Search Results for: Intellectual Property

The Department of Justice on Thursday slammed intellectual property legislation that would re-organize its IP enforcement structure, calling it unnecessary and counterproductive to the work it has already accomplished. “We have a current structure … that works quite effectively,” Sigal Mandelker, deputy assistant attorney general, told the House Judiciary subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. Judiciary Chairman John Conyers last week introduced H.R. 4279, which would further crack down on intellectual property violations, and create several new government positions with the power to enforce the new law. It is intended to preserve American economic prosperity, according to sponsors.… Read more »

Sumner Redstone, the billionaire businessman who grew up in Boston’s former West End and went on to build a career at the forefront of the entertainment industry, delivered a message to a standing-room-only crowd at Boston University yesterday: content is still king, but in the digital age, copyright is what matters. Redstone, 84, the majority owner of National Amusements and the chairman of the boards of Viacom, the CBS Corporation, and the MTVi Group, spoke at the School of Law Auditorium about the challenges of keeping a media company profitable in the digital age and answered questions from Bill Schwartz,… Read more »

Small Webcaster Community Initiative (SWCI), a coalition of streaming-media companies, today announced their intent to form a U.S. trade association. The new organization aims to promote and protect independent online music radio through grassroots civic campaigns, including political action and educational outreach. In addition they should not try to silence an entire industry. People need choices, and currently terrestrial radio does not offer that choice. Internet radio does. This announcement comes in the immediate wake of a determination by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board for significantly higher royalty rates for all Internet radio stations operating under the Section 114 and… Read more »

A rock archive Web site is fighting back against a copyright lawsuit brought by some of music’s most notable classic rock acts, dragging two major record labels into the battle. In December, Led Zeppelin, the Grateful Dead, Santana and the Doors sued Wolfgang’s Vault claiming that the Bill Sagan-owned Web site violates intellectual property rights by selling merchandise and streaming concert archives belonging to the musicians. In response, Wolfgang’s Vault attorney Michael Elkin recently filed a 40-page counterclaim against the musicians and their labels, Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. “Far from being about bootlegging, consumer confusion or infringement of… Read more »

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 »