In the ongoing fight between Redbox–which rents DVDs from kiosks for $1–and major Hollywood studios, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment just filed a brief to dismiss Redbox’s lawsuit against it.

Said Fox in a statement:

“Redbox’s legal claims are fatally flawed. Fox’s filing today makes clear that, in the end, the case is all about Redbox’s refusal to make a business deal on general terms similar to those paid by others in this industry. Instead, Redbox has insisted that Fox sell DVDs to them through distributors, on the date they demand, at the price they want to pay. Unable to get the terms it wanted at the bargaining table, Redbox instead decided to file this meritless lawsuit.”

In a statement, Redbox president Mitch Lowe responded to the filing by stating that Fox was anti-consumer.

“Twentieth Century Fox continues its pursuit to prohibit consumer access to new release DVDs at affordable prices…Redbox remains steadfast in our commitment to protecting consumers’ rights and to providing our customers the DVDs they want, where they want and at the low price they want.”

In two briefs filed this afternoon, refuting Redbox’s allegations, Fox is asserting that it has not refused to provide DVDs to the outfit and has tried to negotiate a deal.

Under contention between the two are the price and terms of when DVDs of hit movies can be released to Redbox.

Redbox has asserted that Fox is violating antitrust laws and copyright misuse in not selling DVDs to the company.

Fox denied that claim in the brief, noting that Redbox simply did not want to pay up in order to get certain DVDs on the “street date,” as do other retailers.

Fox is one of three studios that have become embroiled in lawsuits with Redbox.

Located in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., and is wholly owned by Bellevue, Wash.-based Coinstar (CSTR), Redbox is seeing strong rental growth due to its $1-a-night price for first-run movies, which the company distributes via its 15,000 freestanding machines in supermarkets and convenience stores, as well as in big chains like McDonald’s (MCD), Wal-Mart (WMT) and Walgreens (WAG).

Its fascinating legal battle with the studios centers around the issues of steep discounting, release windowing and the price for premium content.

Redbox recently sued Warner Home Video, owned by Time Warner (TWX), for denying it the opportunity to buy DVDs without being required to wait a month or more to rent them out.

It has previously gone after NBC Universal’s Universal Studios Home Entertainment, owned by GE (GE) and Fox, a unit of News Corp. (NWS), for similar release restrictions.

The trio’s movies make up 40 percent of the DVD rental market.

In its brief today, Fox noted that it was willing to sell to Redbox directly, rather than via wholesalers, but that talks collapsed over pricing issues.

And while some studios are holding fast to fighting price declines represented by consumer-friendly, idiot-proof tech solutions like Redbox, others are not.

Redbox has inked deals with Sony (SNE); Lions Gate (LGF); Paramount, a unit of Viacom (VIA); and also gets movies from Walt Disney (DIS).

Here are two briefs filed by Fox in U.S. District Court in Delaware, the first, a motion to dismiss the lawsuit by Redbox, and the second to transfer venue to California:

FINAL Opening Brief in Support of Fox’s Motion to Dismiss

Redacted Transfer Venue Brief

(Full disclosure: Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns Dow Jones, owner of this site.)

Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

But, like the digital industry and the innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or not.

That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might turn out to be either a rocket ship or a shooting star.

They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-up products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.

While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009’s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

As BoomTown readers know, I have been adamant that Yahoo’s online ad outsourcing deal with Google is troublesome on a lot of levels. Although, so is government intervention.

From giving advertisers less choice to creating a de facto monopoly to its potential for stifling innovation, the deal–which was struck as a parry to Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo (YHOO) and is set to begin next month–gives me the heebie-jeebies, given the pair control 80 percent of the online search ad market.

Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Justice Department has quietly hired an outside litigator–former Walt Disney Vice Chairman Sanford Litvack–to contemplate whether the government should consider mounting an antitrust case against the search giant.

The article stresses that government regulators have not yet decided to move forward or whether they would simply focus on the Yahoo deal or cast their net more broadly concerning the huge market share of Google (GOOG) in search.

But, ironically, the move has echoes of the Justice Department suit against Microsoft 10 years ago for antitrust violations. Well-known litigator David Boies was hired as special counsel in that case.

Google has argued since it struck the deal that it keeps competition alive. In a statement to The Journal, the company said:

We voluntarily delayed implementation of this arrangement to give the Department of Justice time to understand it, and we continue to work cooperatively with them. While there has been a lot of speculation about this agreement’s potential impact on advertisers or ad prices, we think it would be premature for regulators to halt the agreement before we implement it and everyone can judge the actual impact.

Still, Google faces increasing headwinds. Major advertisers have been complaining about the implications of its Yahoo deal, including the Association of National Advertisers this week.

In an egregious pot-kettle move, Microsoft (MSFT) has also been very vocal about stopping the deal, including at Congressional hearings in Washington, D.C. in mid-July, which I attended.

Here are video interviews I did with the lawyers from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft at that hearing:

This kind of arguing will likely be taking place for a long time to come now with the Justice Department weighing in.

And even though what the government knows about the Internet could fit on a microchip, it is probably a good idea for regulators to at least poke around in this arena.

Because what I wrote back in April when the Yahoo-Google deal was revealed still stands:

And while it might be a long-cherished dream of Google’s to take over Yahoo search–and also get the chance to return to the scene of the crime, since Google got its first big push from doing Yahoo search, before Yahoo wised up too late–there is simply no way this will be allowed by regulators, nor should it.

Still, you have to almost admire the chutzpah of the search giant in making this move, if the sheer and unadulterated arrogance of it wasn’t so distracting.

Because while Google has almost none of the obvious menacing aggression that characterized Microsoft when it thoroughly dominated tech (although all those beach bikes on its campus inexplicably creep me out a little bit), the company still cannot be allowed to have a monopolistic share of the market.

It is bad for advertisers, it is bad for consumers, it is bad for innovation, no matter how well-intentioned Google is.

And no matter how many flashy moves Google and Yahoo make, it is flat-out wrong for one player to so dominate such an important sector (and I hope regulators look at the email domination in the case of a Yahoo-Microsoft union with a similar gimlet eye).”

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

In what is likely to turbocharge its heft in the digital space, according to an internal email sent out by Walt Disney (DIS) CEO Bob Iger, the entertainment company is combining its Disney Interactive Studios and the Walt Disney Internet Group.

The new unit, called Disney Interactive Media Group–will be headed by WDIG’s Steve Wadsworth.

WDIG has a wide range of properties, like Club Penguin and Disney.com. Disney Interactive Studios makes a range of games for Disney brands like “Hannah Montana” and “Wall-E.”

Here’s the memo, with email address removed:

From: Bob Iger
Sent: Wed Jun 04 19:44:22 2008
Subject: Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG)

Bob

This morning, I am interviewing Steve Wadsworth, who helms Walt Disney’s (DIS) Internet businesses.

And after sating myself with as much Club Penguin info as possible, I will be sitting rapt in the front row, as folks like Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jeff Weiner, Bebo’s Joanna Shields and AOL’s (TWX) Ron Grant talk about how social media is going to finally make money.

BoomTown is on a vision quest to answer that question in the coming year, so we are kicking entrepreneurs and taking names!

Here’s a short video I did on the opening night, including talking to paidContent’s Staci Kramer and Seth Goldstein of Social Media.

But, first, it starts with a tour of my temporary L.A. abode at the home of Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis:

I am back in Sin City to appear on a panel at the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) conference here today, along with former Walt Disney head Michael Eisner, former Viacom head Jonathan Dolgen and Dmitry Shapiro, founder and CIO of Veoh.

Titled “Possibilities and Perils of Internet TV,” it should be an interesting discussion, since I think it is all peril at this point with very little to show in the possibility column.

While there have been a lot of attempts to create Internet TV–and by this I don’t mean delivering traditional television via IP–most of what is out there is repurposed professional content that Hollywood hopes we will think is newfangled and, via easy-to-post user-generated material, a more massive version of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

In other words, bad Web programs and a whole lot of videos of cats on skateboards. As for profits from all this: Not so much.

Nonetheless, the television industry is changing dramatically. With the backdrop of the writers’ strike, the situation is even more volatile, as viewers migrate away from the network model and toward, well, who knows?

Both Eisner and Dolgen are investors in Veoh–one of the many online video services out there, this one aimed at professional content. And Eisner has been dabbling in the new media content space to mixed results.

I wrote about Eisner back in November when he jumped on the Blame-Steve-Jobs bandwagon, saying Apple was to blame for Hollywood’s woes.

Said Eisner–whose tense relationship with Jobs was well known–then: “[Movie and television studios] make deals with Steve Jobs, who takes them to the cleaners. They make all these kinds of things, and who’s making money? Apple! They should get a piece of Apple. If I was a union, I’d be striking up wherever he is.”

I will be sure to ask him about that comment.

Yesterday, Walt Disney’s ABC broadcast network and ESPN cable sports channel announced a deal at the Cable Show in Las Vegas to provide free on-demand video of hit shows and other content to Cox Communications, one of the bigger cable companies. Except Cox was required to disable its fast-forward feature to stop viewers from skipping over ads. Thus, those with Cox’s on-demand service lose that functionality, although subscribers with their own digital video recorder can still do as they please, thanks be to the TiVo gods.

This move is a disappointment to me, because I think Disney under the leadership of CEO Bob Iger (pictured here) is one of the more–excuse me–fast forward of the television companies, making big strides in moving its programming all over the Net and onto other devices beyond the television. Its own ABC.com, for example, is one of my favorite places to watch “Ugly Betty” and other popular prime-time programming using its really exceptional player. And I don’t even mind its ads embedded in the program, though I do surf the Web as I listen to them, because it was part of the deal I understood when I clicked in, as opposed to on-demand viewers who usually get to fast-forward through programming.

Iger has energized the digital fortunes of Disney since he took over, and he should be commended for this kind of innovative stuff. But he also should be pilloried for moves such as Disney made with Cox. The very idea of this is offensive, given the inexorable movement away from heavy-handed control of consumers’ ability to have what they want, when they want, how they want.

What’s that you say from your Burbank aerie? Programming needs to be paid for? “Advertising is critical to the financial health of our business, and this agreement marks the first time one of our cable-operator partners is acknowledging that,” said Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, to The Wall Street Journal in a story about the Cox deal.

So the plan is to hobble consumers and force-feed them ads they probably don’t want to see? Figuring out new ad solutions in the new paradigm is Disney’s problem and that of the advertising industry. How about coming up with ads that are truly relevant or helpful? Or even entertaining and involving?

Could it be Anne Sweeney, the co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, whose name constantly pops up in Silicon Valley chatter about the job? The position–which will oversee vast swatches of Yahoo’s consumer-product area, like search, news, information and communications products, as well as international and mobile–would not be a bad choice for Yahoo, given her big media chops and also her record with ABC’s Web initiatives.

She was deeply involved in the move to sell episodes of ABC shows on Apple’s iTunes store (where its “Lost” is the biggest seller) and also the streaming of shows on its Web site. (Using its terrific player, I caught up on all the “Ugly Betty” shows I missed last night and even dipped into the turmoils of the sad-sack Los Angeles yuppies of “What About Brian,” so count me a fan.)

Sweeney also gave two of the best quotes ever from a traditional media exec at a conference late last year. On piracy: “We understand now that piracy is a business model,” said Sweeney. “Pirates compete the same way we do–through quality, price and availability. We don’t like the model, but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.” And, my favorite, on consumer empowerment via technology: “All of us have to continually renew our business in order to renew our brands, because audiences have the upper hand and show no sign of giving it back.”

No, they do not and, to revive Yahoo, top execs have to tattoo that mantra on their backsides.

By way of background, there is a still-open position to lead the recently formed division at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company. Late last year, Yahoo reshuffled its management (and jettisoned some). The result was a split of the company into three groups–one tech group headed by CTO Farzad Nazem, the Advertiser and Publisher Group under CFO Sue Decker and an unknown executive to lead its key product consumer areas in search, communications, communities and media in the Audience Group. While Decker is the favorite to eventually replace Chairman and CEO Terry Semel, the Audience Group head would also be a presumable candidate.

Some thought Jeff Weiner, whose title is executive vice president of the network division, would get the nod then and even now, given that his job includes the “consumer-facing” products like communications (email, IM), community (Groups, 360, Flickr, Bix), media (news and information and entertainment), search (Web, Answers, Del.icio.us) and the front door of the whole place. But Weiner’s ascension has not happened, and sources say that makes it unlikely (though not out of the question). Well-liked internally, the hard-working Weiner would be an excellent choice, as would some others inside Yahoo. In any case, the search has been dragging on now five months.

Other people that people mention for the job: Former Cisco exec Mike Volpi and former AOL programming exec Jim Bankoff.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.