U.S. wants end to Allofmp3 spinoffs
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Politicians and trade officials are still pressuring the nation to shut down "illegal" Web sites and to align its intellectual property laws with "international standards."
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Bloomberg is running an article which quotes Google CEO Eric Schmidt&#8217;s stance on media companies and their reluctance to upload content on YouTube, despite its popularity and demand by YouTube users to view copyrighted content. &#8220;Eventually all of the copyrighted content will be available on virtually all of the sites,'&#8217; said Schmidt, who is tussling over [...]
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People who received MP3 players as holiday gifts may want to steer clear of some Web sites that claim to offer legal music but don&#39;t have licensing agreements with major music labels, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) said.CDT, a consumer rights group, has published a list of more than 30 MP3 download sites that don&#39;t have licensing deals with major U.S. music labels. The sites, which charge between $20 and $35 for subscriptions, say they offer music from artists signed to the major labels, CDT said.Consumers should be aware of the sites on the list because in some cases, they may simply provide subscribers popular peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software that&#39;s otherwise free, said David Sohn, CDT&#39;s senior policy counsel. And customers using P-to-P software to trade unauthorized music files could face lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), he said.&quot;People might get the false impression of what they paid for was legal,&quot; Sohn said. &quot;If you pay $25, you might think that $25 goes to compensate the rights holder.&quot;The CDT tried to contact the operators of each site on its MP3 warning list. In each case, the site operators did not respond.Several of the sites on the list seem to be run by the same people -- they have similar designs and make similar claims. In many cases, the sites are registered outside the U.S., Sohn said.Some of the sites hedge their claims of being legal in small print. For example, AllCoolMusic.com, which says it offers 12 billion files, includes a disclaimer at the bottom of its front page: &quot;Today, there are 240 million users trading MP3s on legal file-sharing networks. Sharing is not illegal as long as you obey all relevant copyright laws. Sharing copyrighted material, without permission to do so, is illegal. Purchasing a membership in AllCoolMusic.com does not give you license to download or upload copyrighted material. AllCoolMusic.com implores you to respect all copyright laws.&quot;AllCoolMusic didn&#39;t respond to CDT&#39;s letter, and there&#39;s no contact information readily available on the site.In March 2005, CDT filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission against two Web sites claiming their music and video downloads were 100 percent legal.The FTC filed a complaint in U.S. court against one of the Web sites, mp3downloadcity.com, obtained an injunction, and eventually reached a settlement with the Web site operator in May 2006. The settlement required the site to refund customers.The RIAA has focused its lawsuits on P-to-P users that share music with others, not those that simply download music from P-to-P networks. However, if subscribers to these sites would opt to share their music on the P-to-P software some of the sites provide, that could expose them to lawsuits, Sohn said.In many cases, users of the sites are &quot;getting less than you pay for,&quot; he said.
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Apple to NBC: 'You can't fire me! I quit!' The Americanized version of "The Office" will soon disappear from Apple iTunes. The Reg couldn't care less - we prefer the original, and we have no interest in watching even our favorite TV shows on an overpriced, DRM-shackled, handheld status symbol - but many uncultured Apple-loving web mavens are sure to be very upset.â¦
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UK mesh pioneer taken out of administration
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Apple Inc and a popular Web site  that published company secrets about the maker of the Mac  computer, the iPhone and the iPod have reached a settlement  that calls for the site to shut down.
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(InfoWorld) - A broad group of companies and associations covering most of the Japanese entertainment industry is calling on YouTube to be more proactive in policing its Web site for copyrighted material. In a letter sent Monday to YouTube Chief Executive Officer Chad Hurley and Chief Technology Officer Steve Chen, the group requests YouTube start a system that proactively identifies and removes copyrighted material rather than making rights holders find it and send in complaints. "Taking into account the current status of your service, we believe that your company should not just wait for rights owners to take the 'Notice and Take down' procedures but should bear the responsibility to prevent, in advance, copyright infringements such as illegal uploads and distributions, or to avoid those infringements," said the letter, a copy of which was distributed to media Tuesday by the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC). Monday's letter is signed by JASRAC and 22 other organizations including the Motion Picture Producers' Association of Japan, the Japan Video Software Association, the Association of Japanese Animations, all of the major commercial TV broadcasters, the Japan Satellite Broadcasting Association, the Recording Industry Association of Japan, and Yahoo Japan Corp. It comes a month and a half afterÂ YouTube deleted 29,549 filesÂ based on a complaint filed by JASRAC. The association said the files in question infringed on the rights of 23 Japanese content companies. Neither that complaint or YouTube's action didn't stop users uploading content to the site, and plenty of clips from Japanese TV shows can again be found on YouTube. "We are seriously concerned about the current situation where the Notice and Takedown scheme, aimed [at preventing] copyright infringements, is not functioning well due to the large amount of illegal uploads," the letter said. "While we expect you to promptly take adequate and necessary measures to prevent copyright infringement on the YouTube Web site, until you do so, we request you to take provisional measures ... in order to prevent illegal uploads of audio-visual works, which copyrights are neither owned by the persons posting the works on the Web site themselves nor licensed by the right owners." The preventative measures requested by the group include the posting of a message in Japanese on the YouTube home page warning that posting copyrighted material can be illegal; that users may be liable to civil or criminal prosecution; and a register of names and addresses of users posting content and the termination on-request of user accounts that are used or have been used since June 2006 illegally to upload copyrighted material. The group also requests a reply to the letter by Dec. 15. YouTube could not be immediately reached for comment. Â
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Russia should shut down a pirate music Web site that is robbing U.S. recording companies of sales if it wants to become a member of the World Trade Organization, the top U.S. trade official said on Wednesday.
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The controversial game publisher pulls the plug on a game, for now.
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StopBadware.org and Center for Democracy and Technology file FTC complaint against FastMP3Search.
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We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be.  Now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms for feeds that you might like, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't.  Normally, I'd leave a site like that running indefinitely, but this one needed its own server, and I wanted to cut my server expenses now that my S3 bill is going up, serving some very big JPEGs and generally being the back-end for a community that is growing, the people using FlickrFan. If there's a big demand to bring it back, we can -- but that's going to require cash flow to go with it. At this point, I don't think it's a good investment for me. Still diggin!
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Martin says licenses preclude amalgamation of XM and Sirius.
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'Vertical integration' and cross-promotion in the TV landscape is prompting calls to limit media consolidation.
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Several of the world's largest high-tech fims plan to urge Congress today to force ISPs to crack down more aggressively on users who swap copyrighted material online.
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They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either. AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections." Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it. Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill. They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.  Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power! Make the users everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.
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Update: The Recording Industry Association of America purges nasty file-sharing clients' ads from a recent site reportedly planned as part of a new anti-piracy campaign. In Listening Post.
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'We're fighting the good fight here' Allofmp3.com pulled out its hired violins today to woo the press with a sad song about a hard done-by web site just trying to make its way in a temporarily legal world.â¦