Subscribers to Apple’s iTunes Match service are sending copyright-holders “magic money,” writes Jeff Price at the blog for the TuneCore online music distribution service. And while not an overwhelming amount ($10,000 in the first two months, spread out across 55,000 TuneCore artists), Price points out that it is more than the null sum that artists were previously receiving.

You wouldn’t think we’d have to write articles defending “proper” spelling, but after a recent Wired article arguing against standardized spelling, Lee Simmons, a copy editor at Wired, has penned a lovely rebuttal. Simmons points out that while textisms may be acceptable in texts and tweets, they have no place in professional writing where standardized spelling aids communication and enhances clarity. Well said!

The New York Times looks behind the doors at Foxconn, the massive Chinese firm that manufactures Apple products such as the iPad, as well as products for most major electronics companies worldwide.

Final Cut Pro expert Larry Jordan walked out of Macworld | iWorld with a sense of what the future holds for video editors. While there will still be a need to cater to the high end of video production, several products at the conference demonstrate that regular people shooting with consumer gear is the model we’re likely to see dominate the vast amount of video shooting and editing.

The New York Times has a clever feature article explaining why Apple (and other firms) manufacture in China for a host of reasons, of which low wages may be a relatively small part. The ability to hire a massive number of trained people nearly instantly is one factor, regardless of how well those people are treated by the contractors Apple employs. For instance, Americans typically won’t live in dormitories and work six 12-hour days in a row, which is commonplace in China and other developing nations.

Glenn Fleishman writes in an editorial at Macworld about how Apple’s “new” digital textbook plan reminds him of countless efforts to push multimedia pedagogy without evidence that it improves achievement in any measure. The iPad is remarkable, but interactive textbooks aren’t.

Just hours after Apple’s education announcements on 19 January 2012, the Internet began to vibrate with discussion, much of it dismayed, about some of the terms in the end-user license agreement (EULA) that accompanies Apple’s iBooks Author application. Take Control Books editor-in-chief Tonya Engst was empaneled with other concerned netizens by Chuck Joiner at MacJury to deliberate about how the EULA, even more than the iBooks format itself, might affect the publishing community.

We haven’t been following the Golan case before the U.S. Supreme Court, but Techdirt explains how the Court has ruled that the United States can retroactively take works out of the public domain and put them back under copyright. The government’s claim is that this is necessary for a trade agreement to make other countries respect our copyright, but the end result is that it could (and likely will) be used to shrink the public domain. We’re all in favor of copyright giving incentives to creators, but we can’t see how putting the works of dead people back under copyright will result in any new work.

David Carr of the New York Times neatly explains how Wikipedia’s blackout today to protest poorly drafted anti-piracy bills under consideration in the U.S. Congress leaves a ragged hole in the Internet. He doesn’t see Wikipedia as authoritative, but as fundamental: it’s the way to start to understand and research millions of topics.

This is fun — the Macworld | iWorld folks are having a t-shirt contest (dry, thank you, we’re geeks) to shine a light on some of the coolest t-shirts in the Apple world. We’re planning to hunt through our massive collection of vintage Mac shirts for some suitable entries.

From CNET’s coverage, the Consumer Electronics Show press day sounds uninspired. The PC world is getting into ultrabooks (think of a MacBook Air running Windows), there are new TVs that don’t look all that different from old TVs, smartphone manufacturers are trying out large-screen models that won’t fit in a pocket, 3-D printers are still kind of expensive, and cameras will increasingly have Wi-Fi. Oh, and Microsoft will no longer exhibit at CES.

In the November issue of The Atlantic, James Fallows shares the story of how his wife’s Gmail account was hijacked and what they went through to recover years of stored messages. It’s a compelling tale that will hopefully bring home the need for secure passwords and offline backups of cloud-based data.

It’s always interesting to calibrate one’s view of the world against the aggregate behavior of others, and Amazon’s recently released “Best of 2011” lists offer just this sort of insight. They compile Amazon’s best-selling, most wished for, most gifted, and most positively reviewed products of 2011, and it’s particularly fascinating to see which products appear multiple times. No Apple products make the cut, unless you count Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs” biography.

In his latest Tech Night Owl podcast appearance, Adam and host Gene Steinberg ended up discussing how to be a Freecycle Santa, issues surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act, the continuing story of Quicken, and some of the top 10 TidBITS stories of 2011.

Do you long for the days when your Mac would start with a smiling Mac logo and a row of INITs along the bottom of the screen? Or perhaps you miss watching a NeXT machine perform its initial memory scan? Pine no more for the past, because The Restart Page will transport you there. Choose from 17 Restart dialogs belonging to vintage versions of the Mac OS, Windows, NeXT's OPENSTEP, ProDOS (on the Apple IIgs), a developer build of Rhapsody, and others. Some sequences even include the old startup chimes.

When you cross the U.S. border, government officials can confiscate your electronic devices, search them, and keep them for a while for additional scrutiny, even when there’s no suspicion of wrongdoing. If you travel out of or into the United States, do yourself a favor and read the EFF’s comprehensive guide to what can happen, and what you can do about it.

Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design, Jonathan Ive, can now demand that his employees and everyone else address him as “Sir.” He’s been made a Knight Commander of the British Empire for his design work at Apple. Although Ive worked at Apple for several years, the arrival of Steve Jobs as CEO in 1995 launched an industrial design revolution at the company that has dramatically influenced products and design aesthetics worldwide.

The Federal Aviation Administration’s restriction on electronic devices — even those that don’t have internal radios or are in Airplane Mode — during takeoff (including sitting on the runway for hours) and landing has always seemed unnecessarily cautious, and Nick Bilton of the New York Times has explored that in the past. But his latest blog post makes the restriction seem even more ridiculous, since the FAA is now allowing American Airlines pilots to use iPads in the cockpit at all times. The only defense given is that it might be different if everyone was using a device during takeoff or landing, but that seems eminently testable. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if flying could become more convenient for a change?

Curious about how we came up with the idea for our new membership program, and why we designed it the way we did? This is inside baseball, of course, but if you like peeking behind the curtain, you’ll enjoy hearing Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman discuss the hows and whys with MacVoices host Chuck Joiner. And yes, there is stuff in here that we haven’t said elsewhere.

You’ve read our article about how the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) is forcing parents to teach their children to lie online. If you think that’s as ridiculous as we do (and there has been even more fuss since, particularly for Gmail-using kids whose accounts are being shut down for being underage), you can tell the Federal Trade Commission how you think COPPA should be changed. This FTC article says the deadline already passed, but if you click through to file your comments using the Web form linked at the bottom, it corrects the deadline to 23 December 2011. Have at it!