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I received a call from one of my readers to address the topic of whether a songwriter has the ability to restrict the use of his or her composition in the instance it is being used in advancing a cause opposite to that espoused by the songwriter. This was spawned, of course, by the recent [...]
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 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF7cHmyEJ-c&rel=0] Technorati Tags: digital [...]
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 [...]
The U.S. House of Representatives introduced a 69-page bill entitled the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007." The legislation is significant in that it increases civil penalties for copyright infringement, expands criminal enforcement, and creates both a new federal agency and a new division of the Attorney General's office of the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
See Jane. See Jane write lyrics. See Dick. See Dick write melodies. See Dick meet Jane. See Dick and Jane combine their efforts and collaborate together to write a song. This is one frequent story among Nashville's songwriting community. On any given afternoon in Nashville, there will be innumerable co-writing sessions occurring at any given [...]
There appears to be a slight ripple of a trend among courts to take a stricter look at the evidence being presented by the RIAA in its crusade against digital downloads, based primarily on the evidence of user names and IP addresses assembled by their expert consultants, MediaSentry. In the RIAA's case against Jeff Dangler, [...]
On August 16, 2007, Doe No. 28 in the RIAA's action captioned Virgin Records America, Inc. et al. v. Does 1-33 filed a motion to squash the subpoena issued to the University of Tennessee on the grounds that, one, it was unreasonable on its face and, two, it violates his rights under the Family Educational [...]
Back in 1999, my law clerk, J. Eric Crupi and I considered the topic of personal jurisdiction as applied to the Internet. In the resulting Law on the Row article, entitled "Lines in the Virtual Sand." In the original article, Eric concluded that “the boundaries of personal jurisdiction in cyberspace have not been concretely defined, [...]
