In a joint message featured on the front page of Current.com, Gore, the network’s chairman, and Hyatt, who took over again as CEO in recent months, tell viewers:

We created Current to give voice to those Americans who refuse to rely on corporate-controlled media and are seeking an authentic progressive outlet. We are more committed to those goals today than ever before.

Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers. Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it.

We are moving ahead by honoring Current’s values. Current has a fundamental obligation to deliver news programming with a progressive perspective that our viewers can count on being available daily — especially now, during the presidential election campaign. Current exists because our audience desires the kind of perspective, insight and commentary that is not easily found elsewhere in this time of big media consolidation.

They also introduced his replacement, former New York Gov. Eliott Spitzer, and went on at length about the wonders of an election-year Current sans Olbermann. (Safe to say, after his performance with Sean Parker at SxSW, the former VP won’t be doing his own interview show any time soon.) What they don’t really address is their own role in a hiring that seemed like a stretch when you got beyond Olbermann’s liberal status and his following.

Olbermann’s reply via Twitter was swift, a series of 11 tweets summed up in one long statement promising legal action:

I’d like to apologize to my viewers and my staff for the failure of Current TV.

Editorially, Countdown had never been better. But for more than a year I have been imploring Al Gore and Joel Hyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I’ve been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract.

It goes almost without saying that the claims against me implied in Current’s statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently. To understand Mr. Hyatt’s ‘values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,’ I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain. http://nyti.ms/HueZsa

In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it.

Olbermann and Hyatt gave every appearance of a meeting of the minds when I interviewed them together at paidContent 2011. They were still in a honeymoon phase and Olbermann, who stayed off video for several months between MSNBC and Current, was months away from launching his show. That show involved rebuilding studios, hiring a New York staff and more.

It was an attention-getting move that caused some to think again about Current and certainly hiring Olbermann put the network, which has yet to have its real break through, in the spotlight. But it also put it on the hot seat. Building a network on ideals, worth a shot. Hinging it on one volatile personality, not so much. Olbermann is right when he points to a resume that show how long he’s worked with some people and when he challenges his labeling as peripatetic. He’s also charming, amusing, incredibly bright, knows his baseball, reads James Thurber stories out loud, and has seen the Book of Mormon an unfair number of times.

But he’s also had a series of confrontations and missteps that often make the story more about him, than about any network or its goals.

Al Gore and Joel Hyatt knew that when they courted him. Whatever the reasons for the ultimate split — and I doubt it’s as one-sided as either party wants it to appear — they had to know honeymoons end.

As for Olbermann, he may miss cable networks for a while but he always has the Net.

Olbermann and Hyatt spoke at our paidContent 2011 conference, where they explained how Olbermann joining Current was a match made in heaven.

Not exactly. I cringed at David Carr’s report that Dumenco is forming a council to standardize and evangelize attribution. We need another council like we need another bad infographic — and there’s nothing journalists, bloggers and those who are both dislike more than being told how and what to do.

This isn’t about “aggregators.” We are all Spartacus in that sense, especially if we get paid for sharing what we read. (Or as my GigaOM colleague Mathew Ingram writes,”it’s called curation if you like it, aggregation if you don’t.”)

It’s about attribution and context.

I get the reasons for trying to call attention to the issue and I totally get the need for forming fair internal policies at media outlets that aggregate (i.e. every news org at this point). I’m also intrigued by Maria Popova a.k.a. @brainpicker and her plan for attribution codes but I’m focusing on the one trying to form a new organization to push standards.

Hearing Dumenco and others on the subject at an SxSW session and talking with him after the session didn’t change my mind.

The back story

Dumenco, a media writer for Advertising Age, went public last year with his frustration over the way a post of his was picked up by HuffingtonPost.com. (Carr and Dumenco are former colleagues of mine from the late, lamented Inside.com.) The writer far overreached and was disciplined. That post drove a tenth of the traffic to his piece as a simple aggregated link from Mediagazer. It wasn’t a singular instance in the quote-a-sphere but it wasn’t supposed to be common HuffPo practice and among most professional news org, it was an outlier. Others are far more bright line as routine occurrences. Still, it was Dumenco’s “Howard Beale” moment and he has been on a mission about aggregation and attribution ever since.

Now he is forming a council with charter members including Slate and The New York Observer. Each will pay $295 for their company to belong to something he plans to incorporate as a 501.c.3 non-profit organization. Dumenco says the founders will “attempt” to come up with guidelines and best practices starting via a shared Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Doc. He plans to publish the results and, among other things, to use them to encourage education in journalism schools. His panel includes representatives from Columbia University.

Starting with the choir

In a sense, he’s starting with the choir: news orgs that want to improve their own process and educators looking for a common language that will encourage meaningful attribution. (Not all attribution is meaningful — a hyperlink buried in a post that wouldn’t exist without the original and doesn’t namecheck the outlet or the writer in the text can leave the reader thinking the story sprang from the aggregating site. Ditto for sites that link at the bottom of a very long post riffing off the original.)

“Really it’s about people that are in this space saying, ‘Yeah, we aggregate a lot, we’re aggregated a lot. We know there are bad ways to do it but how can we define best practices? … A lot of people do it flawlessly and don’t need to be educated.” He wants to reach the rest. It isn’t a moral issue, he told SXSW attendees. It’s about collegiality and the value of ideas.

Dumenco knew the reaction from some quarters would be quick and negative, laughing that he could have written the Gawker headline “We Don’t Need No Stinking Seal of Approval from the Blog Police.”

But he also thinks it makes what he’s trying to do sound like something it’s not: “To me, it’s ridiculous to call it a ‘police force.”

He doesn’t expect to able to enforce anything and it doesn’t sound like he really wants to, although he did mention professional organizations that reinforce some policies by banning those who break them from awards or other benefits. (Having logged hundreds of hours plus in dicussions like this, it’s safe to say the education-guidance-enforcement debate is a constant when it comes to professional codes of ethics.)

Herding cats

What he does want to do is get people thinking about how to attribute in ways that further the value of the original, not detract from it. Does that mean aggregating the way Dumenco or his group says you should? It would be far easier to herd cats.

This isn’t academic publishing. We’re dealing with people who can’t even agree on lower casing internet and with companies creating their own styles, not sticking to the AP Stylebook. If enough news organizations agree to a format, it could catch on and become a template.

It also would be close to amazing if the people involved can agree on what their own orgs should do and implement it internally in a way that sticks. Should they? Every newsroom, virtual or physical, needs guidelines and how to attribute should be one of them.

Writing online has changed a lot and thinking about the new nuances of context is something to encourage, not dismiss. Gabe Rivera offers a great example of how to deal with changed context. On Techmeme and Mediagazer it was fairly easy to see where a story originated; on Twitter, it all looked like it came from his sites no matter the source. Now the tweets include links to the originals, the twitter handle of the writer (much appreciated) and a link back to its place on his aggregation sites.

Do I wish others would follow suit? Yes. Do I want or think a new nonprofit should make it happen? No.

The topic came up at South by Southwest this weekend while I was speaking with Ben Huh, he of the Cheezburger empire. For much of its life, Cheezburger and its associated sites have been editorially curated collections of the most popular memes on the Internet. That includes hit properties like I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog and The Daily What.

But the media company recently unveiled a new platform last year, allowing anyone to create his or her own Cheezburger site. The platform, which was launched in beta last October, is designed to create a new platform for people to share what they find funny — and it has opened up an amazing new trove of content for the Cheezburger family. The Cheezburger team itself might not have had the interest or the wherewithal to launch individual blogs for Harry Potter LOLs or Words With Friends rage comics, but now it doesn’t have to — it’s essentially crowdsourcing the funny.

This new feature is part of a growing trend that has taken hold of the mainstream. Consumers are no longer content to just consume — they’re also becoming curators, and content creators in their own right.

The old 1 percent rule assumes that only one percent of an online audience creates content, while an additional 9 percent modify or edit the content, and the remaining 90 percent consuming it. But anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s a paradigm shift going on, with many more curators and creators popping up. The internet is becoming more participatory, thanks to the development of democratizing tools like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr and now Pinterest.

It’s not that consumers didn’t want to be creators or curators. The availability of those tools is really just enabling a fundamental human behavior to be moved online, something Om talked about in his piece about Pinterest a few months ago.

Huh agrees with that premise, that it was never just a handful of people who were creators while the rest of us consumed. What held everyone back was that distribution channels of the past didn’t enable mass creation to reach a large audience. There was a power curve that kept most people from participating. But the Internet is changing all that. For users, that’s a good thing. Now anyone can create a Tumblr of pictures of people scanning QR codes or a blog about LOLGoats.

This article originally appeared in GigaOm.

Read the full post on GigaOm…

Prosecutors timed the seizures to coincide with a major marketing event, Superbowl XLVI. Similar enforcement actions occurred before last year’s Superbowl and before cyber-Monday last November when the feds bagged 150 illicit sites.

Today’s haul included streaming sites with names like sports95.com and firstrowtv.com. Prosecutors are also charging 28-year-old Michigan man Yonjo Quiroa with criminal copyright for operating the sites from his house.

Meanwhile, Reuters (NYSE: TRI) reports that New England quarterback Tom Brady admitted he used an unauthorized stream to watch last year’s Super Bowl while he was in Costa Rica nursing a sore foot.

The theatrics of the enforcement action resembled previous ones. As on other occasions, today’s news featured a swarm of federal agencies, led by Homeland Security, who displayed fake merchandise and gave triumphant statements.

The website seizures are based on a legal process created in the 1970′s to let federal agents confiscate the property of drug dealers. Once seized, the sites display federal law enforcement badges.

After a number of months, the names are forfeited and become the property of the federal government. The government, in a tactic of dubious legality, has also been using some of the forfeited sites to display anti-piracy messages from Hollywood.

Las Vegas odds makers are favoring the New England Patriots to win the big game by three points over the New York Giants.

Instead, Samsung will be presenting it at its own-branded event, with less of a gap between the product launch and actual roll-out.

“Samsung is looking forward to introducing and demonstrating exciting new mobile products at Mobile World Congress 2012. The successor to the Galaxy S II smartphone will be unveiled at a separate Samsung-hosted event in the first half of the year, closer to commercial availability of the product. Samsung stays committed to providing the best possible mobile experiences for customers around the world,” a spokesperson told paidContent, via email today.

The Android-based S II (pictured here with its best enemy, the iPhone 4S) has been one of Samsung’s best sellers since launching last year — although Samsung hasn’t given exact sales figures — and many have been anticipating the upgrade, which will apparently feature a faster processor, better camera and other enhancements.

One of the big issues with the S II, however, was that while Samsung unveiled the device at the 2011 MWC event, it didn’t launch in Europe until summer, and the U.S. several months later, in September.

Did that possibly steal some thunder from the launch? As smartphone competition hots up — including leaks of the first BlackBerry 10 “London” devices and even a new iPhone coming this year — that’s a variable that Samsung probably doesn’t want to explore again.

But while Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has pulled out of CES, and Apple has been running its own launch events for years, Samsung doesn’t seem to be bowing out of the trade show peep show altogether. There have been rumors of Samsung unveiling its first Tizen handsets — that is, the new linux OS that it is developing with Intel (NSDQ: INTC) from the ashes of MeeGo — which could point to a new direction altogether for the Korean handset maker. There are also reports of further tablets on the cards.

But is Hollywood’s new movie cloud really ready for prime time? Can any initiative like this thrive without Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Disney? (NYSE: DIS) And even more important, what happens if they don’t get it right?

At CES, UltraViolet’s backers – which include Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX), Sony (NYSE: SNE), Universal and Paramount (NYSE: VIA), as well as major consumer electronics and retail brands – pushed aside complaints by early adopters that the system’s authentication process is too cumbersome.

The new format’s backers said that since new Blu-ray releases supporting UltraViolet began to roll off replication lines late last year, roughly 750,000 consumers have signed up for the program, which puts a DRM-steeped digital version of the movie they just bought on physical disc in the cloud and available for viewing on other devices.

For studios like Sony, which five years ago helped spearhead the formation of the 70-plus member group that created UltraViolet, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the initiative is crucial.

“We are talking about true DRM interoperability for the first time,” said Mitch Singer, chief technology officer for DECE member studio Sony, speaking at the alliance’s CES press event. “Consumers don’t have to worry about or make technology decisions before buying content. You’ll buy a device, you’ll download an app, it’ll be associated and branded UltraViolet, and you know your content will play.

Driven by consumers’ cooling DVD purchasing habits, the home entertainment sector has declined for the last seven years, dropping 2 percent in 2011, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, a single-digit benchmark that was actually considered strong relative to recent yearly craterings.

Theatrical distribution — the other big-ticket studio revenue stream — has also seen better days, declining for the second straight year, with the domestic box office finishing 2011 with about $10.17 billion — off from $10.56 billion in 2010. Perhaps worse, movie attendance was the lowest it’s been since 1992. (Although, the lower-margin foreign exhibition market remains quite strong.)

The studios believe UltraViolet will help re-establish a higher margin urge to purchase movies on behalf of consumers, who have been more apt recently to engage in lower-margin activities, like stream films and TV shows on Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) or rent DVDs for a $1.20 a night from a Redbox kiosk.

Coupled with restraints on rental outlets — like Warner’s 56-day delay on providing new titles to Netflix — the studios believe UltraViolet won’t just kick-start the nascent business of electronic sell-through, but good old-fashioned disc-buying, too.

In a nutshell, UltraViolet works like this: Buy an Ultraviolet-signatory DVD, Blu-ray or EST title, and a digital version of the film lives in the cloud ready for you to access and play on up to 12 different devices. The system is designed with families in mind — up to six members of a clan can access an UltraViolet account, even if they don’t live in the primary domicile.

There are plenty of perks planned. At CES, for example, Samsung introduced a new Blu-ray player capable of uploading the user’s entire existing disc collection to the cloud for a nominal fee. Further, take the family to a hotel outfitted by DECE member LodgeNet, a provider of media and connectivity solutions to the hospitality industry, and you can access your movie collection from your room.

There are big benefits for the studios, too. They believe this buy-once, play-anywhere scheme will free consumers to once again build movie libraries, since they will now have more options in an electronics universe increasingly devoid of optical drives.

And Hollywood is anxious to get started — about 19 UltraViolet titles have been released since the fourth quarter, including Warner’s Green Lantern and Horrible Bosses, Sony’s The Smurfs and Universal’s Cowboys and Aliens.

Perhaps most notably, the UltraViolet label has appeared on the disc jackets of Warner’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2, which was the most popular film of 2011, grossing well over $1 billion worldwide.

And a promotional blitz is set to begin in the coming months, with DECE also announcing at CES a promotional partnership with another studio-backed consortium, the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG), the organization that helped get Blu-ray off the ground — albeit, quite slowly — six years ago.

“We’ll start having marketing messages — you’ll start seeing TV spots,” Singer said. “The [UltraViolet label] will be on every single disc.”

That speed to get into the market was second-guessed at CES this week, with accounts of early adopters frustrated by UlraViolet’s extensive digital rights management, which requires users to register at two different websites.

Singer boiled down these troubles as “unfinished carpentry” on a “great house,” but others were vexed by their inability to get their UltraViolet movies to play on mobile devices made by Apple, which notably hasn’t yet signed on to DECE.

The failure so far to gain a foothold into Apple’s closed technology universe has been a major detraction from UltraViolet, as has the non-participation of Disney, which has its own DRM locker project in the works, Keychest. DECE continues to talk to both parties about joining its coalition.

But at CES, it became apparent that even some of the studios that are on board with DECE aren’t necessarily all in yet, with Fox (NSDQ: NWS) revealing its decision to hold off on releasing UltraViolet movies until there are more retail outlets to sell them and more devices that play them.

In terms of the former, the announcement last week by Amazon that it will begin selling Warner’s UltraViolet offerings was a key step for an initiative that needed more retail backing.

Concurrently, however, DECE revealed that Netflix had quietly let its DECE membership lapse. It wasn’t a surprise to many to see Netflix pull out of UltraViolet, given Netflix CEO’s Reed Hastings’ historical reluctance to get into the movie-selling business. At one point, Netflix’s player app was seen as a nice work-around for playing UltraViolet movies on the iPad and iPhone. Movie social network site Flixster, which was acquired by Warner last year, now has the only app for playing UltraViolet movies on both PC and Apple platforms.

For his part, Singer downplayed all of these concerns, noting that UltraViolet is still in its “very, very early” stages of development. “You could almost consider this a beta launch,” he added.

Some numbers out from eMarketer (via Memeburn) seem to imply that up to now, advertisers have not ignored connected TV. But nor has interest in it grown:

Looking just at investment in just in digital video advertising (itself only a part of overall spend in digital ads), only eight percent of advertisers said they invested in connected TV video ads in 2011. That’s a modest number, and smaller than other mediums like mobile, where respectively 42 and 41 percent of advertisers said they would spend on iPhone and iPad platforms, and 31 percent said they would invest in ads for Android devices.

Perhaps more tellingly, that eight percent was flat on the year before — that implies that interest in the medium of connected TV seems to have stalled.

Publishers, meanwhile, seem to also be trying to play catch-up in this area: in 2011, 17 percent said they supported video advertising for connected TVs, while only 11 percent supported it in 2010. According to eMarketer’s numbers that puts connected TV video ads on par with video advertising support for non-Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) tablets, but still a ways behind iPhone and iPad (both 35 percent) and Android smartphones (28 percent).

Judging by announcements last week during CES, consumer electronics companies still laying the groundwork for how advertising on connected TV platforms might work in the years ahead:

– Samsung is forging its Smart TV strategy on its own, proprietary platform (complete with Kinect-like gesture recognition and lots of content options). And last week it also launched its own AdHub connected TV advertising services. Premium Interactive Advertising (PIA) is Samsung’s very first ad initiative for its Smart TV platform, and offers advertisers banner advertising on its home screen with functions like click to microsite (interactive multi pages), click to video, and click to application.

– And while Google (NSDQ: GOOG) had a mixed showing for its Google TV connected platform at CES, it continues to make headway into how it is helping more traditional broadcasters sell and manage their advertising inventory. (Their latest customer win: Cox Media.) As those broadcasters begin to consider how they offer advertising on connected TVs, I think it’s a safe bet to say that Google will step up to offer their services there, too.

– Sony’s music and media technology company Gracenote, meanwhile, launched an interesting-looking new service called Entourage, which uses “audio fingerprinting technology” to listen to short clips of content via a mobile device that can trigger the service to then look up content on a smart TV, be it a film to purchase or an advertisement. Gracenote, of course, will need buy-in from smart TV players to make this into an actual service; given that Gracenote is owned by Sony (NYSE: SNE), their might be the first TVs, mobiles and other products where you will see it work first.

– Meanwhile, Sony inked another interactive TV ad deal: Yahoo’s connected TV services, which serve content related to programs and advertisements on regular TV, will now be embedded in Sony Bravia sets. Like Gracenote, it offers an audio-based trigger to deliver advertising (its technology comes from its own subsidiary, IntoNow). Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) says its 180-odd connected TV apps already work on connected TV services from Samsung, VIZIO, Toshiba, Haier and HiSense. Yahoo is also starting to roll out new ad units around its these: it says that Toyota is the first company to use such a service, with display ads placed into Yahoo’s Fantasy Football TV app.

– Ooyala is another online video player that is linking up with a vendor, in this case Panasonic for its Viera line of connected TVs. Advertisers and content publishers now using its platform will now also be able to publish their content on Panasonic’s TVs as they are now able to do on mobile and Internet platforms. The Country Network will be the first broadcaster to use the service to offer selections of its content on-demand and live through Panasonic’s platform.

Considering this is CES we are talking about, it’s unsurprising to have a profusion of device- and platform-led announcements, although in the bigger scheme of things broadcasters will inevitably also be playing a role.

“I think traditional broadcasters want to be seen to be involved in new media today,” says Simon Murray, an analyst with Digital TV Research in the UK. “They were slow before and now want to be involved in new technologies and providing information and serving advertisers in different ways.” But he also notes that “Broadcasters have a bit of a dilemma. Obviously they want to diversify but they don’t want to alienate existing advertisers and traditional ways of advertising because it’s still their bread and butter. Puttng too many ads on to programs outside their traditional market might upset their ad base.”

But regardless of who controls the game, perhaps the biggest issue of all is that, unlike internet or even mobile penetration, we are still a long way from critical mass in connected TV services. Figures from Strategy Analytics estimate that by the end of 2011, there were only 12 million connected TV devices distributed globally by the end of 2011. The U.S. had a penetration of only eight percent while Europe’s connected TV device penetration was seven percent.

That, too, appears to be changing, though. Digital TV Research forecasts that it will take until 2016 for there to be a global penetration of 20 percent in connected TV services — that includes not just connected sets, but also other devices such as blu-ray players; games consoles; retail set-top boxes and pay-TV set-top boxes. Highly anticipated updates from the likes of Apple and its Apple TV could also advance the market.

While today games consoles are the most common way for making a TV internet-friendly, Murray says he thinks that connected TVs will overtake games consoles by the end of this year (2012) as the main route to accessing Internet services via televisions worldwide, driven by more widely-available

“The thing about advertisers is that they want traffic. Some will experiment earlier. It might appeal to advertisers selling highly priced items such as cars, where you might want to demonstrate features of, say, a new model of the BMW, but I don’t know how much P&G or Unilever would benefit TV interactive advertising today,” Murray told paidContent. “I think it will be a fairly minor and experimental feature for at least the next five years, until the market becomes more established.”

Much more in our CES archives.