-air signals.

The final outcome could well end up at the Supreme Court given a current split between the courts in New York and a district court in California, which shut down a similar service to Aereo last year. In the meantime, it’s possible that a patchwork of decisions could result in Aereo being legal in half the country and forbidden in the other half.

In another recent development, the four major sports leagues have joined the anti-Aereo chorus by filing court papers to support the broadcasters’ request that a full panel of the Second Circuit reconsider its decision. The NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball argue that the appeals court was wrong to consider Aereo a “private” transmission like singing in the shower:

An individual who sings a copyrighted lyric in the shower engages in a private performance […] A commercial service (like Aereo) that retransmits the broadcast of a copyrighted television program to thousands of paying subscribers at the same time is not in any way comparable.

Here’s a copy of Aereo’s new lawsuit:

Aereo Complaint for Declaratory Judgment – FINAL FILED

//

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Bitcoin is back in the news again following last month’s epic crash in which it lost 70 percent of its value in two days. This week, the online currency was at the center of a video game zombie operation and a $75 million lawsuit between a Japanese exchange and a Seattle startup that provides Bitcoin services to American merchants.

The recent events are the latest in a never-ending series of crimes and controversies tied to Bitcoin, which is mined by computers and can be used for payments or exchanged into dollars and other currencies. The money is popular with libertarians because it isn’t subject to deflation by central banks, but has also been criticized for attracting criminals and hackers.

The controversy raises the question of whether America’s leading financial regulator, the Securities and Exchanges Commission, will attempt to control the spread and use of Bitcoin.

“We are decling comment,” said an SEC spokesman by email, in response to questions regarding whether the agency had a position on the currency or if it had jurisdiction over Bitcoin trading in the first place.

The silence may be due to the fact that the SEC can exert little regulatory control over Bitcoin. According to Dan Nathan, a securities lawyer at Morrison & Foerster, the agency can oversee trades of financial instruments like stocks and bonds but, for the most part, not currencies.

Nathan said the SEC could exert indirect control through imposing capital requirements on trading houses that hold Bitcoin, but any direct trading regulation would likely be restricted to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — a separate agency that overseas futures contracts.

Major financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have reportedly been visiting online Bitcoin exchanges as often as 30 times a day, but have refused to comment about whether they are holding the currency.

The only direct attempt at regulation by the U.S. so far has been guidelines issued in March by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which targets money laundering.

Want to learn more about Bitcoin and whether it’s viable as a mainstream currency? Join us on May 16 in San Jose where engineers from Google and Facebook, and executives from Expensify and Lemon will share their perspectives — it won’t cost you a single Bitcoin.

And to learn more about Bitcoin, see my colleague David Meyer excellent overview: “Yes, you should care about Bitcoin. Here’s why.“

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The Washington Post Company posted bleak quarterly earnings on Friday. The newspaper division saw an operating loss of $34.5 million, newspaper division revenue fell four percent from a year ago, and while online revenue was up the entire company barely eked out a profit.

While most of the losses arose as a result of pension and restructuring expenses, the company’s core business remains distressed. Print advertising revenues fell 8 percent, and while circulation declined by seven percent. A small bright spot comes in the form of a 16 percent increase in online display advertising at a time when such revenue is flat or falling at other newspapers.

While the Washington Post’s earnings reflect a familiar story of the declining newspaper business, they are particularly discouraging because the paper does not appear to have a turnaround plan on the horizon. While the New York Times has been experimenting with its digital paywall for over a year, and now has plans to create different pricing tiers, the Post’s plan to raise online digital subscription revenue remains amorphous. The company plans to launch a paywall this summer, but the model appears so leaky that it is unlikely to bring in significant money any time soon.

At the same time, while the New York Times has cut away all its non-core assets to focus on the flagship brand, the Washington Post Company is also figuring out how to turn around Kaplan, its troubled education segment.

Correction: The first paragraph of this post was updated to correct descriptions of profit and loss.

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Everyone from banks to bad guys are buzzing about Bitcoin — the cryptography-based currency that is beyond the control of governments. At GigaOM, we’ve covered Bitcoin as part of our mission to explain new ways that technology is connecting us. Now, we’re hosting a get-together in Silicon Valley where people who know their money and their tech will share their perspective on this new form of payment.

The event is taking place on Thursday, May 16 from 6pm to 9pm at the San Jose Tech Museum — and it’s free thanks to our friends at Ribbit Capital. This will be a great way to get the inside scoop on who is using Bitcoin — from pizza merchants to investors — and what will happen next with the controversial currency.

Joining us will be David Barrett of Expensify, which now offers Bitcoin as a way for companies to repay employee expenses. We’ll also have engineers Mike Hearn of Google and Ben Davenport of Facebook, and Wences Casare who founded the digital wallet service Lemon.

Together, we’ll explore whether Bitcoin can be a viable payment option amid wild valuation swings and ongoing hacking incidents. We’ll also look at how U.S. government agencies like the IRS and FinCEN are taking a growing interest in Bitcoin — and how much they can affect the use of the currency.

At a broader level, the event will also be a way to examine how Bitcoin is part of trans-national technology networks that connect people without government intermediaries.

Here’s the link again to sign up. See you on May 16.

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Two famous print brands offered up glitz and booze in New York City this week to persuade advertisers to invest in their growing vats of video content. The hoopla was part of Newfronts, a week-long push by media companies of all stripes to recast themselves as mini TV studios — and to grab a piece of television’s massive ad budget.

In the case of the Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast, the companies are borrowing the language of the TV industry and inviting advertisers to sponsor “documentaries,” “shows” and “original programming slates.” The actual content, however, is typically a collection of 2-4 minute web clips and the marketing pitch often invites a single brand to slap their name on the entire package.

Will it work? Both the Journal and Conde Nast are relying on their historic brand power to attract video sponsors and, like everyone in media, are serving up their wares on all screens. But the two companies are also taking different approaches to scale and strategy. Here’s a look at their offerings, and how the companies are framing their new video identities.

A video start-up inside 100-year-old magazines

Conde Nast wields considerable cultural and political power through titles like Vogue and Vanity Fair and GQ — but that doesn’t mean the company and its famous editors Anna Wintour and Graydon Carter, who were on an hand at Conde’s ad event, know much about making video. Many readers, meanwhile, may not even know the videos exist.

Appearing to recognize that print prowess doesn’t automatically transfer to video, Conde Nast went on a hiring spree, bringing in “video natives” from companies like the Huffington Post and CW Networks, and giving them rein to create content in a hands-off environment. The “start-up” (that’s Conde Nast’s word for the venture) is known as CN Entertainment and is also working with TV veterans who produced fare like Mad Men and Project Runway.

CN Entertainment’s output has been trickling out for a while, and includes video series like GQ‘s “10 Essentials” and Glamour’s “Elevator Runway.” On Wednesday, the company announced over 30 new “original programming slates” that include Wired’s “Angry Nerd” and programs tied to titles like Teen Vogue, Epicurious and Vanity Fair.

The new offerings represent a big expansion for Conde Nast’s video efforts. But they but also come at a time that other companies are rushing to offer original programming too — AOL, Yahoo and the Weather Company were just some of sites who made similar announcements this week.

To avoid being over looked in this flood of content, Conde Nast is relying on syndication deals with sites like Twitter and YouTube. The company is also promising to spend heavily on marketing in order to assure advertisers that someone will actually watch the videos.

“It’s on us to make people know the brands are in the business to create video. A lot of people fall down with the philosophy of ‘build it and they will come’” Fred Santarpia, Chief Digital of CN Entertainment, told me at the event. He said the company might, for instance target GQ magazine readers with Facebook ads to make sure they’re aware of the brand’s videos.

Santarpia said he could not disclose revenue figures, only saying they were “healthy.”

Not your father’s Wall Street Journal

For the last year, the Wall Street Journal has been pursuing its “WSJ Everywhere” strategy that involves producing a lot of content and putting it in as many places as possible — from the iPhone to the X-box and more.

Unlike Conde Nast, the Journal has been relying heavily on its existing print teams to crank out the content. This typically means pulling reporters before a makeshift studio in the Journal offices or even recording them via Skype from their homes and hotel rooms. The result has been plenty of video but a mixed bag in terms of quality.

Now, the Journal appears to be increasing its efforts to pluck out the best stuff and package it as discrete channels. At a splashy event on Monday morning, executives touted the Journal’s proximity to power brokers and invited advertisers to become exclusive sponsors of fare like “Seib & Wessel,” a senior journalist chat fest.

“This isn’t your father’s Wall Street Journal,” war reporter Michael Phillips told the crowd. Perhaps to drive home the point, the event also featured appearances by rapper MC Hammer and a Bloody Mary stand to help ad and media executives start the week off right.

The Journal also announced a new documentary series “WSJ Startup of the Year,” sponsored by the NYSE, that will feature famous entrepreneurs like Richard Branson kicking the tires of upcoming companies. The paper is also betting on lifestyle video content like “WSJ Cafe” and clips from popular sports writer Jason Gay.

According to Chief Revenue Officer, Michael Rooney, people are watching the videos because they are attached not just to the paper but to the Journal name.

“They want to follow this brand anywhere and anyhow they can get the content,” Rooney told me at the event, adding that advertisers understand the viewers are high income people and will pay top dollar to reach them. WSJ is now streaming 20-25 million videos a month with premium cost-per-thousand view rates coming in at $40-$60 a month.

Early innings for old brands and new video tricks

This week’s ad outreach by Conde Nast and the Journal comes at a time when digital display dollars are proving insufficient to offset the inexorable decline of their legacy print products. The turn to video promises higher ad income as online viewing takes off, and big brands contemplate moving more of their TV budgets to the web.

The video strategy seems obvious but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. To actually pull this off, the print companies will have to persuade advertisers that their videos can reach a wide enough audience to be worth their time (this is likely the reason the New York Times pulled down its paywall for online video last week).

At the same time, they will have to compete with a host of other media outlets suddenly jostling for video dollars too, as well as newer outfits like PopSugar and Break Media who have already figured out how to produce compelling videos on the cheap.

This flood of content from all corners could also depress the high rates that are attracting brands like Conde and the Journal to video in the first place. And while a tilt of ad dollars from cable to online video seems inevitable, no one knows when this will actually occur.

“The market is growing. Everything points to more money moving into space,” said CN Entertainment’s Santarpia. ”It’s early —  only time will tell.”

Asked to frame it in baseball terms, Santarpia said it’s only the second inning for the online video industry — and the first for companies like Conde Nast.

(Image by Yuri Arcurs via Shutterstock)

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Social media studies suggest that African Americans use Twitter more than other group in the U.S. – 26 percent compared to 19 percent of Hispanics and 14 percent of whites. Now, news site The Root has launched a tool that curates leading black voices on Twitter and shows the most popular ideas and trends in the community.

Called The Chatterati, the tool relies on algorithms and a hand-selected database of thousands of influential Twitter users — including entrepreneurs, academics and celebrities — to display popular news, hashtags and retweets.

“It’s a digest of what’s going on on Twitter among African Americans. That’s why we built it,” said Donna Byrd, publisher of The Root, in a phone interview. “The other benefit is it quickly identifies key conversations, which informs what we write about and how we craft stories.”

For The Root, which competes with sites like theGrio and the HuffPo’s Black Voices, The Chatterati could provide a leg up on breaking news stories. This week, for instance, Byrd said the news of NBA player Jason Collins’ decision to come out as gay trended among its users before it did among Twitter at large.

The tool, which sits atop Twitter’s API, could also be a magnet for marketers looking to target African Americans. Twitter, which has been known to cut off services that threaten its own revenue stream, is for now okay with The Chatterati, according to Byrd.

The tool itself went live this week and has categories like “top hashtags,” “top retweets” and “our favorites,” where The Root staff curate Twitter highlights. Byrd said her team is still working out a few bugs, but that The Root will continue to expand its database of the most influential black Twitter users.

Byrd said the tool’s primary purpose is to help The Root readers, who are not on Twitter all day long, and quickly discover what’s trending.

“I don’t think there’s a need for a black Twitter per se. It’s an opportunity to have a view of what’s going on in a subsection of the broader community.”

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A federal court has sided with Craigslist in the early stages of a bitter dispute over whether upstart data and apartment listing sites can draw on information posted by the classified giant to offer rival services.

In a ruling handed down Monday in San Francisco, US District Judge Charles Breyer refused the request of PadMapper, 3 Taps and other defendants to throw out a laundry list of claims by Craigslist, which is accusing the defendants of hacking, copyright infringement and more.

In the view of Craigslist, the newer companies are plundering data which it has collected and compiled at great effort. The defendants, meanwhile, say Craigslist is monopolizing data that belongs to users while offering an ugly, out-dated service. The lawsuit broke out last summer.

In a key part of Tuesday’s highly-technical decision, the judge examined whether Craigslist’s terms of service meant that users had given the site permission to use their ads as the basis for copyright lawsuits. The judge said Craigslist didn’t obtain such permission, except for a short period in the summer of 2012 when the site changed its terms of service — before backing down in the face of a popular backlash.

What this means is that Craigslist can rely on users’ ads to go forward with its copyright lawsuit, but only those ads written between July 16 and August 8, 2012. The judge also said said that Craigslist may have its own copyright over the way it has compiled the ads, though it will still have to prove that this compilation is an “original” artistic work.

The hacking portion of the decision, which is based on the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a similar law in California, is also nuanced. The judge wrote that the companies’ attempts to access Craigslist data after receiving cease-and-desist letters might be “unauthorized access” under the laws, but implicitly suggested that the laws are out of date.

The judge also gave Craigslist a minor victory by agreeing to shelve counter-claims from Padmapper and 3Taps over the monopoly issue. The defendants won their own minor victory when the judge threw out Craigslist’s conspiracy claims.

So what does all this mean? Monday’s decision is very preliminary and was about what can stay in the case — the real action will start at the summary judgment stage, likely later this year, where each side can try to win on a matter of law.

In the bigger picture, the case is important because it is helping to set the rules over the degree to which companies can treat data controlled by other firms as a public good.

This is just a short summary of a complex decision. If you want to get further into the weeds, here is a marked-up copy of the ruling itself:

<p  style=” margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block;”>   <a title=”View Craigslist PadMapper on Scribd” href=”http://www.scribd.com/doc/138806124/Craigslist-PadMapper&#8221;  style=”text-decoration: underline;” >Craigslist PadMapper</a></p>

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