News Corp reported Wednesday that its annual net profit surged to $2.1 billion, versus $1.5 billion a year ago -- a whopping 40-percent increase. The company particularly cited strong performances from DVD sales including The Day After Tomorrow, Alien vs. Predator, Garfield and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. In a conference call with analysts and reporters, News Corp CFO David DeVoe said, "All divisions are experiencing continuing strong growth and operating income growth for fiscal 2006 will be in the mid-teens." Chairman Rupert Murdoch said that he expected the company to focus its attention on the Internet. He remarked that there was "no greater priority for the company today than to meaningfully and profitably expand our Internet presence." Slow to wade into cyberspace, News Corp has recently dived in, recently spending $580 million to acquire Intermix Media, which operates the social networking website MySpace.com. Reporting on the News Corp conference call today (Thursday), the Los Angeles Times observed that Murdoch, instead of celebrating the company's strong results, "sounded testy ... as reporters peppered him with questions about the circumstances surrounding the unexpected resignation" of son Lachlan. He declined to respond to any of them, saying that he had addressed them all at the time of the resignation.

The producers of the 1976 independent movie The Clonus Horror have filed suit against DreamWorks and Warner Bros., claiming that the plot of their film, about a colony of clones kept on an island as spare parts for ailing rich people was cloned for the recent flop The Island. The Clonus producers claim that there are 90 instances in which the two films are identical. Indeed Premiere magazine recently wrote, "The first hour of The Island plays like a much more expensive albeit scene-for-scene remake." The Clonus team, producer Myrl A. Schreibman, director Robert S. Fiveson, and screenwriters Bob Sullivan and Ron Smith, are asking for unspecified damages. DreamWorks issued a statement saying, "The Island was independently created and does not infringe anyone's copyrights."

In a settlement underscored with irony, the producers of the movie Mona Lisa Smile have agreed to pay a group of 19 female musicians a total of $66,500 to settle a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission which accused the filmmakers of paying the musicians less than their male counterparts. The film is based on a real-life Wellesley college professor, played by Julia Roberts, who teaches her female students to stand up for their rights. The EEOC had charged that the producers, Revolution Studios and Smile Productions, had acted "with malice or with reckless indifference to the federally protected rights" of the female musicians.

Although Warner Bros., Paramount, and Universal all announced in January that they planned to release a slate of high-definition DVDs by Christmas time this year, two of the studios, Warner's and Paramount, now say they are likely to wait until 2006, and Universal is saying it's reconsidering its release schedule, Home Media Retailing magazine reported on its website Wednesday. The delay, they indicated, was dictated by the expectation that Toshiba and Sony, which have developed two competing high-definition video systems, will resolve their differences and agree on a single standard. "We are considering rolling back our launch in the hopes of a last-minute compromise, which would avoid two formats straining the marketplace," Jim Cardwell, president of Warner Home Video, told the magazine.

British indie film director Shane Meadows has tried his hand at creating a short film using only a video cell phone. The London daily Sun reported today (Thursday) that the 15-second film was produced to draw attention to the Nokia Shorts competition, which hopes to attract entries from people using Nokia's video phone. In an interview with the Sun, Meadows remarked, "Films like the Blair Witch Project showed for the first time just what could be achieved using digital camcorders. With the quality of camera phones improving at such a rapid pace, I expect to see a feature film made using a mobile phone before long."

China, which has traditionally dealt with objectionable content in motion pictures by having its censors simply remove it, is considering adopting a ratings system, according to the Xinhua News Agency. The state-run wire service acknowledged that "to the chagrin of producers and distributors, scary or sexy movies are often butchered by government censors." It quoted filmmaker Feng Xiaogang as saying that he was concerned about filming certain scenes for his movie A World Without Thieves because he was worried that children who saw it might imitate the behavior of the characters. "So I had to put a policeman there to teach justice to minors." And, Xinhua said, the Chinese distributor of War of the Worlds has issued a public warning, advising that "children should watch the movie only accompanied by parents."

Award-winning actress Barbara Bel Geddes, best known for her role as Miss Ellie on Dallas from 1978-89 (she dropped out of the series in 1984 because of health problems but returned the following year), has died of lung cancer in Northeast Harbor, Maine at age 82. Bel Geddes received three Emmy nominations and one win during the Dallas run. She had a distinguished career on Broadway and films in the late '40s and received a best-supporting-actress Oscar nomination for I Remember Mama in 1949. Her career was interrupted for seven years in 1951, however, when she was blacklisted after director Elia Kazan, in congressonal testimony, named her as a fellow member of the Communist Party.

American Idol judge Simon Cowell may be facing a judge himself in a Los Angeles courtroom if a lawsuit brought by two Minnesota TV producers goes to trial. The two, Jean Golden and Todd Walker, claim that Cowell, FremantleMedia North America, and ABC-TV ripped off their syndicated TV show Million Dollar Idea in which inventors compete for $50,000 seed money to develop their idea and eventually have their finished product introduced at a store in the Mall of America, where their show is taped. Golden and Walker claim that they pitched their show to ABC programming executive Andrea Wong in 2004. After Wong passed on the idea, the suit claims, Golden and Walker were stunned when they read in Daily Variety that ABC had ordered nine episodes of a show titled The Million Dollar Idea in which inventors would compete for $50,000 in seed money and a $1-million grand prize. In a statement, Golden said Wednesday. "The arrogance of Simon Cowell and ABC is beyond comprehension. Can you imagine stealing an idea and not even bothering to change the name of it?" ABC declined comment. But lawyer Joseph Gioconda, who specializes in intellectual property law, told today's (Thursday) New York Times that the Minnesota producers face an uphill battle. "The issue," he said, "is that you can't protect an idea. It is the particular expression of that idea that is protected by copyright."

The National Association of Broadcasters has urged the FCC to move up the deadline for manufacturers to include digital tuners in new TV sets to late next year, rather than July 2007 as current FCC rules require. It also asked the commission to remove the exemption for sets with screens that are 13 inches or smaller, saying, "Consumers of small sets should not be forced to purchase analog-only receiving equipment." Consumer groups immediately filed comments opposing the NAB's call and asking it to set back the date for the transition to digital TV still further. Congress is expected to require broadcasters to turn off their analog transmitters and switch to digital by January 1, 2009.

As part of its strategy to distinguish itself as an outlet for no-nonsense news, CNN is shutting down its street-front studio in New York and, beginning August 22, will originate its American Morning from its new headquarters at the Time Warner Center. The move is reportedly intended to enhance the cable news network's image during the morning hours as the place to go for serious reporting rather than the chatty diversion generally offered by the network morning shows.

A day after it was reported that MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann engaged in a heated exchange with MSNBC President Rick Kaplan following Olbermann's remarks about smoking during a discussion of Peter Jennings' death, the cable channel announced that it is starting an "I Quit" campaign. An MSNBC press release said, "'I Quit, with Keith Olbermann' has launched in response to substantial viewer feedback asking ... 'how do I quit?' after Olbermann's segments and Weblogs about Peter Jennings' untimely death and Olbermann's own recent cancer scare." On Wednesday New York Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove reported that after Olbermann's broadcast, Kaplan castigated him for being "out of control" during his lurid account of his own cancer scare, and accused him of driving away viewers. "I don't care if you don't come to work tomorrow," Kaplan reportedly told Olbermann.