1. Print editions of newspapers are going, going, gone.
2. TV may not be going anywhere. But it will get a lot better when we can use the Web to find our favorite shows.

And here’s the Los Angeles Times’ retort: “TV Times,” a new 44-page TV guide insert that will be bundled with the paper’s Sunday edition.

Here’s what you get: “A 24-hour daily grid listings spanning morning, afternoon, primetime and late-night programming, four pages of alphabetized TV/cable/satellite movie listings, a full-page cover story, a TV-related crossword puzzle, episode highlights and synopses, and a dedicated sports programming page.”

In a Hulu/GoogleTV/iTunes/BitTorrent/Clicker/TV Everywhere/Etc., etc., etc. age, why would you possibly want this? Because you don’t use any of the aforementioned services. The LAT, owned by bankrupt Tribune Co., doesn’t spell this out, but that’s clearly the thrust here: Anyone who still reads our print edition probably doesn’t spend much time online. Let’s see if they’ll pay up for more paper.

And the Times does expect people to pay, by the way. The LAT is charging its subscribers an extra $3 a month for this.

The Swedish site has been out all morning. TorrentFreak pins the outage on legal pressure from Hollywood studios, via an injunction granted by a German court against broadband provider CB3ROB, which had been routing the site’s traffic to the Web.

But if you’re looking to nab free music and movies via the site’s BitTorrent hub, you probably won’t have to wait long. As CNET points out, The Pirate Bay has lost bandwidth providers in the past and usually pops back up in fairly short order.

Meanwhile, if you want to grab your stuff via other means, there are plenty of options. LimeWire, for instance, which lost what appears to be a significant court case last week, is still up and running.

The micro-blogging service disclosed in a notice to developers late Tuesday that an unidentified person had been creating so-called “torrent” sites and forums for “a number of years” with the sole purpose of getting users to input user names and passwords the person could use to gain access to Twitter accounts.

The person “waited for the forums and sites to get popular and then used those exploits to get access to the username, email address, and password of every person who had signed up,” the notice stated.

Torrent sites are those that allow users to search for files sent through file-sharing service BitTorrent. Twitter didn’t identify any specific sites and forums it believes to be gathering the data.

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Congress on Tuesday introduced the Secure Federal File Sharing Act, which would restrict the use of peer-to-peer file sharing software like Limewire among federal employees.

The new legislation follows multiple embarrassing leaks of sensitive government information by means of open file sharing networks, including the location of a safe house for the First Family, financial files belonging to Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the electronic schematics to President Obama’s helicopter, and a list of 30 lawmakers currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

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Certainly, requiring Comcast (CMCSA) to disclose more information about its traffic management practices seems a mere slap on the wrist for a company that deliberately interfered with BitTorrent traffic in violation of Internet openness principles. But Comcast, which wants a court to reverse and vacate the FCC decision, feels even it was too much.

“The order is unlawful because it enforced mere policy–not any provision of federal law–against Comcast,” the company said in a brief filed with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals this week. “The commission’s action was procedurally improper and violated bedrock principles of fair notice…the FCC erred in enforcing mere policy…and this court can and should dispose of this case on that ground alone.”

In other words, since the FCC’s Network neutrality principles haven’t yet been codified, Comcast can’t be held accountable for violating them. The FCC, of course, disagrees. In a filing of its own, it wrote, “[FCC] determinations were lawful and reasonable….Congress created the FCC for cases such as this one.”

Indeed. And while it’s true that those Net neutrality principles Comcast ran afoul of aren’t yet official rules, they clearly will be soon.

This time, though, they’re not trying to convince consumers to pay for music or asking advertisers to subsidize it. Instead, they’re trying to act as a middleman between labels and publishers who own music and advertisers, Hollywood and other folks who want to use the tunes for commercial purposes.

Via Twain Media, their personal investment company, Goldberg and Roback have purchased a smallish start-up called mSoft and renamed it Dashbox, which they describe as a “subscription service that aggregates and manages all of your production music and sound effects.” The idea is to link up people who need to buy music for commercial reasons with rights holders, who are often scattered and hard to track down.

Roback will take the CEO spot at the renamed company; Goldberg, who has a day job running SurveyMonkey, will be chairman. The company hasn’t disclosed the terms of its mSoft purchase, but people familiar with the transaction tell me they bought the company for under $10 million.

Roback and Goldberg founded Launch Media in 1994, and sold it to Yahoo (YHOO) in 2001; the two stayed on to run Yahoo Music until 2007. Earlier this year, Goldberg invested in and took over SurveyMonkey, an online survey coordinator.

Goldberg is one of many former digital music executives I’ve talked to who thinks the music business is fundamentally broken, so at first blush it’s a tiny bit surprising to see him back in it again.

But he and Roback are essentially investing in an entirely different industry–it’s a business-to-business market that really hasn’t been affected much by the digital revolution. If you want to use a song in your TV show, you can’t steal it via BitTorrent or stream it for free on Spotify.

Nor has the digital revolution affected the industry’s infrastructure, which remains pretty ancient. Music supervisors for TV shows and movies still end up resorting to faxes and phone calls to track down tunes they’d like to use.

So there are some obvious opportunities for someone who can amass scale and decrease friction here. It may not be as sexy as providing consumers with all the free music they want, but it may end up being more profitable.

And by many accounts, Windows 7 is poised to do just that. Unlike Vista, it was completed on time. And unlike Vista, early reviews have been positive.

“Even in beta form, with some features incomplete or imperfect, Windows 7 is, in my view, much better than Vista, whose sluggishness, annoying nag screens, and incompatibilities have caused many users to shun it,” Walt Mossberg said of the OS back in January. “It’s also a serious competitor, in features and ease of use, for Apple’s current Leopard operating system.”

So Microsoft (MSFT) has good reason to be proud of this release-to-manufacturing, or RTM, milestone. There’s a lot riding on Windows. And the company seems to be very much on point as it brings the newest version to market.

“Today’s release is the result of hard work and collaboration with our partners in the industry to make Windows 7 a success,” wrote Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc in a post to the Windows 7 Team Blog. “We delivered Windows 7 with a predictable feature set on a predictable timetable that allowed OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] to focus on value and differentiation for their customers. We continue to be overwhelmed at the community’s response to Windows 7 and it has been an extremely rewarding experience to witness. We hope the enthusiasm will continue to grow even more as our partners build amazing experiences with their products and Windows 7.”

Ironically, this particular build of Windows 7–Build 7600.16385–which Microsoft designated as RTM, was leaked to the Internet nearly a week ago and has been available for download via BitTorrent ever since.

This is old news, literally: Chen left his spot as chief technology officer last fall, though he remains employed at Google (GOOG), which bought his company for $1.65 billion in 2006. “Steve shifted his focus to help with some Google engineering projects. He’s still involved with YouTube and invested in its success,” says YouTube spokesman Ricardo Reyes via email.

Google hasn’t officially named a replacement chief technology officer for Chen, and people at the company say the job no longer exists. But the highest ranking engineer at the company is now Louis Perrochon, who has been at Google since 2003.

Chad Hurley, who co-founded YouTube with Chen and Jawed Karim in 2004, remains the company’s CEO. But it’s not unusual for founders to move on from their companies within a few years of selling them.

The fact that Chen’s move  has gone unreported until now should underscore that his departure didn’t represent a major org chart reshuffling. The technical challenges of the site have long been handled by a large engineering team, which makes sense considering that the challenges themselves are large. YouTube now uploads 20 hours of video per minute.

Chen was reportedly working on a technology incubator project last fall along with BitTorrent co-founder Ashwin Navin; no word on what Chen is actually doing at Google now.

Here are Chen and Hurley in a video they shot and uploaded on Oct. 9, 2006, the day they sold their company to Google.

Thanks to all the readers who set me straight. It turns out there’s an easy answer for MegaVideo’s popularity: It’s a really good way to watch pirated movies and TV shows online.

The trick, it turns out, is not to go to MegaVideo itself to look for “The Dark Knight” or HBO’s new “Eastbound & Down” show. Instead you head to sites like movietvonline.com or sidereel.com, and they’ll direct you to one of MegaVideo’s streams. The stuff generally appears to be pretty good quality, and it’s much easier to access than a BitTorrent download–if you can use Hulu, you can use this stuff.

Apologies to anyone who finds this old hat. It’s obviously becoming more and more common for many of you. Again, take a look at this comScore (SCOR) growth chart. This is how you move from obscurity to the 10th-most popular video site in a year’s time (click graphic to enlarge):

Can’t Hollywood try to crack down on sites like MegaVideo and the sites that showcase their streams? After all, Google’s (GOOG) YouTube was once a piracy haven, and is much less so now. Same thing with DailyMotion, etc.

Sure. But the Chinese government has, um, a mixed record when it comes to IP protection. And in any event, we’re certainly going to see more of these coming down the pike, and it’s only going to be more commonplace.

All of which means that Hollywood, network TV and the cable companies have no choice if they want to keep viewers from turning to the pirates: Give them easy access to whatever they want, whenever they want it.

It’s the same scenario the music guys faced at the end of the 1990s, and they screwed it up. Look at them now.

Right now some of the players are talking a good game–“We think everything on television should become available to you on broadband for free,” Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes said yesterday at an investor conference. He doesn’t really mean free, by the way–he means free to cable and satellite TV subscribers.

The industry can hash out payment plans later. But first, those who make money creating and distributing video need to move very fast to get their stuff in front of viewers, wherever they want to see it. Because MegaVideo is already doing it.

If so, you might want to download the aptly named “Switzerland”–a tool that tests whether your Internet provider is violating the principles of so-called “network neutrality.”

Network neutrality, which prevents carriers from blocking traffic or manipulating the speeds of traffic from certain Web sites, became a hot-button issue several years ago when carriers suggested they should be allowed to charge content providers more for using faster lanes on their networks.

The issue resurfaced last summer when the FCC determined that Comcast (CMCSA) had interfered with its subscribers’ use of a file-sharing technology, called BitTorrent, a free application used to distribute sometimes large software and media files. Comcast is contesting the ruling.

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Bad news, Internet music, movie and other content “sharers”: The content companies are trading their sue-’em-all strategy for one that leans on Internet service providers to help them fight their battles for them. This may ultimately be much more effective. Here’s how it will work, via The Wall Street Journal:

The [Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's trade group] said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

The RIAA said it has agreements in principle with some ISPs, but declined to say which ones.”

The fact that the big labels are going to stop suing people who “share” their music via P2P services is the least interesting development here. That’s just the industry accepting that it lost a battle that ended years ago. In Q3 of this year, the volume of music swapped on via P2P increased 28 percent, says NPD.

More interesting is that Big Music thinks it has finally found an ally in the ISPs, who have traditionally been just fine with letting their subscribers swap all the music they wanted. It’s not clear what incentive they’ve offered to get the ISPs on board. And note that the WSJ doesn’t identify any ISPs that have actually signed on to this strategy. So this still may not be a done deal.

But the people who sell you Internet access–whether its the cable guys like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), or telcos like Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T)–have already shown a general inclination to help content owners fight piracy. Or at least help them fight particular kinds of particularly egregious piracy.

They’ve been doing so by trying to limit, in various ways, your ability to swap lots of files with other people. Some of these strategies have been clumsier than others.

Last year Comcast tried “throttling” the connections of broadband subscribers using some file-sharing software–a ham-handed approach (particularly the lying about it) that earned them a wrist-slap from the FCC.

But other companies have been more upfront about telling subs that they reserve the right to cut off file-sharers. A different approach that many are contemplating: simply charging heavy file-sharers a lot of money.

Do the ISPs really care about the sanctity of copyright? Doubtful. But they do care about the cost of moving lots of data around–and those costs are only going to increase as consumers start consuming more and more video over the Web.

And at least in the case of Hollywood, they do care about keeping content creators somewhat mollified, since all of the ISPs want to make money by selling, renting, or just offering up Hollywood’s movies and TV shows to subscribers.

So I’ve always understood why Comcast was standing up for the likes of Sony’s (SNE) movie studio. But why is Comcast (or its peers) going to start working on behalf of Sony’s music group? I’m all ears.

Web surfers may want to pause before cheering, though, as some are warning that the move could lead the way to Internet metering–under which people would be charged based on their usage levels instead of the traditional flat rate.

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Broader issues? Like reasonable network-management practices? The responsibility to deliver traffic fairly? Service disclosures? The sort of issues that might figure prominently in a “P2P Bill of Rights?”

Guess not.

Anyway, Comcast has already scrapped its policy of deliberately slowing some traffic flowing over BitTorrent and other P2P networks, so there’s really no need for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to bust its chops anymore. As Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manger of its Internet service, told the New York Times, Comcast’s new policy is to slow traffic based on usage pattern, not application. “[Our new technique] will be based purely on individual consumption by consumers,” Bowling said. “Anything in addition to that is outside the scope of what our network management goal is.”

So the company plans to throttle traffic to the customers that use the most bandwidth. Hmmm. I wonder who those might be? The folks who use the Internet for email and Web browsing or those who use it for downloading digital media?

Broader issues? Like reasonable network-management practices? The responsibility to deliver traffic fairly? Service disclosures? The sort of issues that might figure prominently in a “P2P Bill of Rights?”

Guess not.

Anyway, Comcast has already scrapped its policy of deliberately slowing some traffic flowing over BitTorrent and other P2P networks, so there’s really no need for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to bust its chops anymore. As Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manger of its Internet service, told the New York Times, Comcast’s new policy is to slow traffic based on usage pattern, not application. “[Our new technique] will be based purely on individual consumption by consumers,” Bowling said. “Anything in addition to that is outside the scope of what our network management goal is.”

So the company plans to throttle traffic to the customers that use the most bandwidth. Hmmm. I wonder who those might be? The folks who use the Internet for email and Web browsing or those who use it for downloading digital media?