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When users first began to share music online, the music label's first reaction was to sue them. While this did little to deter music sharing, it ruined the public's opinion of these labels. Given how easy it is to copy and share text online, the newspaper industry currently faces similar problems, but instead of just sharing the content with their friends, a lot of sites simply appropriate a paper's articles - often in order to sell advertising next to the pirated text. A new study from Attributor, however, shows that news organizations have more effective means of fighting these pirates than suing them.

Just as the iPad has proven to be a boon to magazine publishers, newspapers have flocked to the device too. All of the major western newspapers have an iPad app now: the New York Times, Wall St Journal, Guardian, USA Today, Financial Times, and others. There are also new forms of news services that have arisen based solely on the iPad's touchscreen interaction and multimedia capabilities: Newsy and Flipboard come to mind.

In this post we'll look at how some of the leading newspapers are using iPad, what the user experience is like, and what could be improved still. We'll specifically look at WSJ, NYT and Newsy.

Fans of "old media" who treasure the sensation of flipping through inky newsprint have argued against the customized curation of Internet news. As they see it, this eliminates the chance of discovering a story or topic you didn't know you were looking for. However, the Internet has been known to leverage technology in order to resolve these conflicts. Just as Pandora helps music lovers discover music according to their tastes, a new app for the iPhone - The Accidental News Explorer (ANE) - invites users to "look for something, find something else."

The argument over the utility of open source has one more voter in the yes camp. This time, it's the Journal Register Company, a U.S. newspaper chain with 170 publications.

Calling it the Ben Franklin Project, the company tried open source for a month. Things went so well it decided to make it permanent and company-wide for its 18 daily newspapers and their websites.

Traditional media's first major adoption of Web 2.0 came with Facebook, as outlets syndicated their content on the popular social network by way of fan pages and official accounts. Then, Twitter went mainstream as writers, editors and the media organizations themselves signed up, sent out links, and chatted about related topics in 140 character bursts. Now it seems traditional media outlets are flocking to another service - one that is almost a hybrid of the others, allowing for short-form posts, but with richer format.

What's the new trend among legacy media? Why it's none other than Tumblr.

We are all aware of the floundering print industry that has seen a steady decline in revenues over the last several years. Newspapers that once thrived on the cash-cows that were classifieds and print advertising have had their lunch eaten by the disruptive forces of Craigslist and online advertising, which have slowly chipped away at print ad sales. Soon, however, according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Internet advertising revenues will surpass those of print advertising to become the second largest segment of advertising in the U.S. behind television.

When Apple's iPad hit the shelves just over two months ago, many wondered whether it would become as ubiquitous and as popular as the iPhone and iPod touch. One area many thought would benefit by the iPad was publishing, and some early stats could be a sign that the industry is indeed gaining traction. Wired Magazine and The Financial Times have both seen significant returns on their iPad-based applications, and with some help from Adobe, other publishers will soon find it easy to join in on the fun.

Swiss startup Kooaba is trying to bring the worlds of printed news and virtual content closer together with its Paperboy iPhone app. This app, which is currently only available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, allows users to take pictures of articles from a range of popular magazines and papers and then see additional content about these articles on their iPhones. Paperboy will also make a digital version of the article available in your Kooaba archive and users can then share this article with their friends by email and on Facebook and Twitter.

Sony just announced that it is expanding its selection of newspapers and magazines in its e-book store. Starting today, users of Sony's e-readers will be able to subscribe to 20 new newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, PC Magazine and Foreign Affairs. With the newspaper business in turmoil, it only makes sense for these papers to try to get a better foothold on more devices.

According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 61% of Americans now get some of their news online, though local TV stations are still the most popular means of finding out about the news. Local print newspapers still reach 50% of Americans and 17% read the print versions of national papers like the New York Times or USA Today.

While 38% of Americans still rely solely on offline sources for their daily news, only 2% of adults in the U.S. get their news exclusively from online sources.