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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Earlier this week, Tom Baldrica, vice president of marketing at Sony BMG, announced that Heather McBee has been promoted to vice president of digital business. McBee, who has been with the label for 14 years, was formerly senior director of that department. Baldrica said in a prepared statement: "I'm so proud of this promotion. Heather [...]
Propelled primarily by the sales of 2.5 million copies of the new Harry Potter book, Amazon's profits reach ed the stratosphere in the 3rd fiscal quarter of 2007. The company announced its third-quarter earnings in an online conference call on Tuesday, announcing a profit of $80 million, three times the $19 million it earned in [...]
