The Price of Podcasting Music
"ASCAP updated its Internet licensing to reference podcasts – oh, excuse me, pod-casts – last week. The move may have been intended to answer some questions as to the legality of using music in podcasts, but, as with the webcasting era, it left a lot of people scratching their heads. Is this all we need, just a $288 license to this agency, to be covered through 2005?
"Well, there’s some bad news. The truth is that, no, that’s not everything. In fact, the landscape for music licensing is even more confusing than most people would imagine, and it at times consists of entities who may not even want to sell you a license. Here, I try to break them down. Know that I am not a lawyer, and as such am not going to know much more detail than is absolutely necessary.
Bestkungfu Weblog. Podcasting, Music and the Law. Feb. 15, 2005.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
MPAA Files More Piracy Lawsuits
"Hollywood studios launched a new round of legal action Thursday, aimed in part at people swapping versions of nominated films in Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony.
"As with previous rounds of lawsuits filed by the Motion Picture Association of America, the group’s executives declined to say how many people were targeted in the lawsuits or where the suits were filed. They cited several award-nominated films–including ‘Sideways,’ ‘The Incredibles‘ and ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind‘–as being involved in the lawsuits.
"The MPAA is several months into an aggressive new legal campaign against unauthorized film trading, which has resulted in several key file-swapping hubs being taken offline.
John Borland. Studios Target Oscar Film Swappers. News.com. Feb. 24, 2005.
See also:
Reuters. Hollywood Files More Web Lawsuits. CNN Money. Feb. 24, 2005.
John Borland. MPAA Files New Film-Swapping Suits. News.com. Jan. 26, 2005.
John Borland. File Swapping vs. Hollywood. News.com. Jan. 25, 2005.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Protecting Digital Property Without New Legislation
"The agenda for last week’s Digital Media Hollywood Summit reads like a self-help guide for the content industry. Sessions on the economics of media convergence and ’embracing the connected consumer’ are indicative of an industry dealing with changes in technology and consumer behavior. Panels discussed technologies that package digital content in new ways.
"Using technology protections for copyright instead of legislation to protect copyright is a worthwhile public policy discussion. Indeed, going forward, technology, and not legislation, should be the primary means for defining the consumer experience.
"Why? Technology applications – if not the result of a government mandate – represent a market solution that can help reward artists and provide consumers with innovative content."
Braden Cox and Clyde Wayne Crews. Helping Hollywood Help Itself – Protecting Digital Property Without New Legislation. Competitive Enterprise Institute. Feb. 15, 2005.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Search Engines Involve Legal Issues
"A competitor is running a search engine ad with your trademarked brand name. Another has copied your web site without permission. You suspect another of driving up your advertising costs through click fraud. What are your legal options?
"What can you do to protect your site from these online thieves? At the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, a panel of experts explored a wide range of issues related to search engines and legal protection."
Grant Crowell. Search Engines and Legal Issues. SearchEngineWatch. Feb. 23, 2005.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Russian Police Investigate MP3 Site
"A Russian digital-music site offering high-quality song downloads for just pennies apiece is the target of a criminal copyright investigation by the local police, recording industry groups said Tuesday.
"AllofMP3.com has been operating for several years, asking consumers to pay just 2 cents per megabyte of downloads–usually between 4 cents and 10 cents per song. Alongside the catalogue available at traditional stores like Apple Computer’s iTunes, the site offered access to songs from the Beatles and other groups that haven’t yet authorized digital distribution.
"The Russian site claimed it had licenses to do so from a local clearing house, but record labels have maintained that the licenses weren’t valid. After long-standing complaints, the Moscow City Police Computer Crimes division completed an investigation earlier this month and recommended that prosecutors charge the site’s operators with criminal copyright infringement."
John Borland. MP3s for Pennies? Russian Cops Say No. News.com. Feb. 22, 2005.
See also:
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Recording industry Welcomes Police Investigation of Allofmp3.com. (Press Release.) Feb. 22, 2005.
John Leyden. Russian Police Probe Cheap Downloads Site. The Register. Feb. 22, 2005.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Podcasting: How Amateurs May Soon Rule the Airwaves
"’People think I’m this poseur guy from MTV, but I don’t care,’ says Adam Curry, the former VJ whose long blond locks once mesmerized teenyboppers across the globe. ‘I’ve always had this total dual life as a geek and a celebrity.’
"Curry, 40, is the brains behind iPodder, a tiny application that he believes has the power to challenge commercial radio. iPodder is the bastard offspring of the blog and the Apple MP3 player. It combines the hyperactive talkiness of blogs and the hipness of iPods into something utterly new: the podcast. iPodder uses the blog syndication tool RSS to automatically download homebrew radio shows, podcasts, directly into a portable MP3 player.
"Welcome to podcasting, the medium that promises a future where anyone can make radio, instead of just listen to it. The biggest podcast audiences now number in the mere tens of thousands. Yet real radio, the kind with bona fide mass audiences, is starting to use the technology to make its shows available for download.
"The podcasting scene is reminiscent of the early, heady days of blogging, circa 2001, a time before Wonkette made the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Like bloggers in the good old days, podcasters are obsessively internecine and gloriously, honestly unprofessional."
Annalee Newitz. Adam Curry Wants to Make You an iPod Radio Star. Wired. March 2005.
SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.
Groups Challenge Broadcast Flag Rules
"Mike Godwin, the legal director for Public Knowledge, a digital-rights advocacy group in Washington, is a fan of Showtime’s new drama series ‘Huff.’ So three weeks ago, when he missed the season finale, he decided to download it to his personal computer.
"To Mr. Godwin, the time-consuming download (and the file’s poor quality) indicated that the rampant piracy of digitized broadcast programs – a threat Hollywood has long warned against – was hardly imminent. But to the Federal Communications Commission and the Motion Picture Association of America, cases like this one suggest a future of widespread illegal file-sharing that must be stopped before it begins."
"The debate will be presented in oral arguments tomorrow before the District of Columbia Circuit for the United States Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by Public Knowledge and others against the F.C.C., challenging a new regulation that is intended to prevent such bleeding of television content onto the Internet."
Tom Zeller Jr. Federal Effort to Head Off TV Piracy Is Challenged. News.com. Feb. 21, 2005.
See also:
Ed Felton. Broadcast Flag in Court. Freedom to Tinker. Feb. 21, 2005.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. Broadcast Flag "Just As Important As Grokster". Deep Links. Feb. 18, 2005.
Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF’s HDTV-PVR Cookbook. No date
Update: Declan McCullagh. Court Questions FCC’s Broadcast Flag Rules. News.com. Feb. 22, 2005. (A federal appeals court questions whether the FCC has authority to undertake such sweeping regulation.)
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