April 24th 2008
Music giant EMI is demanding that music file storage company MP3tunes turn over all music stored on its servers. Apparently, EMI is demanding this irrespective of who owns, or published, the music. What is unclear is what “hand over” means in this context. Clearly, though, it does mean EMI seeks to violate the privacy and personal […]
April 23rd 2008
Universal Music Group (UMG) is suing Troy Augusto, owner of Roast Beast Music Collectables, who sells promotional CDs on eBay. UMG claims promo CDs are for personal use only and, according to the agreement contained thereon, cannot be redistributed —including being sold, given away, or even thrown away. The discs are usually sent out to […]
March 23rd 2008
At this year’s SXSW Music and Media Conference in Austin, an idea was floated that was supposed to “monetize anarchy” found in the music industry vis-à-vis illegal copying. The idea: a five dollar monthly surcharge on broadband internet service as a royalty for downloading music illegally. This is also known as a “utility model.” But […]
March 22nd 2008
Penn Jillette is the taller, louder half of the magic and comedy act Penn and Teller. He is also a research fellow at the Cato Institute and has lectured at Oxford and MIT. Somewhere along the path of being a magician, writer of best-selling books, and producer of a film about a single dirty joke, he developed […]
March 8th 2008
The ill-conceived and draconian PRO-IP Act got some of its feathers clipped by the elimination of a requirement known as Section 104 of the proposed bill to treat compilations of music as a separate violations. Had this been allowed to stand, the fines would have been multiplied many times, because they’d be determined based upon […]
March 4th 2008
Is the RIAA only about the money, and not the ethical defense of intellectual property rights of artists? It seems the artists the RIAA supposedly represents have seen little or no money as a result of copyright infringement settlements over the years from major entities like Napster and Kazaa. Those settlements are in the neighborhood […]
February 28th 2008
On February 13, 2008, in Connecticut copyright case Atlantic vs. Brennan, the court rejected the RIAA’s request for a default judgment on the grounds of its theory that simply making available copyrighted music that might be illegally copied by some other party is, in fact, infringement. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton ruled that such a […]
January 29th 2008
There’s a lot to be happy about in recent moves by the recording industry to experimentally make music available on an ad-supported “free” basis. Here are three examples of emerging models meeting with dramatically different levels of success.
January 15th 2008
In a court brief filed by RIAA counsel Ira Schwartz in a case involving Jeffrey Howell of Scottsdale, AZ, the RIAA claims that any copying of CDs is “unauthorized.” According to an article in the Washington Post: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection […]
December 25th 2007
The RIAA sank to a new all-time low by producing a two-minute video press release intended for local TV stations to broadcast about copyright infringement during the holiday season. A copy of the poorly made video may be found here. It matches a press release by the RIAA released on December 13, 2007. Among the […]
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