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Even music labels have a sense of humor. Hours after yanking a now-viral YouTube video of a man belting out Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” from a police cruiser, EMI is now letting the video play on.

The video features Robert Wilkinson breaking into song on his way to be booked for impaired driving.

The 29-year-old Canadian man uploaded the recording to YouTube after receiving it as part of the prosecution’s evidence package. The video has since been viewed millions of times with viewers praising Wilkinson’s near perfect rendition of the song, including its iconic drum solo.

Yesterday, however, the National Post reported that EMI had removed the video for copyright reasons. While the record label technically has cause to do so, it appears to have had a change of heart and allowed the video to be restored.

It can be seen here with the song beginning at the thirty second mark.

The Mountie in the cruiser allows Wilkinson to perform the song without interruption. At the end of the ride, the cop agrees not to cuff him after Wilkinson states “physical violence is the least of my worries.”

Wilkinson has told Canadian media he has received calls from as far away as New York. The Toronto Star reports he also posted a “loving apology to Queen” on his Facebook page.

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James Murdoch to step down as BSkyB chairman (The Guardian)

SEC Probes Groupon (Wall Street Journal)

Groupon settles coupon expiration lawsuits for $8.5 mln (Reuters)

Pinterest Co-Founder Paul Sciarra Is Leaving The Company (Startup Grind)

Angry Birds animated TV series to premiere in Autumn 2012 (The Guardian)

Google Wallet Co-Founding Engineer Departs Google for Square (NFC Times)

AT&T Embraces Startup Speed-Dating to Spur Innovation (Bloomberg)

Websites Have To Get Better [To respond to Readability] (ReadWriteWeb)

Researcher: Over 1 Million U.S. Cable Subscribers Cut Cord In 2011 (paidContent)

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In the two pieces, Amazon comes across as a highly secretive company — when it is viewed from the perspective of other businesses. Book publishers reading the philanthropy piece today will find new reasons to distrust the company. Consumers may not care as long as they are getting excellent customer service.

The first article, “Amazon a virtual no-show in hometown philanthropy,” says, “As Amazon prepares to turn 18 this summer, it cuts an astoundingly low profile in the civic life of its hometown.”

While Seattle companies like Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Boeing are actively involved in charitable giving, Seattle Times reporters Amy Martinez and Kristi Heim call Amazon a “giant, silent neighbor”:

Though Amazon is a Fortune 500 company, you won’t find the company’s name on the rosters of major donors to such venerable local nonprofits as the Alliance for Education, Seattle Art Museum and United Way.

The Seattle Times also found no record of significant Amazon donations to the Seattle Symphony, Washington’s Special Olympics, YMCA of Greater Seattle or Forterra, a prominent conservation group formerly called the Cascade Land Conservancy.

Amazon now “leases more office space downtown than any other private-sector employer,” but “won’t even acknowledge how many employees it has in the area.” A philanthropic consultant who worked with Microsoft calls the company a “black box.

Martinez and Heim note Amazon’s attitude may be changing:

In the past year – as The Seattle Times began looking into its charitable giving and shortly after [former City Council member Jan] Drago questioned Bezos at the company’s annual shareholder meeting – Amazon reached out to more than 30 local nonprofits, offering volunteers, in-kind donations and small, often unsolicited, cash contributions.

The second article, “Amazon.com trying to wring deep discounts from publishers,” written by Amy Martinez, examines Amazon’s increasingly important role in the world of book publishing as it becomes a book publisher itself.

Most of the piece doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following the company closely, but Martinez interviewed two small book publishers who have been fighting with Amazon over the company’s demand for better terms.

“Publishers rarely criticize companies they do business with,” Martinez notes, but “some say they’re speaking out against Amazon partly because they’re offended by its tactics. They describe Amazon’s demands — made in e-mail, with no personal-contact information provided — as overly aggressive and leaving almost no room for discussion.”

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It is bringing TVCheck, its smartphone app for checking in to TV shows, from France to the UK.

TVCheck asks users to point their phone’s camera at TV screens to identify shows by cloud-based signal processing, so they can share their viewing habit to social networks and interact with shows on the phone.

The app has garnered nearly 100,000 downloads since release in France last year, Orange business development director David Nahmani told paidContent, declining to disclose remaining active users.

In France, Orange has both a popular IPTV service and a mobile network to which it could have allied TVCheck but hasn’t. Neither will the app be bundled with Orange UK handsets, Nahmani said.

The idea is to ensure all comers can use it. To that end, it will be available to non-Orange customers through both iOS and Android. But, minus, the carriage that Orange’s services could have given it, TVCheck may be challenged to compete with GetGlue and Zeebox in particular.

Nahmani told paidContent TVCheck’s USPs over rivals are in-buit gamification, simplicity and show recommendation features. The app can recognise TV ads so the door is open to potential commercial tie-ups – just as Zeebox recently launched – Nahmani added, but Orange wants to try gathering a user base before committing to a revenue plan.

“We can imagine premium=access content, premium voting, advertising – but all those activities will come later,” Nahmani said.

He is trying to strike partnerships with broadcasters which he hopes might want to include interactive features relating to their shows in the app – again, just like some others apps are doing.

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In three lawsuits filed this week, Unifi Scientific Batteries claims that Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) and a group of phone and tablet makers violate US patent 6791298, “Monolithic battery charging device.”

The patent appears to relate to a process for recharging a battery:

A monolithically formed battery charger may be fabricated as an integral part of a multifunctional integrated circuit or as independent monolithically formed integrated circuit. The monolithically formed battery charger includes at least one step-down converter having a given duty ratio coupled to a battery-terminal interface that provides a stepped-down output voltage and current that may be used to charge a rechargeable battery.

The patent was issued in 2003 and has since passed through a series of shell companies until it was acquired by Unifi last October. Companies like Unifi, known as patent trolls, typically serve as alter-egos for lawyers and investors that make a business of collecting patents and suing companies that produce goods.

The other defendants and products named in the lawsuit are: Research In Motions’ Playbook and Storm 9530; Barnes & Noble’s Nook; Samsung; Texas Instruments; HTC; Nokia; (NYSE: NOK) Sony.

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) were not named in the lawsuits.

The lawsuits were filed in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas which has long been a popular venue for patent trolls.

Here’s a copy of one of the complaints:

Unifi v RIM and Phone Industryhttp://www.scribd.com/embeds/87388717/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-21rih1gtxlt128p11601

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This time, the reluctant dating site star is a Slate contributor who teases us with the headline, “I found my boyfriend’s face on a dating website!”

The story, alas, is less tawdry than we hoped — it turns out both the boyfriend and the writer herself had let a friend sell pics of them to a stock photo agency.

The agency in turn sold the photos to dating site HowAboutWe and, voila, minor internet scandal.

The lesson here seems to be don’t volunteer for stock photos and you won’t end up on the internet. As the writer discovered, model release contracts are fairly bulletproof so there’s not much she and her boyfriend can do.

The story does, though, provide a fun tour of other unexpected photo finds — including a man “who cried when he saw that his leg had been digitally chopped off for a billboard about the dangers of diabetes.”

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The children want royalties to songs like “I Got a Woman” and “Mary Ann” which are now being paid to the Ray Charles Foundation, an organization that funds projects related to education and hearing impairment.

Charles, who died in 2004, has twelve children but only seven are named in the lawsuit.

The Ray Charles dispute is the second high profile case to emerge over so-called “termination rights.” The first involves the lead singer of the Village People who is in California court in an effort reclaim “YMCA” and other hits.

Studios and other content owners, who face the loss of valuable backlists, are attempting to rely on legal loopholes to avoid the transfers. One of these involves the “work for hire” rule which says artists can’t claim rights if they make the creative work as an employee.

The purpose of the 35-year law, which is part of the 1978 Copyright Act, is to ensure that artists who signed bad deals when they were young can have a second bite at the apple.

In the case of Charles, the foundation is arguing that the studios already increased royalty terms once already and his heirs can’t try to sweeten the deal a second time. It is also saying some of the songs were works for hire and that the children are barred by contract from claiming the work.

Ray Charles was the subject of a 2004 Oscar-winning biopic Ray.

Ray Charles termination lawsuit
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Over the past few weeks, we’ve brought some of GigaOM’s stories to paidContent and vice versa, only hinting at the depth of coverage our combined efforts will offer. But most of the integration has been behind the scenes — until now.

In just a few days, we will move into that new home when paidContent shifts to the same publishing platform as GigaOM. Most of the changes are under the hood — you’ll still see the same great stories by the same top-notch writers and much of the site’s look and feel will be very familiar. But we are making a few important changes that we want to fill you in on before you visit our new virtual digs.

Same furniture, different rooms

Now that we are part of the larger GigaOM Network, some of our content will be appearing in different places. Both mocoNews and paidContent:UK are being phased out as sites; rest assured, their content stays. Links are being preserved and all the content is moving over.

Between the ubiquity of smartphones and the growing importance of tablets, content lines are getting more blurred. Having a separate site to cover mobile content no longer makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that we’re reducing our mobile coverage — far from it. Tom Krazit, who has so adeptly led mocoNews for the past year, is joining forces with GigaOM’s mobile writers. Together, that combined team lets us get deep into mobile technology on GigaOM, while at paidContent we continue to focus on how it fits into digital content strategy and monetization. The mocoNews archives will live on paidContent.org. You will have access to it all.

paidContent:UK has been an important voice on the transformation of digital content. But there are more stories to be told about Europe, and we’re delighted that Robert Andrews, an integral part of that site since its launch, will continue his coverage as part of a bigger team with a broader international reach. We’ll reveal more about those plans soon. As is the case with mocoNews, all of the content will be at paidContent.org and existing links will be redirected.

It’s only getting better

Thanks to the intense effort of our developers, you’ll have access to all the vital pieces of the current paidContent site when we switch to the new platform: our daily coverage, our archives, our newsletter, RSS feeds, search, a revamped event site, and more. With most of these pieces, you may not even notice a change. There are other features that we won’t have initially but will be rolling out gradually. Don’t worry, we’ll provide you with a comprehensive guide to all of the changes when the new paidContent goes live next week.

Most important, as we promised in February, paidContent is only getting better as part of GigaOM.

As we near the end of our first decade, I’m thrilled to be able to say we continue to bring you the same news coverage, smart reporting, and insightful analysis of the rapidly evolving economics of digital content — and we will be able to bring you more of it.

Thanks for your support. Welcome to the new era of paidContent.

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The AAP is beefing up its monthly reports with data from many more publishers — 1,149 for January 2012 compared to under 100 in past months — and more detailed reporting on specific genres: Children’s/young adult e-book sales are now broken out and religious book sales are divided by hardcover, paperback and e-books.

Here’s how January 2012 compared to January 2011. Overall, trade sales were up 27 percent compared to January 2011, and children’s/YA sales were up 80.5 percent compared to January 2011.

What accounts for the growth? The AAP notes that last January’s trade sales were negatively affected as bankrupt Borders began returning books to publishers. Children’s books have seen strong growth for a few months now — due in part to highly successful series like The Hunger Games, and also possibly due to “Shop Local” initiatives around the holidays.

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