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)

That fellow was sentenced to a half year of incarceration for burning a DVD of Mike Meyers' epic dud of a comedy last year. Yates got a hold of the movie at the Burbank duplication company that was hired by the studio to cut promo reels for talk shows. When Yates was caught, in true American fashion he started blaming everybody else:

When confronted, Yates accused co-workers and Paramount employees of putting the contraband copy on the Internet. But videotaped footage showed Yates making the unauthorized copy of "The Love Guru" at work before leaving the building and then going into his car, Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik M. Silber said. Yates subsequently blamed his grandmother, saying that he showed the movie at her birthday party and she then gave it away to a cousin who gave it to a friend who was the former roommate of the man who is believed to have uploaded the movie, but has not yet been charged. In his plea agreement, Yates confessed to making a copy of the comedy and later distributing it to others.

Oh, oh dear. So the terrible leaking of The Love Guru was all Gramma's fault. Paramount was happy with the verdict, as, who knows!, had the terrible DVD not leaked online and been downloaded by sad weirdos 85,000 times, the film could have been a box office smash! Oh stealer of dreams, Jack Yates! Seriously, though, that really sucks dude. Shouldn't have stolen from work, sure. But six months in the clink? And for that movie? Pretty brutal.

In other piracy related news, a mother of four in Minnesota was just slapped with $1.92 million in fines for illegally downloading 24 songs off of Kazaa and then sharing them with other people.

"There's no way they're ever going to get that," said Thomas-Rasset, a 32-year-old mother of four from the central Minnesota city of Brainerd. "I'm a mom, limited means, so I'm not going to worry about it now."

Wait, she's from Brainerd? I know how she can get the money! Have someone kidnap one of her kids or something and then get the ransom money from her rich ex-husband and then have it all crumble around her as Frances McDormand foils everyone's plans and then finally get arrested in a sleazy North Dakotan motel. The perfect crime.

Don't do that file share shit guys! They're cracking down!

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.

It's all fun and games until they seize your freighter. Wired, which got its hands on a genuine Somali-pirate video, says they use the clips to prove to the shipping firms they hold up for ransom that they really have captured their ship and crew. Yet with the peppy opening music, we're reminded of another group of young men excited to be at sea:

What, exactly, does a fundraising email mean when it's accompanied by a picture of the sender with a gun? Send money or we'll shoot your kids?

Arnot's actual message, once decoded, was a bit more subtle. Arnot recently visited Somalia and met Rama, the most successful of the Somali pirates plaguing Ukrainian military transports and American cruiseliners. Drawing on that experience, he tried to argue that investing in piracy — like mortgage-bond peddlers, they too have financial backers — was a more likely bet than the success of Eaglebrook's fundraiser.

Arnot's letter is the best sign yet of the New Poorness — the desperation of rich people facing the prospect of being even slightly less rich, and the willingness of the wealthy to prey on each other (emotionally, for starters). Is Arnot really that different from the pirates he grudgingly admires?

Like father, like son. Eaglebrook, in Deerfield, Mass., serves students in grades six through nine; it takes both day students and boarders. Its website mentions the charitable activities of Arnot's son, Hayden Arnot, class of 2009. Will Hayden's school go under if his classmates' parents invest in Somali piracy futures rather than their beloved school? It surely doesn't help that Arnot is making the pirates sound like a safer way to go than, say, Bernie Madoff.

But even after a recent Chinese crackdown destroyed more than 47 million illegal publications ("including pirated DVD's," according to Variety), an exhausted government spokesman struggled to placate the West:

"In merely 20-odd years it is impossible for China to establish IPR (intellectual property rights) protection awareness similar to that of Western countries," said Yin Xintian, spokesman with the State Intellectual Property Office.

"As the country's economy expands, so does the production scale of each product. Taking all the factors into consideration, it is natural that there will be some piracy," Yin said.

There are fewer pirated DVDs circulating in China these days, though many people prefer to illegally download product or go to Internet cafés.

This sucks for us, who'd naturally planned to download the entire Summer Olympics before they're even broadcast — not just for the flexibility it gives us on vacation dates, but also for the furtive leg-up we'd have in Gawker Media's ultra-competitive Olympic wagering pools. We hope Chinese pirates media minds find a solution that works conveniently for everyone involved.

• China Takes Piracy Steps [Variety]
• Jackie Chan Billboard to Fight Piracy [Variety]

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?

· Though the number was down 10 percent from the same time last year, American Idol's 29.1 million viewers were more than enough to steamroll any doomed schedule-filler its network competition bothered to run against the Nielsen juggernaut™ [Variety]
· The Oscar season success of specialty units like Paramount Vantage, Miramax and Fox Searchlight seems to indicate that their major-studio parents have given up the burden of making "good" movies, conceding quality, awards-attracting filmmaking to their quirkier, lower-budgeted divisions. [Variety]
· The Sci Fi Channel has picked up the rights to Jericho reruns, demonstrating a willingness to weather the peanut-shipping wrath of the show's hard-core fanbase should the network ever decide to pull the series from its schedule. [THR]

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.