SOPA and PROTECT IP: Is the Sky Falling on the Internet?
By Amber Rose and Barry Shrum If you’ve cruised the net or checked out your local news any time within the last few months, chances are you’ve heard rumors currently sweeping the United States about two pieces of proposed legislation : H.R. 3261 entitled the Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”) and [...]
YouTube Uses Happy Tree Friends to Educate on Copyright
By Rachel Galloway IMPORTANT NOTICE: The views expressed in this article are solely those of Ms. Galloway and may not necessarily reflect the views of Law on the Row or Barry Neil Shrum, Esquire. The last time I watched a Happy Tree Friends video was when I was around 13 years old in the company [...]
Illegal file-sharing has the greatest impact on the lowly songwriter
A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators… and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business. -Bono (New York Times, January 2010) The passage of the Digital Economy [...]
Immigration and Counterfeit Enforcement Agency Brings Criminal Charges against Owner of ChannelSurfing.Net
By Barry Neil Shrum & Nathan Drake In November 2010, the Federal Immigration and Counterfeit Enforcement agency (“ICE”) recently seized 82 websites and shut them down on the grounds that they were committing criminal copyright infringement. One of these websites has recently become the spotlight of attention:. Brain McCarthy, the owner and operator of channelsurfing.net, [...]
98% of all Statistics are Made Up on the Spot! Fact is, copyright infringement DOES kill jobs.
Mark Twain had a lot to say about statistics, ranking them as the highest of all lies: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. Twain is also attributed with the more insinuated saying that “statistics are like ladies of the evening, once you get them down, you do anything with them!” [...]
The Magical Ring of Gyges: Why Illegal Downloading is So Rampant in the Age of Cyberspace
NBC Universal recently hired a company called Envisional to study counterfeiting activity over the Internet. The results of this study – despite the fact that it is industry funded – are literally astonishing: 24% of all global Internet traffic involves digital theft! Stated another way, one in every four people surfing the Internet are stealing [...]
Origins of an Idea–Nothing New Under the Sun?
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the [...]
The Limewire Ruling: New King of the Hill for Illegal Downloading Decisions
The U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled against LimeWire and its parent company, Lime Group, finding them liable for inducement of copyright infringement based on the use of their service by subscribers. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood issued the 59-page decision Wednesday, siding with the 13 record companies that [...]
Nothing left to lose – the ongoing war on copyrights
Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster once penned one of my favorite lyrics in the song Me and Bobby McGee, i.e., “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” The sentiment is perhaps appropriate for the ongoing war that is being waged against copyright laws as we know them. The latest battle in this war [...]
PassAlong Networks gets cash infusion
Word is spreading on the Internet about PassAlong Networks, Inc.’s recent infusion of investment capital. PassAlong is a digital music distribution and sharing service aptly headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee. According to VentureWire, the company plans to close a $30 million funding round later this month. PassAlong, also known as the Tennessee Pacific Group, LLC, was [...]
Thomas verdict vacated; new trial ordered
The trial in Capital v. Thomas was one of the first stories I began tracking over a year ago. See Jury Awards RIAA $222,000 against Thomas: My Thoughts on the Verdict and Jammie Thomas to appeal verdict in RIAA Litigation. Now, in a decision issued on September 24, 2008 – only eight days shy of [...]
Second Circuit gets it wrong in Cartoon Network v. Cablevision
On August 4, 2008, the Second Circuit court of appeals overturned a lower courts opinion that Cablevision’s Remote Storage” Digital Video Recorder (“RS-DVR”) system violated the Copyright Act by infringing plaintiffs’ exclusive rights of reproduction and public performance. The full 44-page opinion is available at Cartoon Network, LLP, et al. v. Cablevision. In my humble yet [...]
Why "Freeconomics" – and the Music Industry's Five Point Plan – won't work in the long term
There is a great deal of talk these days about the concept of “freeconomics,” spurned by the fact that most teenagers and college students are still ripping music and sharing it online. Most recently, the major record labels commissioned a study from two think tanks, The Leading Question and Music Ally, which resulted in a [...]
Taking a Bite out of Apple: iPhone Hackers File Lawsuits
Posted with the permission of the author Matthew Williams, Esquire. Matthew is an intellectual property attorney practicing with the firm of Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp. All rights reserved. Apple’s release of the iPhone in June 2007 was an unqualified business success – 1.4 million iPhones were sold in just a few months. However, as has [...]
You Say You Want A REVOLUTION?
You say you want a revolution Well, you know We all want to change the world . . . You say you’ve got a real solution Well, you know We’d all love to see the plan You ask me for a contribution Well, you know We are doing what we can [...]
Columnist David Pogue sings a humorous diddy about the RIAA
New York Times technology columnist and Emmy-award winning CBS news correspondent David Pogue is featured in this YouTube video singing a fun diddy about the digital wave of media on the Internet, ending with a humorous take on the RIAA and its wave of litigation against college students nationwide. Enjoy Technorati Tags: digital copyright [...]
Atlantic Records et al. v. Brennan: Federal Judge Denies Default Judgment for RIAA
U.S. District Judge for the District of Connecticut Justice Janet Bond Arterton, handed down a very pointed and decisive opinion hammering the R.I.A.A. for its boilerplate style of pleading in the nationwide wide campaign against illegal file sharing. Justice Arterton was appointed by President Clinton in 1995. The full decision is here: Decision. At several [...]
Copyright Royalty Board begins critical hearings
On Monday, January 28th, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) began what will be four weeks of hearings. The CRB will hear testimony from interested parties on both sides of issues which will ultimately determine the statutory mechanical rates for songwriters and music publishers. The CRB sets these rates periodically, but these particular hearings are more [...]
Expert Witness Fund established to defend against RIAA Lawsuits
The Recording Industry v. the People, an anti-RIAA blog operat ed by New York attorney, Ray Beckerman, is cooperating with the Boston-based non-profit, The Free Software Foundation, to establish “a fund to help provide computer expert witnesses to combat RIAA’s ongoing lawsuits, and to defend against the RIAA’s attempt to redefine copyright law.” The Free [...]
The Magic Bubble Bursts: Did the Record Labels make their own grave?
For almost a decade now, the major labels (at the beginning there were five of them, now only four, EMI, Sony BMG, Vivendi Universal and Warner) have declared that illegal downloading is ravaging their business by destroying the sales of physical product. One may question this declaration, however, in few of the fact that ever [...]
Music Publishing 101, Part 4: Show me the money!
Section 106 of the Copyright Act gives the owner of a copyright a bundle of rights which includes the rights to 1) reproduce the work, 2) prepare derivative works, 3) distribute copies of the works, 4) publicly perform the work and 5) publicly display the work. All of the music publisher’s income flows from this [...]
Copyright: it's the end of the world as we know it.
Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs” places self-actualization as the pinnacle of human behavior. To illustrate what the phrase “self-actualization” meant , Maslow said: “a musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves.” Of course, the thing that is important to [...]
The long tail wags the dog! An independent artist succeeds using the Internet
I have often advised my clients in the past that the new direction for independent artists is what I refer to as “guerilla” marketing, meaning finding alternative means of marketing your product. One of the most explosive methods of doing that over the past few years has been the Internet. One of the problems with [...]
New concurrent resolution, H.Con.Res. 244 introduced to combat performance fees for record labels
For years now, a huge battle has been brewing between proponents of performance royalties for the owners of sound recording copyrights to be paid by terrestrial radio stations (those broadcasting through the air) and it has been gathering steam in the last several months. The battle is being waged between the giants of industry, the [...]
