In the News

["Jack Boeve" <JBoeve@xxxxxxxx>]

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Gracenote, music publishers in lyrics deal. by Reuters; 07/14/2006.
http://news.com.com/Gracenote%2C+music+publishers+in+lyrics+deal/2100-1030_3-
6094174.html

U.S. digital entertainment company Gracenote on Thursday said it obtained
licenses to distribute lyrics as music publishers mulled legal action against
Web sites that provide them without authorization.

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Copyright Fever: Battle Over 'Disco Inferno' Rages. By Shannon P. Duffy; The
Legal Intelligencer; 07/12/2006.
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1152608728296

The legal battle over who owns the copyright to the song "Disco Inferno"
sounds more like a law school test question than reality. It's as if someone
engineered the facts to create a handful of tricky questions.

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Google to Open Michigan Research Center. By Micheline Maynard and Nick
Bunkley; New York Times; 07/11/2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/technology/11google.html

Google is expected to announce plans to open a research center in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, alma mater of Google cofounder
Larry Page. The center will reportedly encompass 240,000 square feet, of which
the majority would house a technology and call center. The balance of the
space would be dedicated to Google's controversial book-scanning project, in
which the University of Michigan is a participant.

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Pumping Up Online Music, Video Ads: Pump Audio launches an editing tool that
lets people license music to create video ads for Web sites. by Laurie
Sullivan; TechWeb.com; 07/11/2006.
http://www.informationweek.com/management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=1903021
75

A company that helps independent musicians and artists license music to
television studios and advertising agencies launched a service aimed at the
growing crop of amateur filmmakers popping up on the Internet.

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New Soundtrack Service for Videographers. by May Wong; The Associated Press;
07/10/2006.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/10/AR20060710000
31.html

Pump Audio, a company that licenses the music of independent artists for use
in television shows and commercials, will launch Monday a soundtrack-creation
service aimed at the growing crop of amateur filmmakers pervading the
Internet.

Paramount Submits Complaint; Film over World Trade Center claimed to infringe
Copyright. Markenbusiness News (Germany); markenbusiness.com; 07/10/2006.
http://www.markenbusiness.com/en/news.php?newsid=3745

The final-year Yale student Chris Moukarbel had made a 12-minute film
concerning the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The
budget was tiny but its influence turned out to be great. The American film
studio Paramount perceived the short film to be a potential threat to the
success of its own film 'World Trade Center' and submitted a complaint against
Moukarbel for copyright infringement and danger of confusion.

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"Worst copyright law in Europe" passed in France.  by Bruce Byfield;
NewsForge; 07/09/2006.
http://trends.newsforge.com/trends/06/07/09/040205.shtml?tid=147&tid=138

The French Parliament has passed what the anti-Digital Rights Management (DRM)
group EUCD.INFO calls "the worst copyright law in Europe." Popularly known as
DADVSI (Loi sur le Droit d'Auteur et des Droits Voisins dans la Sociiti de
l'Information, or Law on Author's Rights and Related Rights in the Information
Society)...DADVSI makes sweeping changes to French copyright law to make it
conform to the European Directive on Copyright (EUCD), which is generally seen
as the European equivalent of the United States' Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA).

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Court Rules Against Sanitizing Films: Federal Appeals Court Rules That
Removing Sex, Profanity From Films Violates Copyright Laws. AP; 07/08/2006.
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060708/film_sanitizers.html?.v=1

Sanitizing movies on DVD or VHS tape violates federal copyright laws, and
several companies that scrub films must turn over their inventory to Hollywood
studios, an appeals judge ruled.

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Broadcasters told to honour intellectual copyright laws. Viet Nam News;
Vietnam News Agency; 07/08/2006.
http://vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn/showarticle.php?num=06SOC080706

Provincial television stations in Viet Nam must respect intellectual property
rights of programmes produced by national and foreign television or risk a
heavy fine or jail sentence, broadcast television officials have said.

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PodShow Updates Site to Eliminate Podcast Hijacking; It Was a Silly Mistake,
Says Adam Curry. PodcastingNews.com; 07/08/2006.
http://www.podcastingnews.com/archives/2006/07/podshow_updates_1.html

PodShow, which has come under heated criticism because the updated PodShow
site hijacked podcasters feeds, has quickly updated their site to fix the
problem. Instead of linking to podcasters' original podcast feeds, PodShow was
rewriting feeds, removing podcasters' copyright notices and republishing them
under PodShow URLs.

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Everyone's a video star. by Ted Nesi, for The Sun Chronicle (Attleboro, MA);
07/08/2006.
http://www.thesunchronicle.com/articles/2006/07/08/city/city3.txt

But citing copyright infringement, the network's lawyers ordered YouTube to
remove the file, and the company complied. Attorneys say that sensitivity to
legal restrictions, combined with users' inability to archive videos on their
personal computers, protects the company under the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act of 1998.

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Online Store Offers Music Sans Sex and Swearing. by Steve Woodward, Newhouse
News Service; 07/07/2006.
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/woodward070706.html

Although Apple's iTunes and other commercial music-download sites offered
plenty of Christian and other inoffensive songs and albums, Howard Rachinski
wanted something that catered exclusively to religious people like himself and
his family. So he and his colleagues created SongTouch, an online music store
much like iTunes -- but without a single "Parental Advisory" label among its
220,000 religious, inspirational and classical titles.

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French 'Pirate Party' formed to oppose copyright law. OUT-LAW News,
out-law.com; 07/06/2006.
http://www.out-law.com/page-7074

A French 'Pirate Party' has been formed. Modelled on Sweden's Pirat Partiet,
the Parti Pirate has been founded to fight for a loosening of copyright law in
France.

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