Bilbo Baggins had a wicked lawyer

What fiction can teach us about the law.

FORTUNE -- Bilbo Baggins' employment contract with dwarves in The Hobbit is five feet long when unfurled. Replicas of the actual movie prop—which really does contain all the legal verbiage—are being sold on Amazon for $39.50.

Attorney James Dailey offers a freakishly fascinating, highly detailed analysis of the contract at Wired. Dailey is the author of The Law of Superheroes, which takes on such MORE

Why Netflix can't keep winning

Netflix is fast becoming just another competitor in an increasingly crowded market, albeit a competitor with formidable strengths.

FORTUNE -- It's only logical that Netflix will lose its dominance over the video-streaming business. It's been slowly happening for a couple of years. Competitors have been piling in. Netflix is losing some big providers of movies and TV and paying more to the ones it lands or retains. That situation is likely MORE

About that NRA shooting app

"NRA: Target Practice" went on sale a month after the Sandy Hook massacre.

FORTUNE -- The NRA going after President Obama because his children are protected by armed guards (the Secret Service) is just what White House spokesman Jay Carney says it is: "repugnant and cowardly." It's also nothing new. Critics of presidents have always looked under rocks to find hypocrisy—as when President Clinton was lambasted for sending his daughter Chelsea MORE

The new MySpace: What a mess

MySpace users—the few who remain—will find a radically different and confusing new site.

FORTUNE -- The new MySpace seems to be two things: a confusing mess for existing users (and maybe everybody else), and basically a promotional vehicle for the music star Justin Timberlake, one of the main investors in the site.

The splash screen presents a giant picture of Timberlake and an opportunity to log in, or to sign up. Existing MORE

Sony Music's Bob Dylan copyright disaster

By releasing just 100 copies of a CD containing unreleased early material recorded by Bob Dylan, Sony Music is practically inviting pirates to download the album.

FORTUNE -- Sony Music's decision to issue an extremely limited edition of what immediately became one of the most highly collectible Bob Dylan recordings ever -- including many rare bootlegs -- reveals the essential, and possibly intractable, problems of protecting intellectual property in the Internet MORE

Amazon: TV is about to get way more interesting

With the original programming strategies of all the major Internet video-streaming companies now in place, the TV business is about to change drastically.

FORTUNE -- When Amazon announced the creation of Amazon Studios and its plans to create original TV programming in May, it was widely described as a "crowdsourcing" project, giving ordinary people a chance to become TV producers. But of the six pilot shows the company has greenlighted, five come MORE

Online ad revenues soar, but that's no reason to cheer

Advertising money is still pouring into the Internet. But with ad rates low -- and falling -- that doesn't mean much for any particular Internet publisher.

FORTUNE -- Total revenues from online ads are still headed skyward, up 18% in the third quarter over the same period last year, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau's semiannual report.

This means little to any individual Internet publisher, however, given that online ad rates are MORE

Google's biggest ad problem: Fat fingers

Many mobile advertisements are clicked on by accident. Google may have finally found a solution.

FORTUNE -- It is one of the chief tech conundrums of the decade: people are flocking away from desktops and laptops and toward mobile devices, but the mobile-ad economy is terrible. Selling ads on smartphones, in particular, is difficult, and they sell for much less than ads served to traditional computers, which already sell for much MORE

Redbox isn't much of a threat to Netflix -- yet

Redbox's $8-a-month streaming service is priced just like Netflix's. But it offers far fewer movies and no TV shows.

FORTUNE -- Redbox has announced the pricing plan for its new movie-streaming service: $8 a month. This is being widely characterized as a direct assault on industry leader Netflix, which charges the same amount. But it's not, because Netflix offers all the same movies that Redbox does, plus about 55,000 more.

Redbox will MORE

What Pandora should really be worrying about

Pandora's CEO blamed the company's grim forecast on "uncertainty" caused by the stalled fiscal-cliff talks. But it's another political fight that may decide whether it rocks or rolls over.

FORTUNE -- In issuing a glum fourth-quarter forecast on Tuesday, Pandora (P) CEO Joe Kennedy pointed a finger at the stalemate over the "fiscal cliff," which he said has created so much "uncertainty" in the marketplace that advertisers are hesitating to make MORE