Mediagazer: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson aren't protected by copyright, US court rules (Adi Robertson/The Verge)

4:50 PM ET, December 27, 2013

Top News:

ESPN received $260M in tax breaks and credits over 12 years to remain in Connecticut — For ESPN, Millions to Remain in Connecticut — BRISTOL, Conn. — The governor of Connecticut arrived at ESPN's expansive campus here to celebrate the groundbreaking of the sports media giant's 19th building …

Robert Channick / Chicago Tribune:

Tribune closes $2.7B Local TV acquisition … Tribune Co. has closed on its $2.73 billion acquisition of Local TV, making it one of the country's largest television station owners, the company announced Friday. — The deal, which was approved by the Federal Communications Commission last week …

Discussion: Wall Street Journal and TVSpy

Tribune Company:

Tribune Closes Acquisition of Local TV Holdings — Company Completes Final Steps of Transaction Announced in July Tribune Company announced today that it has completed the final steps necessary to close its acquisition of Local TV Holdings, LLC. The transaction creates …

Discussion: St. Louis Post-Dispatch and FOX6Now.com

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

Game of Thrones tops 2013 BitTorrent downloads as piracy debate continues within TV networks — ‘Game of Thrones’ Most Pirated TV-Show of 2013 — Game of Thrones has the honor of becoming the most downloaded TV-show for the second year in a row. — With 5.9 million downloads via BitTorrent …

Discussion: NYT Bits, WebProNews, Comicbook.com, Hollywood Reporter, Quartz, @sims, TVLine, Business Insider, Softpedia News, Variety, BGR, BetaNews, UPROXX, Rolling Stone, The Wrap, The Verge, PopWatch, TIME and ArtsBeat

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:

Rdio Shuts Down Video-Streaming Site Vdio, Offers Amazon Credits As Reimbursement For Purchases — It's only been six months since Rdio launched its video-streaming platform Vdio to the world, but it appears that the company has already decided to give up on that experiment.

Discussion: Vdio Help Center, Variety, Gigaom, AllThingsD, Pocket-lint, FierceOnlineVideo News, The Next Web and The Verge

Adi Robertson / The Verge:

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson aren't protected by copyright, US court rules — Sherlock Holmes' status as a copyrighted character is easily as complicated as any of the cases he's had to solve. Created over 125 years ago, Holmes would remain a fixture in author Arthur Conan Doyle's work until the late 1920s.

Discussion: ArtsBeat, Open Culture and Guardian

Andy / TorrentFreak:

Major Recording Labels Prepare to Sue Russia's Facebook — For several years, vKontakte, Russia's social networking giant, has been marked as a piracy enabler by rightsholders and even the U.S. Government. — In several Special 301 Reports published by the United States Trade Representative …

Discussion: The Switch, TechCrunch, The Moscow Times and Softpedia News

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

Upcoming DJX news offering and integration with WSJ newsroom make 2014 critical for Dow Jones — Dow Jones' ‘make or break’ 2014 — Dow Jones is gearing up for a potentially pivotal 2014. — The 131-year-old financial information and media company, which publishes The Wall Street Journal …

Andy Carvin / Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth:

Andy Carvin, noted Twitter curator and NPR's senior social media strategist, says farewell — This...Was NPR. — It's my last day at NPR. — I can't believe how seven years have gone by so quickly. It feels like it was just yesterday that I first began chatting with then-VP …

Discussion: @nprnews, @acarvin, @acarvin, @ninaism, @acarvin and Andy Carvin's Waste …

The Stream:

New report exposes digital front of Syria's civil war … Washington D.C. — Adults and children alike flock to the U.S. Botanical Garden in Washington, DC to see the model train display — A growing number of Americans don't identify with a religion. Some see Christmas as a cultural, not religious, holiday.

Discussion: @headhntr and @azmatzahra

Jeremy Barr / Poynter:

As fewer people read newspapers, more share their front pages — Newspapers are dying. But their front pages aren't. — At a time when print advertising revenue continues to decline and publications are laying off staff in droves, newspaper covers are increasingly being shared digitally …

Ethan Smith / Wall Street Journal:

Dollar-and-Cents Secrets of Music Streaming — Staying Power Is More Important Than Bursting on the Scene — In the good old days of the CD boom, the music industry was all about the first week. Prime the pump with endless airplay on pop radio and MTV, blanket major markets with billboard ads …

Discussion: @billboardglenn, @charlesubaghs and @alisternburg