Search Results for: Intellectual Property

Ten years ago, as the Internet began to mushroom in popularity and emerging technologies enabled consumers to make nearly perfect copies of digital content, the recording industry embarked on a two-pronged strategy in response to the changing business environment. First, it emphasized copy-control technologies, often referred to as digital rights management (DRM), that many in the industry believed would allow it re-assert control over music copying. Second, it lobbied the Canadian government for a private copying levy to compensate for the music copying that it could not control. While the industry’s approach proved successful on the legal front — the… Read more »

Warner Music Group Corp., home to recording artists such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, James Blunt and Daniel Powter, said Thursday its first-quarter profit fell 74 percent due to fewer albums released during the period and soft domestic and European sales. Its shares fell nearly 5 percent. The New York-based recording company said net income declined to $18 million, or 12 cents per share, from $69 million, or 46 cents per share, during the same period a year ago. Total revenue fell 11 percent to $928 million from $1.04 billion during the prior-year period. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected… Read more »

Washington – Congress is toying with the idea of mandating one standard for all online music platforms. Thanks but no thanks – the industry can figure it out, said music industry and consumer groups at a congressional hearing about the plan Wednesday. During a hearing to discuss mandating interoperability standards between competing music platforms such as Apple’s iTunes and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody, lawmakers sounded off on the lament of some hipsters frustrated by playback snafus when they try to transfer music files from other platforms to their iPods. Although Real and Apple support Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), a compression format defined… Read more »

The Apple iTunes store has been selling a million tracks a day, it was announced recently. And no, that is not a misprint: a million a day. This will come as no surprise to readers of this column. Quite why the music industry didn’t spot the opportunity will be the subject of innumerable MBA dissertations in the years to come. But for now the significant thing to note is that it was a computer manufacturer and not a record company that cracked the problem of providing legal music downloads. On a global scale, you might say that the inadequacies of… Read more »

John Hall, a former Democratic county legislator in upstate New York, co-wrote the song and recorded it with his band Orleans in 1976. He complained Friday morning about the campaign’s use of the song at the president’s events. The cheery pop tune opened and ended a Bush campaign rally in New Hampshire Friday, then was to have vanished from the political playlist. “Out of deference to Mr. Hall’s views, the song will no longer be played,” Bush campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said. She said the song had been included in a catalog of music that the campaign’s licensing company used… Read more »

Internet music piracy has no negative effect on legitimate music sales, according to a study released today by two university researchers that contradicts the music industry’s assertion that the illegal downloading of music online is taking a big bite out of its bottom line. Songs that were heavily downloaded showed no measurable drop in sales, the researchers found after tracking sales of 680 albums over the course of 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data with activity on the OpenNap file-sharing network, they concluded that file sharing actually increases CD sales for hot albums that sell… Read more »

The Bush administration on Thursday accused South Korea of failing to halt the piracy of American movies and music that it said was costing U.S. companies millions of dollars in lost revenue. The administration announced that South Korea was being added to a priority list of countries that are subject to special monitoring and consultations aimed at making sure the foreign government acts to address the copyright piracy issues that have been uncovered. If South Korea fails to comply the United States would have the ability to bring a case before the World Trade Organization. If the WTO ruled in… Read more »

The week the music industry brought suit against 261 users of Internet file-sharing services, Donald L. McCabe was in St. Louis to talk about a different form of digital copying. Mr. McCabe, a Rutgers University professor, has made a career of studying the cheating of American high school and college students. His most recent study found that cheating was spreading almost like file-sharing. Of more than 18,000 students surveyed, 38 percent said they had lifted material from the Internet for use in papers in the last year. More striking to Mr. McCabe, 44 percent said they considered this sampling no… Read more »

The Beatles want to take another bite out of Apple Computer Inc. Their record company, Apple Corps Ltd., said Friday that it was suing Apple Computer because the technology company violated a 1991 agreement by entering the music business with its iTunes online store. When Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1977, he is said to have chosen the name in part as a tribute to the Beatles. The 1991 agreement dealt with the future use of the name “Apple” and of both companies’ well-known logos. Apple Corps, founded in 1968, is owned by Sir Paul McCartney; Ringo Starr; John… Read more »

Rep. Mary Bono, who is forming a new congressional caucus on music piracy and copyrights, sought Monday to defuse speculation over whether she wants to run the music industry’s lobbying organization in Washington, saying she isn’t actively seeking the job. Bono, R-Calif., said she hasn’t considered whether she would accept a prospective offer to replace the departing chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America but stopped short of denying she was interested. Her spokeswoman, Cindy Hartley, earlier had described the position as Bono’s “ideal job” but said her boss wasn’t actively pursuing the position and plans to run… Read more »