royalties
Pink Floyd, EMI Brawl Over iTunes Royalties
Pink Floyd and its label, EMI, are battling over online royalties stemming from a contested clause in their decade-old contract. The developer of “The Dark Side of the Moon” and other top-selling albums claims its contract with EMI requires its music to be sold as an entire album, not single tracks that EMI has permitted iTunes to distribute. The band’s attorney, Robert Howe, told a London Court on Tuesday that “It’s a matter of fact that the defendant has been permitting individual tracks to be downloaded online and that therefore they have been allowing albums not to be sold in their original configuration,” Howe said, Bloomberg News reported .
Continue reading »Copyright Group Prosecuted For Failing to Pay Artists
Royalty collection agencies go to the extremes, ostensibly to claim money on behalf of artists and music composers. They target schools and kids’ community centers for singing Christmas carols without a license, and some even crash weddings if they have to. With all this dedication one would expect that such groups would handle the money they collect with care.
Continue reading »RIAA vs. Public Radio – Performance Rights Act Moves Ahead
If one were to frame this as a case of biting the hand that feeds it, there would be plenty of people who wouldn’t be surprised at the comparison. A bill in the US is moving ahead that would tack on a brand new tax onto public radio broadcasters where if radio plays music, they have even more royalty fees they have to pay. It’s not hard to see why the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) wants this bill passed.
Continue reading »Apple found guilty of willful patent infringement
Apple has been ordered to pay $19 million to Opti Inc., a technology company based up the road in Palo Alto, for patent infringement. The verdict came out of Patent Lawsuit Valley (also known as the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Marshall) late Thursday, where a jury found that Apple had “willfully” infringed on Opti’s patent for “Predictive snooping.” The patent—its full name is ” Predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses “—describes a method to more efficiently transfer data among the CPU, memory, and “other devices.” The patent was issued to Opti in June of 2002, and the company filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple in January of 2007 (which we briefly mentioned in a Friday Apple links post that week). Click here to read the rest of this article
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