DirecTV and EchoStar Get New CEOs; Michael Dugan to come out of retirement to run EchoStar, while Michael White is leaving Pepsi to head up DirecTV. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Spot Runner Intros a Web Platform; company says the Malibu Media Platform helps to algorithmically match ad buyers and sellers. (MediaWeek)

Report: Vivendi Wants More Cash from GE; company wants a bigger portion in cash for its 20 percent stake in NBC in regards to the Comcast deal. (Bloomberg)

Lawyers Launch Class-Action Redbox Site; RedboxLateFees.com let’s people figure out if they are eligible to join the lawsuit. (Video Business)

GlideTV Intros On-Screen Keyboard App for Macs; the GlideTV OSK links the living room to popular application and web sites when used with the GlideTV Navigator. (GlideTV)

CoolIris Now on TV.com; TV portal now using the 3-D visual interface in its “Shows” section. (TechCrunch)

Which HD TV is Right for You? HDGuru provides a walk-through when picking a new set. (HDGuru)

This morning’s Video Rights Roundtable was, as we hoped, a rare opportunity for online video industry players to talk about their conflicts and collaborations in the wild — not in a courtroom or conference room. In a (more than) two-hour discussion, the nearly 50 attendees shared their perspectives on the increasingly complex world of rights, responsibility and opportunities surrounding online video content. Complete liveblog coverage is available at GigaOM Pro (subscription required), and Ryan Lawler was on-site with some additional event coverage at NewTeeVee. More links below the fold (and full event video coming soon!).

• In Round One, Ethan Applen, director of technology and business strategy for Warner Bros., talked about copyright enforcement as video content shifts online. While the DVD business was threatened by the emergence of digital piracy, he said that online distribution is even more vulnerable. To approach the problem, he said, the first line of defense is to make illegal consumption of content online more difficult. “That’s what we need to tackle,” he added (subscription required).

• In Round Two, Liz Gannes brought Michael Seibel, CEO of Justin.TV, and Yangbin Wang, from Vobile, up to discuss rights issues specific to real-time/live-streaming video content (subscription required). The two companies are partnering to automate unauthorized content detection and takedown. Ryan has the full scoop at NewTeeVee.

• In Round Three, Betsy Zedek, content protection counsel, Fox Group Legal, fielded questions about the future of copyright law in the digital age (sub. required), and the audience discussed the sticky issue of fair use. Paul Sweeting takes a deeper look at these issues at GigaOM Pro.

• The final section of the event was an open discussion among the audience (sub. required), which touched on the challenges posed by BitTorrent (Ryan recaps this discussion over at NewTeeVee), opportunities to monetize online content in new ways, and the future of medium-budget movies.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the advocacy group Public Knowledge sent tit-for-tat letters to the FCC yesterday over the issue of Selectable Output Control (SOC). The MPAA has petitioned for waiver on the FCC’s ban of SOC, which would allow analog outputs from consumer electronics devices to be disabled, and, by extension, would prevent people from watching certain content unless they had special digital inputs on their TV sets.

The MPAA says that enabling Selectable Output Control would help stem piracy and would allow studios to release movies on VOD sooner after they appear in theaters.

Public Knowledge doesn’t buy that argument and sees the issue as a matter of control over what kind of TV you can use. It sent a letter to FCC Genachowski asking the Commission to deny the MPAA the waiver. Public Knowledge wrote:

[O]ver the past year, the MPAA has failed to provide a reason as to why the limited interests of its six member movie studios should be allowed to outweigh the interests of those consumers that will be forced to replace over 20 million television sets and countless other devices in order to view content that their current equipment is capable of displaying.

In its response, the MPAA sent its own letter (PDF) to the FCC and wrote:

[G]rant of the waiver would for the first time allow millions of consumers to view high- value, high-definition theatrical films during an early release window that is not available today. MPAA has explained that release of this high-value content as part of an earlier window, especially with respect to movies released for home viewing close to or even during their initial theatrical run, necessarily requires the highest level of protection possible through use of SOC.

Chinese P2P startup Xunlei has sued its competitor Sohu for copyright infringement, according to the Shenzen Daily. Xunlei is alleging that Sohu’s search engine, Sogou, is infringing on copyrights related to Xunlei’s P2P software as well as its own search engine, Gougou.com. Sohu had previously filed its own copyright infringement lawsuits against Xunlei and other Chinese P2P vendors.

China has long been a P2P video wunderkind of sorts. Efforts to establish P2P-based consumer video platforms like Joost and Babelgum have largely failed in the U.S. and Europe, but similar offerings attract millions of users in China. However, the Chinese market is saturated with literally dozens of video vendors, and efforts to grow their business beyond the PC have stalled due to strict government licensing requirements.

Xunlei is a popular Chinese P2P client that combines BitTorrent with web-based downloads. The company’s Gougou.com search engine links to TV shows and movies hosted on various ftp servers and web sites. Users can download these files and automatically accelerate their downloads through Xunlei’s P2P functionality. Gougou obfuscates these links in order to get users to access the content with its own client and sign up for its premium services, which include remote downloading to Xunlei’s servers.

However, that didn’t stop Sohu from allegedly crawling these sites as well and publishing the direct download links without any Xunlei-specific code. Xunlei wasn’t too happy about that and decided to sue last week. Some reports suggest the lawsuits include complaints about cracked versions of Xunlei appearing in Sohu search results. Sohu previously sued Xunlei for broadcasting a TV series that the company had exclusive online rights for, and it recently announced further lawsuits against Xunlei and other competitors under the helm of a newly formed “Online Video Copyright Union.”

You know the fight for market share is getting ugly when online video companies do the dirty work for rights holders and sue each other for copyright infringement. The irony of these lawsuits is that much of the content indexed by both search engines clearly isn’t licensed to begin with. We asked both companies for their side of the story, but haven’t heard back from Xunlei, and just got a brief “no comment” from Sohu.

The lawsuits shouldn’t really surprise anyone who has been following the Chinese online video industry. The country is home to a number of large P2P video platforms as well as YouTube-like sites. P2P streaming service PPLive, for example, touts up to 30 million active viewers per month, and YouTube-like Youku boasts 140 million visitors per month. Both compete with at least a handful of similar services, many of which also have an impressive user base. There isn’t one clear market leader like YouTube in the U.S., and Chinese online video business models still seem to be in a flux.

At the same time, it’s been getting harder for Chinese video ventures to grow their market beyond the PC audience. PPStream and Xunlei have tried to get their platforms on set-top boxes and connected TV sets, but those efforts have stalled because of the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. The government agency views set-top box offerings as equal to over-the-air or cable television programming, which means that online video startups would need to get a special Internet TV license. That hurdle seems to be so high that a Chinese TV set manufacturer actually canceled plans to include PPStream in one of its connected TV sets in September.

The challenge and opportunity of live video, the promise of viral distribution as marketing, and the state of fingerprinting technology and the DMCA are some big-ticket questions at the core of the web video business. To try to make some headway on them, NewTeeVee is going to offer up some bonus content for you next week ahead of the NewTeeVee Live conference, in the form of a live-streamed session on the topic of online video copyright and syndication.

Here’s the pitch:

The creation of original content underpins our industry, but Internet video has exploded too quickly for copyright laws to react. Technology and content companies have necessarily developed interim approaches to monitoring, regulating, spreading and monetizing content online. Rarely have these stakeholders had a chance to sit down to talk to one another constructively about where these activities are headed.

To start to address that need, we’re hosting a small event from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. PST on Wednesday, Nov. 11 at our office in San Francisco. Attendees will include content owners, video sites and copyright service providers, such as:

Ethan Applen, director of technology and business strategy, Warner Bros.
Betsy Zedek, counsel, content protection, Fox Group Legal
David King, senior product manager of Content ID, YouTube
Michael Seibel, CEO, Justin.tv
Yangbin Wang, CEO, Vobile

If you’d like to contribute in person to the Video Rights Roundtable, please drop me a note at Liz at gigaom.com. Otherwise, tune in on NewTeeVee for a live feed powered by Livestream.

Of course, the day after the roundtable we’re having a much bigger public event, NewTeeVee Live. If you’d like to join us for a lively day of conversations with thinkers and doers like Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Comcast’s Amy Banse, and the soon-to-be-independent CBS Interactive head Quincy Smith, we still have a few tickets left, so grab yours now.

UPDATED: Salvatore Cuffaro, an former Italian politician who was found to have ties with the Mafia in Italy, is taking legal action against 4,609 YouTube commenters.

This story comes via Techdirt and Boing Boing, and there are some issues with translation, but here are what seem to be the basics: The video (embedded here) is from the early ’90s and features Cuffaro before he was elected president of Sicily in 2001. Stefano Polli, a Boing Boing commenter, provided what he says is a translation of what’s happening in the video:

The man onstage with mustaches on the right is one of our civil heroes, Giovanni Falcone, an anti-mafia judge that paid his commitment dying in the most terrifying of the cosanostra attacks, the Capaci carnage. The yelling guy is Salvatore Cuffaro 10 years before becoming the president of Sicily. He is complaining about how journalists and some kind of magistrates (referring to Mr. Falcone) are damaging sicilian politic system and the whole Sicily with their “false” accusations, even more than CosaNostra itself.

We’re not sure exactly what legal actions Cuffaro is taking, but on Oct. 22 he “laid charges,” writes Boing Boing. An anti-corruption Italian political party called Italia del Valori has offered to cover the legal defense of any of the commenters that need help.

A criminal investigation has been launched against senior executives of YouTube and parent company Google in Hamburg, Germany, over allegations of copyright infringement, according to media reports from that country. The case started after a complaint by German music rights holders; Hamburg’s prosecutor has formally requested assistance from U.S. colleagues to compel YouTube to produce log files identifying who uploaded as well as who viewed 500 specific videos.

It’s unclear if the investigation will ever result in an actual court case. German prosecutors routinely throw out criminal investigations against copyright infringement, leaving it up to the parties involved to pursue civil lawsuits or settle out of court. The case does, however, once again demonstrate that Viacom’s massive one billion-dollar lawsuit isn’t the only copyright dispute Google has to tackle. There are regularly lawsuits all around the globe accusing YouTube and Google as running a worldwide video platform. Indeed, at a time when fragmented rights and universal access continue to collide, not irking rights holders seems impossible.

The current investigation started as the result of a formal complaint by Hamburg-based lawyer Jens Schippmann, who represents 25 German musicians, producers and music publishers. Schippmann sued Google in civil court earlier this year, alleging that videos of his clients have been viewed more that 125 million times without any compensation. Schippmann now alleges that Google didn’t respond to requests to take down more that 8,000 videos and that his clients were denied access to the company’s Content ID Program. He also claimed that users would utilize YouTube as a kind of “covert file-sharing platform,” tagging his clients videos with keywords like “album quality” to encourage downloading.

Google strongly objected to these claims, according to a report by German IT news site Netzwelt.de. German Google spokesperson Henning Dorstewitz rejected the idea that executives or other employees of Google or YouTube were committing criminal acts of infringement. “We cooperate with thousands of rights holders across the globe,” Dorstewitz told Netzwelt.

He was undoubtedly referring to Google’s Content ID system, which is able to identity songs used in videos based on audio fingerprinting technologies, among other things. Google recently told us that more than a thousand rights holders have utilized Content ID to date, with the total number of reference files used to identify rights holders’ works now being north of a million. Content ID makes it possible to flag certain videos or songs used in videos for takedown, but rights holders can also elect to keep these videos up and instead monetize them through advertising. These decisions can be country-specific, making it possible, for example, to monetize content in the U.S. and take it down in other countries.

Content ID hasn’t stopped rights holders around the globe from crossing swords with Google. Part of the problem is that music rights are extraordinarily complicated, with many different parties owning rights to the same song based on the type of use as well as the territory. One example: Licensing talks between the German music rights group GEMA and YouTube broke down this spring. German YouTube users have not only had to go without countless videos featuring songs licensed by GEMA ever since, but they won’t be able to watch U2’s YouTube concert that will be streamed live by the site this Sunday, either.

However, the current criminal investigation wouldn’t go away even if Google and GEMA made up tomorrow. The rights holders represented by Schippmann only signed over certain rights to GEMA and instead decided to go after Google by themselves.

Court Orders Pirate Bay to Delete Torrents; site operators are found responsible, but don’t have to block access to Dutch users. (TorrentFreak)

The Sales-Only Window Is Real; studio sources confirm Netflix CEO’s assertion that the industry will block more than just Redbox discount rentals — though delays may actually be traded for better deals. (LA Times)

Why TV Is Good for the World; interesting read on the global effects of television, past, present and future. (Foreign Policy)

yfrog Adds Webcam Uploads; now users can post videos and photos to Twitter using the yfrog, web site, iPhone, email, and many desktop and mobile Twitter apps. (emailed release)

Which Came First, the Rights or the Monetization? Supercomm panelists say multiple aspects of a successful online video business are still missing. (Contentinople)

Here in the UK, last night’s Question Time — a BBC show where audience members can ask questions of a panel, usually consisting mainly of politicians — caused uproar as the BBC invited Nick Griffin, the controversial leader of the far right British National Party, to participate on the show.

While the general opinion seems to be that Griffin’s appearance hasn’t done his party many favors (and Griffin is planning on formally complaining about his treatment on the show), one thing about the show struck me as interesting. Every time Griffin tried to portray his party as being more moderate in its views, the other members of the panel would respond by pointing out various videos of Griffin available on YouTube, such as this one of Griffin appearing on stage with Ku Klux Klansman David Duke and explaining how to “sell” far right ideas, or denying that the holocaust took place. The live show didn’t stitch in the videos themselves, but the fact they existed was enough. While Griffin could claim that some quotes attributed to him in the media were untrue or taken out of context, it was very hard for him to deny the video evidence.

To see UK politicians — among them Jack Straw, a senior member of the Cabinet — citing specific YouTube videos to discredit Griffin (rather than, say, taking quotes from newspaper articles) was surprising and effective. Griffin had to resort to saying he couldn’t comment on the content of the Holocaust denial video out of concern he would be prosecuted under European law — a statement that was flatly denied by Jack Straw, who has some authority on the topic as UK Justice Secretary.

Simon Mackie is editor of our sister site WebWorkerDaily.

3 Sex Crime Arrests for Stickam This Year; multiple users of the live video site allegedly broadcasted sexual acts, some with minors. (New York Times Bits Blog)

Revision3 Shows to Appear on Roku; tech-heavy online TV show will be free on the $99 box “very soon now.” (Revision3 blog)

NBA Releases Video Rule Book; wants fans to give referees a little more respect. (New York Times, NBA.com)

NBC Scores Q3 Profit; would be a loss if not for one-time gains, but it comes at a time when GE-owned network wants to look nice while Comcast gives it a look. (MediaMemo)

Hulu Gets the Feature Treatment; but not much in the way of new information from a long profile of the startup in Fast Company. (Fast Company)

Consumer Spending on Rentals Increases in Q3; DVD and Blu-ray rentals up 9.9 percent year-over-year, hitting $1.6 billion for the quarter. (Video Business)

New Tech Disrupts Camcorder Pirates; near-infrared LEDs behind movie screens put green and red blotches on surreptitious footage. (Variety)

Project Runway Heading for the Wii; players will create and “sew” their fashions and even strut the catwalk. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Barry Sonnenfeld Vlogs; director of Men in Black will talk about his geek passions on Crackle. (AllThingsD)

50 TV Insiders to Follow on Twitter; Ryan Seacrest, Seth Meyers, and Tracy Morgan among those recommended. (The Wrap)

EveryZing Signs FOXNews.com and FOXBusiness.com; company will provide search and SEO for both sites. (VideoNuze)

Soulja Boy Arrested; YouTube-driven star was apparently shooting a music video in a vacant house. (Associated Press)

Warner Music Group Outsources Ad Sales; the label using Veoh spin-off Outrigger Media to monetize online video. (AdAge)

PermissionTV Renames Itself Visible Gains; company drops out of competition with Brightcove and thePlatform to focus on B2B marketing. (Contentinople)

Netflix Subscribers Go for Value; today’s most popular plans are the lowest-priced ones (which include unlimited streaming); CEO says traditional DVDs will be king for only two more years. (Video Business)

Microsoft Gives Smooth Streaming to Everyone; IIS Media Services 3.0 released today, same as what’s already been used for Sunday Night Football and Wimbledon. (Silverlight blog)

YouTube Close to Signing Channel 4; British broadcaster would give the site full episodes and sell its own ads. (Telegraph) In other premium content news, the site got (U.S. only) access to Taxi Driver yesterday via its relationship with Sony’s Crackle. (YouTube blog)

Health care shmealth care — government is finally working to solve a problem we can all get behind: loud commercials. The House Communications Subcommittee has approved a bill that would require broadcasters and operators (including satellite and cable) to normalize the volume of TV advertisements.

Broadcasting & Cable writes that the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) is backed by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.):

Eshoo said the bill premise was simple: “To make the volume of commercials and programming uniform so that spikes in volume do not affect the consumer’s ability to control sound.” Eshoo said that ad volume spikes had “endangered hearing for decades.” She also said legislative spouses had been urging their husbands or wives to sign on as co-sponsors. “I think they are all tired of getting blasted out of their easy chairs or off their exercise equipment due to these ridiculously loud commercials.”

After the fast-forward button (to zap through the commercials entirely), “mute” is the second most used button on the Albrecht remote. I’m not sure why advertisers think that YELLING at us will make us like their product, but hopefully this bill will pass and the TV will quiet down.

It looks like the bill only addresses oldteevee, which is too bad because we’ve noticed that newteevee sites definitely fiddle with the ad volume as well.

In the ongoing back and forth of Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube/Google, evidence may have been uncovered that shows YouTube employees were among those who uploaded unauthorized copyrighted content to the site, according to CNET.

In addition, internal emails show that YouTube managers were aware of the unauthorized content on the site, but kept the material up anyway. CNET explains why this knowledge is important:

Such evidence could be a major blow to YouTube’s defense. If managers possessed “actual knowledge” of copyright infringement on the site and did not quickly remove it, the company may not be entitled to protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe-harbor provision, according to legal experts.

The difference between a general knowledge of copyrighted material on the site and specific knowledge of particular instances is an important distinction. A federal judge recently threw out Universal Music’s lawsuit against online video site Veoh. Jonathan Steinsapir, a Santa Monica-based attorney with Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert explained to us at the time of the decision:

The Court emphatically rejected UMG’s attempts to get around the DMCA’s immunity by arguing, among other things, that Veoh should be stripped of immunity because it knows, at a very general level, that there is content on its site that infringes others’ copyrights…It was not enough for UMG to prove that Veoh generally knew that some users inevitably upload content to its site that infringes someone else’s copyrights.

A YouTube spokesperson told CNET, “The evidence will show that we go above and beyond our legal obligations to protect the rights of content owners.”

Google is also looking to protect its $1.65 billion investment in the video site. In a separate story, CNET reports that Eric Schmidt said under oath in a Viacom deposition last spring that leading up to the acquisition, he thought YouTube was worth $600 – $700 million. But he paid a billion more than he thought the site was worth to fend off competition from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft.

YouTube has made a concerted effort over the past year to sidestep future copyright entanglements by wooing Hollywood and other premium content owners. And times have changed since the 2007 Viacom lawsuit kicked off. YouTube’s content monitoring tool, which debuted after the lawsuit, has evolved from strictly policing the site to enabling content owners to monetize unauthorized content uploads.

FOX Files Brief to Dismiss Redbox’s Suit; the two entities are in an ongoing tussle over $1 per night movie rentals and timely access to DVDs; the studio calls Redbox’s claims “fatally flawed.” (AllThingsD) For some background on this story, see our previous coverage.

Analyst: NBComcast Would Pass Government Muster; Stifel Nicolaus says operator/programmer combo would likely get administration approval with certain conditions. (Broadcasting & Cable)

Dollhouse Gets into Augmented Reality; desktop download puts a virtual “Echo” on your screen acting out various actions. (The Live Feed) For more on augmented reality, check out the new GigaOM Pro report Augmented Reality: Lost of Promise, Lots of Hurdles. (subscription required)

What Does the Flip Remote Control? New filing with the FCC shows a Flip Video-branded RF remote. (Engadget)

Video Game Spore to Become a Movie; 20th Century Fox acquires the rights to turn it into a CG animated feature. (Heat Vision Blog)

Students in Disney Movie Appreciation Club Told They Can’t Watch Films; because multiple students were gathered to watch the movie without a proper license, the group shut down. (TechDirt)

The House Energy & Commerce Committee is scheduled to mark up tomorrow a bill dubbed the Informed P2P User Act (H.R. 1319) that aims to prevent accidental file-sharing by mandating the display of clear warnings during the installation and usage of P2P software. Critics, however, fear that the final bill might end up going much further, regulating FTP clients, web browsers and even complete operating systems.

The bill could also have implications for anyone trying to leverage P2P for video distribution via solutions like the Octoshape Flash plug-in that was used by CNN.com to handle the Obama inauguration livestream traffic. The irony of the whole controversy is that much of the support for H.R. 1319 has been motivated by an almost religious disdain for just one file-sharing program in particular.

The Informed P2P User Act, which was introduced by Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) in March, is supposed to prevent so-called inadvertent file-sharing, which has in the past resulted in the leaking of Social Security numbers, tax returns and even classified government documents. Inadvertent file-sharing is usually caused by users accidentally sharing their documents folder or even their entire hard disk with everyone connected to the same P2P network. The bill would force makers of P2P software to inform users about its file-sharing capabilities and get their informed consent before installing the software in question. Users would also have to acknowledge that they know what they’re about to do before sharing any file. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

It would be, except the bill defines P2P applications as anything that “designate(s) files available for transmission to another computer” as well as transmits and receives files. Of course, the same can be said for FTP clients — or your browser, for that matter. “There’s little in this definition that limits the scope to an actual p2p application,” wrote Alex Curtis from Public Knowledge, and Declan McCullagh from CNet agreed: “Every copy of Windows, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X sold in recent memory includes a command-line FTP client fitting that definition.” And the current definition would also affect P2P streaming solutions and BitTorrent clients, even though there is virtually no risk that anyone would share his Social Security number through downloading a torrent or accessing a P2P video stream.

One of the most vocal supporters of the bill is the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Thomas Snydor, who’s testified before Congress numerous times about the subject. At the center of all of his testimonies is one single file-sharing client: LimeWire. Snydor alleges that the application has been intentionally designed to “prey on the weak” by tricking people into unknowingly sharing files.

He has repeatedly singled out functions of LimeWire that could lead to accidental file-sharing, claiming in his most recent testimony (PDF) that he was able to simulate the accidental sharing of almost 17,000 sensitive files “just by installing LimeWire 5.2.8.” Snydor had to backtrack later and admit that this was only possible because he prepared the PC by installing a previous version of LimeWire, enabling document sharing (an option hidden in a sub-menu that’s labeled with a clear warning message and takes six clicks to activate) and then uninstalling the earlier version before once again installing the client. LimeWire chairman Mark Gorton called the result of these actions in an interview with ComputerWeek “a highly misleading picture of reality.”

Of course, one might be able to argue that LimeWire could be doing a better job to prevent even such highly unlikely cases of accidental file-sharing. But do we really need a new bill for that? Even Thomas Snydor has difficulties justifying one. As he said in his most recent testimony, “[E]xisting laws already provide the authority needed to send a blunt and powerful message that would deter distributors of piracy-adapted file-sharing programs from causing further inadvertent sharing.”