About seven-tenths of one percent of total 2008 newspaper ad revenue of $38 billion. And that's assuming the worrywarts are correct; the $250 million number was provided to the New York Times by the CEO of an anti-news piracy startup Attributor which has an interest in over-estimating the size of the problem.

So solving the piracy problem overnight would do basically nothing to fix the news industry's woes, financially speaking. Strategically, it wouldn't help much, either, since sites that illegally copy wire stories tend to be very low-stakes operations, usually Google spammers trying to make small change via AdSense (see Wired's explanatory chart). More dangerous to newspapers is the explosion in Web outlets that give news without infringing on copyrights (with the possible exception of the Huffington Post, which could stand to dial back its "excerpting" a notch).

UPDATE:Recently departed nytimes.com general manager Vivian Schiller, now at NPR, tells Newsweek that "news is a commodity:"

I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online. It's almost like there's mass delusion going on in the industry-They're saying we really really need it, that we didn't put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so let's do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn't work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we're all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us. News is a commodity; I'm sorry to say.

(Disclaimer: Attributor CEO Jim Pitkow once headed Moreover, the syndication company co-founded by Gawker Media chief Nick Denton.)

(Pic via Ioan Sameli)

Asked about digital piracy, King emailed Motoko Rich of the New York Times:

The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys. And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.

Or reading novels by Cory Doctorow, the Boing Boing blogger with a little-known sideline in fiction. Doctorow doesn't mind if you copy his books — in fact, he gives them away. To guys living in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.

Ripped copies of commercial DVDs have replaced screener copies, thanks to early-release DVDs from other world regions. Those DVDs, which skip the special features and image processing that go into American releases, were originally made to sell copies earlier in countries like Russia, where pirated screeners get ripped to DVD and are sold on the street. But by beating the pirates to the punch in the East, distributors helped viewers in the West get high-quality pirated movies before the Academy even got their screeners.

But that's not all the irony! Fear of piracy can also kill a film's Oscar chances. Baio noted in last year's piracy roundup that late and broken screeners probably killed Munich's Oscar shot in 2005, and that Crash won Best Picture after sending screeners to all the voters it could, while Disney took such anti-piracy pains that over a fourth of Academy voters didn't even watch its screeners, and Narnia only won Best Makeup.

Since some studios seem willing to kill their chances at an Oscar just to keep leaks off the Internet, I want to know: How many of you actually pirate movies online?

The recording industry is suffering from a bit of an image problem lately. Beyond digital ineptitude, as illustrated by Universal CEO Doug Morris and Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman, the RIAA is wasting money on lawsuits while attempting to hack publicly funded universities. Bad press isn't the best way to win consumer goodwill, and by cutting ties with the rest of the industry, EMI could send the message that it cares more about selling music than suing its customers.

This, Anderson said, after the MPAA told him, "We would need somebody like you. We would give you a nice paying job, a house, a car, anything you needed.... if you save Hollywood for us you can become rich and powerful."

After signing the contract, Anderson held up his side of the bargain, guessing at user passwords until he gained access to TorrentSpy's email servers and then forwarding information to the MPAA.

But after Anderson cashed his $15,000 for services rendered, he said he never heard from the MPAA again. Whoops.

Eventually, the attention-starved deviant went to Torrentspy's founder, Justin Bunnell, and confessed. Now Bunnell is suing the MPAA for illegal wiretapping. Anderson, however, faces no legal trouble.

"He took steps to advise us of his wrongdoing and to cooperate. We've made a decision to go after the bigger wrongdoing, the MPAA," Bunnell's attorney, Ira Rothken, told Wired.

Trent Reznor, frontman for Nine Inch Nails, is on the warpath against his record label, Universal Music Group. In Sydney, Reznor kicked off the NIN concert with an appeal to the crowd to steal his music until the labels realize they're ripping people off. This follows his attack on the recording industry while playing the Beijing Pop Festival earlier this month. He asked Chinese fans who couldn't obtain legal copies of his album to download it off the Web. Reznor views labels as greedy entities — charging progressively more for records without passing any additional revenue to artists. Once the band's contract with Universal is finished, Reznor plans to sell music directly to his fans for about $4 an album.

Update: Comcast says it does not throttle BitTorrent traffic. A representative told Silicon Alley Insider that Comcast does use various technologies to manage its network, but the company does not throttle or block BitTorrent or any application.

First step: Figuring out how to shut down increasingly crafty uploaders, who are putting copyrighted shows on Veoh and labeling them with nonsensical names to escape the reach of movie and music companies' takedown notices. And to do so, he'll have to batttle former CEO and founder Dmitry Shapiro, who's becoming Veoh's "chief innovation officer." As such, he'll no doubt continue to mouth platitudes about respecting copyright — and then come up with "innovations" like VeohTV, a piece of software which makes it easy to grab video from anywhere on the Web and store it on a user's hard drive, where, again, it's hard for media lawyers to find it.