DECEMBER 2006
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FILM & COPYRIGHT - Hollywood wins copyright suit in China SHANGHAI, Reuters Dec 29, 2006 -- Hollywood movie studios have won a lawsuit in China over the posting of movie clips on the Internet according to the Motion Picture Association. A unit of Sohu.com Inc., which runs some of China's most popular Web portals, lost a suit over copyright infringement after it posted digital files of motion pictures for downloading, the group said in a statement. The Beijing First Intermediate People's Court ordered Beijing Sohu Internet Information Service Co. Ltd. to pay damages and costs of 1.1 million yuan ($139,000), the group said. A Sohu.com spokesman in Beijing, contacted by telephone, denied knowledge of the litigation, and officials at the Beijing court were not available for comment. But Chinese official newspapers also reported the court judgment. Movie titles involved in the suit included Lord of the Rings, Dawn of the Dead and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the movie group said. The group estimates that major global movie studios including Twentieth Century Fox -- a unit of News Corp. -- and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Pictures lost about $2.3 billion to Internet piracy in 2005.
MUSIC - Johnny Hallyday Loses Legal Battle With Universal Music Group Dec 21, 2006 Post Chronicle -- French rocker Johnny Hallyday lost his two-year legal battle with Universal Music Group for control of his back catalogue yesterday (20Dec06). Hallyday - real name Jean-Phillippe Smet - originally lost his case in April 2005, and his subsequent appeal was rejected by the Cour de Cassation, the highest French court, yesterday. The ruling means Universal Music retains control of the master tapes Smet recorded between 1961 and 2004 - featuring over 1,000 songs including Pour Moi La Vie Va Commencer and Souvenirs Souvenirs. Smet argued Universal tried to make him financially dependent by granting him loans totaling 16.3 million euros ($21.6 million/£11.1 million) between 1978 and 1997. He paid these back from revenues from his recordings. The ruling also upheld Smet's outstanding commitment to record one more album for Universal Music. A spokesperson for the French division of Universal says, "It is also good for all the employees of Universal, who whatever their position at the company, had felt like Hallyday's move put into question work done for 42 years."
MUSIC - Canadian Idol auditions to allow instruments Dec 19, 2006 CP - Canadian Idol auditions usually showcase a mixture of shining vocal talent and atrocious singers with lousy dance moves. And soon, there will be a new element to make viewers applaud – or cringe.
CTV announced that the reality TV singing competition is making changes for Season 5 to allow competitors to play instruments during their auditions. The instruments may also return later in the series next summer. Previously, singers only went into auditions with their voices and producers say competitors who perform a cappella this year will be judged the same as those who play instruments. "Canadian Idol remains a vocal competition, but we're hoping this new element brings out people who may have never considered auditioning before," executive producer John Brunton said in a statement. The change does not apply to "American Idol." Canadian Idol's Season 5 Audition Tour begins Jan. 27 in Vancouver and will tour malls in nine more cities across the country through mid-April. Those stops include Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, London, Ont., Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Halifax, St. John's and Toronto. The series will return to CTV in June.
Eva Avila, 19, of Gatineau, Que., won the last season of the show. Her debut CD, Somewhere Else, hit shelves in November.
MUSIC - British court ruling about issues of 'decency' and 'fairness': Loreena McKennitt -- Cassandra Szklarski, Canadian Press December 20, 2006 Toronto (CP) - A recent court ruling that upheld Loreena McKennitt's right to privacy is about issues of decency and fairness, not press freedoms, the Canadian folk singer said Tuesday after successfully keeping private details from being included in a tell-all book.
The soft-spoken performer said her lengthy legal battle against former friend and employee Niema Ash centred on protecting confidential details of her life, calling intimate passages included in a 2005 memoir "unspeakable." "I hate to feel that I need to design my life like Fort Knox because I don't know who I can trust and that gets to the heart of the concept of privacy," said McKennitt, adding that privacy is a luxury most people take for granted. "When you are well-known, for whatever reason, all of a sudden your zones of privacy ... start having currency and so when you have let's say, fallings out with friends or if you have staff that you've let go or something, all of a sudden, that zone of privacy becomes a currency." Ash's book, "Travels with Loreena McKennitt: My Life as a Friend," followed a bitter feud with McKennitt that severed all ties between the pair. The tome delved into a lengthy property dispute, discussed McKennitt's personal relationships, and detailed McKennitt's grief over the 1998 drowning of fiance Ronald Rees. The singer, who is originally from Winnipeg but now lives near Stratford, Ont., condemned the account of her bereavement as "unspeakable." "I think most sensitive, decent people would say, I don't need to know that, I don't need to know the intimacies of that," McKennitt said by phone from New York, where she is editing a televised concert set for broadcast next year.
Last week, the British Court of Appeal upheld a lower court's decision by ruling that Ash's book breached a duty of confidence. The three-judge panel said portions of the self-published memoir by the Montrealer were intrusive and insensitive. Effectively defining the boundaries of such disclosures, they said they were covered by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which governs the right to respect for private and family life, and not by Article 10, which enshrines the right to freedom of expression and "to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority . . . regardless of frontiers." Several British press organizations had unsuccessfully sought intervention status in the case, fearing that the ruling would complicate the practice of celebrity "kiss-and-tell" journalism in books and magazines. McKennitt takes issue with certain passages in the book, especially those concerning the property dispute. The singer, who sought no financial damages, said she regrets that the matter had to proceed as far as the courts, noting that she repeatedly asked Ash to rewrite certain passages, but was rebuffed. The intention was never to stop the book's publication, but rather ensure that it was accurate and fair, she insisted.
COPYRIGHT - US Congress Panel on on the Internet and intellectual property by Jim Puzzanghera, LA Times December 11, 2006 , WASHINGTON -- It will be a comforting sound to the entertainment industry when Rep. Howard L. Berman pounds a key House subcommittee to order next month.That's because the Valley Village Democrat sometimes known as Hollywood's congressman will be wielding the chairman's gavel after his party takes control of Congress. The position will give Berman considerable sway over laws regulating the transition to digital media. But Berman's oversight of the Judiciary Committee's panel on the Internet and intellectual property is likely to give a splitting headache to consumer electronics makers and public interest groups advocating unfettered use of digital content. Berman's San Fernando Valley district is home to thousands of people who work in the entertainment industry, and he has championed their interests since arriving in Congress in 1983. Berman said he was not opposed to flexible rules on video and music but wanted a balance that preserved the financial incentives for moviemakers, musicians and others to create new content. He said the principle of fair use, which allows people to make limited copies of their music and video collections, should be fair to everyone.
MUSIC - UNITED KINGDOM - The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), The Performing Right Society (PRS) and their operational alliance - The MCPS-PRS Alliance. What is The MCPS-PRS Alliance? MCPS and PRS are, and remain, separate societies in terms of income, constitution, membership and guardianship of different rights. To make the best use of their individual strengths, they are now working as an operational alliance - The MCPS-PRS Alliance. MCPS - The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society - Acting on behalf of its composer and publisher members, MCPS negotiates agreements with those who wish to record music, ensuring the copyright owners are rewarded for the use of their music. It collects and then distributes the "mechanical" royalties which are generated from the recording of music onto many different formats, including CDs, cassettes, videos, audio visual and broadcast material. PRS - The Performing Right Society - PRS works for composers, lyricists and music publishers, who are its members, to license the public performance and broadcast of copyright works, collect the licence fees, assemble information about the use of that music, and then distribute the royalties.
INTERNET & COPYRIGHT - YouTube by Andy Greenberg 11.29.06 Forbes -- It's getting tougher and tougher to break copyright law on YouTube these days. The site now performs frequent purges of television shows and other proprietary content uploaded by users. But those forbidden files can still be had. They've largely migrated to DailyMotion.com, another video-uploading site that replicates YouTube's model of user-provided videos. DailyMotion, by contrast, seems to do little if any regulation of copyrighted material, nor does it limit the lengths of clips. At any given time, DailyMotion hosts hundreds of copyrighted television episodes, allowing users to watch the shows free of charge and without commercials. And try as they might, television networks have had little success in plugging the streaming-video leaks in their intellectual property dam. DailyMotion, based in Paris, displays no advertisements and has no apparent source of revenue. Its executives couldn't be reached for comment, and its business model remains a mystery. But if the site's goal is to build a large audience before seeking profit, it's starting to succeed. Its market share, though a tiny 0.22% compared to YouTube's 65%, has increased 300% in the past three months, according to researchers at the Web analysis firm Hitwise. DailyMotion recently claimed its millionth registered user, and according to analysts at ComScore Media Metrix, the site had 7.6 million unique visitors in September. DailyMotion's store of contraband has lately been attracting the attention of a more entrepreneurial set of technorati. The site's fans have created a small industry of "portals," amateur pages that catalog entire seasons of television shows and link to those shows on DailyMotion's France-based servers. Many of these 30 or so portal sites display their own advertisements, reaping a profit from their copyright-infringing videos. John Pace, a 17-year-old student who lives in Buffalo, N.Y., runs the portal site myturn.tvheaven.com. TVHeaven links to every episode of shows like The Simpsons and South Park on DailyMotion, and Pace says that in the first three weeks after his site's launch, its traffic has grown to about 2,500 daily hits. By hosting Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) AdSense ads at the bottom of his page, he makes about $5 a day. "Max," an administrator of the DailyMotion portal site All South Park, who provided only his last name and would communicate only through instant messenger, claims to earn an average of $220 a day from his site's ads. The portal has been up for only about four months, and its traffic is growing quickly, according to the British college student. He plans to spend the thousands of dollars he's accumulating on a BMW.Pace, "Max," and other portal administrators claim that their pet projects are legal. Many offer disclaimers on their sites, pointing out that their servers host no copyrighted content. "I let people watch the shows for free, I make a little money for my time and I'm not breaking any laws," Pace says. "I'm simply linking to videos hosted by another site."That legal argument doesn't quite hold water, says John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Because the portal sites have no use other than aiding copyright infringement, he argues they're illegal under American copyright law.It's unclear, however, whether DailyMotion specifically is infringing copyrights. Jason Schultz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology rights advocacy group, says the site might be protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provision. That provision allows sites to host infringing content if they aren't aware of it, don't profit from it and remove any infringing content immediately upon the copyright holder's request. Google is making a similar argument to ensure the legal use of YouTube, its recent $1.65 million acquisition. But YouTube also aggressively removes copyrighted material from the site and limits uploaded video clips to ten minutes. A spokesperson for Fox Network owner News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people ), whose shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy have often been uploaded to DailyMotion, said in an e-mail that takedown notices sent to the site are beginning to have some effect in removing infringing content. But it's an uphill battle: When Fox demands that the site's administrators remove a video, users can simply upload the file again within minutes. "It's kind of a whack-a-mole situation," Schultz says. Similarly, networks might be hard-pressed to stamp out the mini-industry of video portals linking to those files. Several popular portals, like All Simpsons and Daily Episodes, have already caved under pressure from Fox and removed their links to DailyMotion. But the Internet television audience is only growing, and new sites are constantly being created to fill the void. "What they're trying to do is like getting a bubble out from behind wallpaper," says Steve Thompson, whose DailyMotion links site, Quicksilverscreen.com, connects users with 22,000 videos a day. "If you try to squash the bubble under your thumb, it just moves." According to the EFF's Schultz, networks will have to learn to co-exist with sites that pirate content, or the corporations may even offer their own commercial-free sites on the Web. "Companies like Fox are slowly realizing that this is inevitable," he says. "So maybe eventually Fox will have its own portal."
MUSIC - SOCAN tells ACC to pay for the music 01dec2006 BUSINESS REPORTER by R.Westhead -- A trade group wants concerts barred at the Air Canada Centre until the arena's owners start paying music industry dues. The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) is suing Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. in federal court over the company's refusal to pay tariffs related to concerts staged by artists such as Placido Domingo, Kim Mitchell and rapper Lil Bow Wow. According to Canada's Copyright Act, concert promoters are obligated to pay a tariff to SOCAN based on money generated from ticket sales. Tariffs can be as much as 3 per cent of gross ticket sales, and much of the money paid to SOCAN by promoters is then distributed to its 80,000 members, who include composers, lyricists, songwriters and music publishers who own the copyright to the music in Canada. SOCAN is requesting an injunction barring Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment from holding concerts at the ACC but it's unclear when a judge might rule on that. The trade group's allegations have not been proven in court. In an interview, MLSE general counsel Robin Brudner argued the company isn't a concert promoter at all, merely a venue. "All we have received has been rent," Brudner said yesterday. In the instances where the company has paid SOCAN a tariff, it's been because it was directed to do so by concert promoters. "That came out of their share," she said. Created in 1990 and sanctioned by the federal copyright regulator, SOCAN has gone to interesting lengths to collect tariffs. It has coaxed some school boards across the province to pay blanket fees to cover music that's been used at school dances and sports events. It collects fees from doctors' offices, strip clubs and restaurants and even charges companies for the right to play music over the telephone when callers are put on hold. The dispute with MLSE, simmering since SOCAN's statement of claim was filed in December, 2004, has been quietly working its way through the discovery stage of Federal Court. SOCAN lawyer Kelly Gill expects it will be a least a year before the case will go to trial. In its statement of claim, SOCAN listed 29 concerts dating back to 1999 on which the sports company allegedly owes tariffs. "MLSE's conduct has been deliberate and high-handed and is deserving of the court's condemnation ...," it said. In its statement of defence, MLSE said that two concerts mentioned by SOCAN, a March 1999 date featuring V.I.P. and a February 2002 appearance by Fab U Lous with De La Soul, weren't held at the Air Canada Centre. Moreover, MLSE wrote that operational details relating to the concerts listed by SOCAN, "were the sole responsibility of the concert promoter and/or the performer or performers." Tony Tobias, a Toronto-based music industry consultant who has produced music videos for artists including Gordon Lightfoot and Honeymoon Suite, said most stakeholders support SOCAN's efforts, "in the same way a bank would want their collection agency to chase down someone who was in default. "Anything else is a cost of doing business but with music, people just want us all to take a bath," said Tobias, president of Pangaea Media & Music Inc. "Stop music for a week at events and see what happens. Everybody would be at one another's throats. "Music is society's Prozac. It's SOCAN's job to pull every penny out of every nook and cranny that it can on its behalf." The legal dispute could represent "significant" financial exposure for a sports company that, according to its website, sold more than 325,000 tickets to 38 concerts in 2002, generating $24 million that year alone. It's unclear how much money a judge could award SOCAN because Gill said MLSE hasn't revealed its concert revenues from the past seven years. But under Canada's Copyright Act, if a judge were to rule in favour of SOCAN, he or she would have the option of awarding 10 times any actual monetary damages, Gill said. That could result in an award of $50 million or more, based on the 2002 figures.
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FILM & COPYRIGHT - Hollywood wins copyright suit in China SHANGHAI, Reuters Dec 29, 2006 -- Hollywood movie studios have won a lawsuit in China over the posting of movie clips on the Internet according to the Motion Picture Association. A unit of Sohu.com Inc., which runs some of China's most popular Web portals, lost a suit over copyright infringement after it posted digital files of motion pictures for downloading, the group said in a statement. The Beijing First Intermediate People's Court ordered Beijing Sohu Internet Information Service Co. Ltd. to pay damages and costs of 1.1 million yuan ($139,000), the group said. A Sohu.com spokesman in Beijing, contacted by telephone, denied knowledge of the litigation, and officials at the Beijing court were not available for comment. But Chinese official newspapers also reported the court judgment. Movie titles involved in the suit included Lord of the Rings, Dawn of the Dead and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the movie group said. The group estimates that major global movie studios including Twentieth Century Fox -- a unit of News Corp. -- and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. Pictures lost about $2.3 billion to Internet piracy in 2005.
MUSIC - Johnny Hallyday Loses Legal Battle With Universal Music Group Dec 21, 2006 Post Chronicle -- French rocker Johnny Hallyday lost his two-year legal battle with Universal Music Group for control of his back catalogue yesterday (20Dec06). Hallyday - real name Jean-Phillippe Smet - originally lost his case in April 2005, and his subsequent appeal was rejected by the Cour de Cassation, the highest French court, yesterday. The ruling means Universal Music retains control of the master tapes Smet recorded between 1961 and 2004 - featuring over 1,000 songs including Pour Moi La Vie Va Commencer and Souvenirs Souvenirs. Smet argued Universal tried to make him financially dependent by granting him loans totaling 16.3 million euros ($21.6 million/£11.1 million) between 1978 and 1997. He paid these back from revenues from his recordings. The ruling also upheld Smet's outstanding commitment to record one more album for Universal Music. A spokesperson for the French division of Universal says, "It is also good for all the employees of Universal, who whatever their position at the company, had felt like Hallyday's move put into question work done for 42 years."
MUSIC - Canadian Idol auditions to allow instruments Dec 19, 2006 CP - Canadian Idol auditions usually showcase a mixture of shining vocal talent and atrocious singers with lousy dance moves. And soon, there will be a new element to make viewers applaud – or cringe.
CTV announced that the reality TV singing competition is making changes for Season 5 to allow competitors to play instruments during their auditions. The instruments may also return later in the series next summer. Previously, singers only went into auditions with their voices and producers say competitors who perform a cappella this year will be judged the same as those who play instruments. "Canadian Idol remains a vocal competition, but we're hoping this new element brings out people who may have never considered auditioning before," executive producer John Brunton said in a statement. The change does not apply to "American Idol." Canadian Idol's Season 5 Audition Tour begins Jan. 27 in Vancouver and will tour malls in nine more cities across the country through mid-April. Those stops include Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, London, Ont., Montreal, Ottawa-Gatineau, Halifax, St. John's and Toronto. The series will return to CTV in June.
Eva Avila, 19, of Gatineau, Que., won the last season of the show. Her debut CD, Somewhere Else, hit shelves in November.
MUSIC - British court ruling about issues of 'decency' and 'fairness': Loreena McKennitt -- Cassandra Szklarski, Canadian Press December 20, 2006 Toronto (CP) - A recent court ruling that upheld Loreena McKennitt's right to privacy is about issues of decency and fairness, not press freedoms, the Canadian folk singer said Tuesday after successfully keeping private details from being included in a tell-all book.
The soft-spoken performer said her lengthy legal battle against former friend and employee Niema Ash centred on protecting confidential details of her life, calling intimate passages included in a 2005 memoir "unspeakable." "I hate to feel that I need to design my life like Fort Knox because I don't know who I can trust and that gets to the heart of the concept of privacy," said McKennitt, adding that privacy is a luxury most people take for granted. "When you are well-known, for whatever reason, all of a sudden your zones of privacy ... start having currency and so when you have let's say, fallings out with friends or if you have staff that you've let go or something, all of a sudden, that zone of privacy becomes a currency." Ash's book, "Travels with Loreena McKennitt: My Life as a Friend," followed a bitter feud with McKennitt that severed all ties between the pair. The tome delved into a lengthy property dispute, discussed McKennitt's personal relationships, and detailed McKennitt's grief over the 1998 drowning of fiance Ronald Rees. The singer, who is originally from Winnipeg but now lives near Stratford, Ont., condemned the account of her bereavement as "unspeakable." "I think most sensitive, decent people would say, I don't need to know that, I don't need to know the intimacies of that," McKennitt said by phone from New York, where she is editing a televised concert set for broadcast next year.
Last week, the British Court of Appeal upheld a lower court's decision by ruling that Ash's book breached a duty of confidence. The three-judge panel said portions of the self-published memoir by the Montrealer were intrusive and insensitive. Effectively defining the boundaries of such disclosures, they said they were covered by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which governs the right to respect for private and family life, and not by Article 10, which enshrines the right to freedom of expression and "to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority . . . regardless of frontiers." Several British press organizations had unsuccessfully sought intervention status in the case, fearing that the ruling would complicate the practice of celebrity "kiss-and-tell" journalism in books and magazines. McKennitt takes issue with certain passages in the book, especially those concerning the property dispute. The singer, who sought no financial damages, said she regrets that the matter had to proceed as far as the courts, noting that she repeatedly asked Ash to rewrite certain passages, but was rebuffed. The intention was never to stop the book's publication, but rather ensure that it was accurate and fair, she insisted.
COPYRIGHT - US Congress Panel on on the Internet and intellectual property by Jim Puzzanghera, LA Times December 11, 2006 , WASHINGTON -- It will be a comforting sound to the entertainment industry when Rep. Howard L. Berman pounds a key House subcommittee to order next month.That's because the Valley Village Democrat sometimes known as Hollywood's congressman will be wielding the chairman's gavel after his party takes control of Congress. The position will give Berman considerable sway over laws regulating the transition to digital media. But Berman's oversight of the Judiciary Committee's panel on the Internet and intellectual property is likely to give a splitting headache to consumer electronics makers and public interest groups advocating unfettered use of digital content. Berman's San Fernando Valley district is home to thousands of people who work in the entertainment industry, and he has championed their interests since arriving in Congress in 1983. Berman said he was not opposed to flexible rules on video and music but wanted a balance that preserved the financial incentives for moviemakers, musicians and others to create new content. He said the principle of fair use, which allows people to make limited copies of their music and video collections, should be fair to everyone.
MUSIC - UNITED KINGDOM - The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS), The Performing Right Society (PRS) and their operational alliance - The MCPS-PRS Alliance. What is The MCPS-PRS Alliance? MCPS and PRS are, and remain, separate societies in terms of income, constitution, membership and guardianship of different rights. To make the best use of their individual strengths, they are now working as an operational alliance - The MCPS-PRS Alliance. MCPS - The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society - Acting on behalf of its composer and publisher members, MCPS negotiates agreements with those who wish to record music, ensuring the copyright owners are rewarded for the use of their music. It collects and then distributes the "mechanical" royalties which are generated from the recording of music onto many different formats, including CDs, cassettes, videos, audio visual and broadcast material. PRS - The Performing Right Society - PRS works for composers, lyricists and music publishers, who are its members, to license the public performance and broadcast of copyright works, collect the licence fees, assemble information about the use of that music, and then distribute the royalties.
INTERNET & COPYRIGHT - YouTube by Andy Greenberg 11.29.06 Forbes -- It's getting tougher and tougher to break copyright law on YouTube these days. The site now performs frequent purges of television shows and other proprietary content uploaded by users. But those forbidden files can still be had. They've largely migrated to DailyMotion.com, another video-uploading site that replicates YouTube's model of user-provided videos. DailyMotion, by contrast, seems to do little if any regulation of copyrighted material, nor does it limit the lengths of clips. At any given time, DailyMotion hosts hundreds of copyrighted television episodes, allowing users to watch the shows free of charge and without commercials. And try as they might, television networks have had little success in plugging the streaming-video leaks in their intellectual property dam. DailyMotion, based in Paris, displays no advertisements and has no apparent source of revenue. Its executives couldn't be reached for comment, and its business model remains a mystery. But if the site's goal is to build a large audience before seeking profit, it's starting to succeed. Its market share, though a tiny 0.22% compared to YouTube's 65%, has increased 300% in the past three months, according to researchers at the Web analysis firm Hitwise. DailyMotion recently claimed its millionth registered user, and according to analysts at ComScore Media Metrix, the site had 7.6 million unique visitors in September. DailyMotion's store of contraband has lately been attracting the attention of a more entrepreneurial set of technorati. The site's fans have created a small industry of "portals," amateur pages that catalog entire seasons of television shows and link to those shows on DailyMotion's France-based servers. Many of these 30 or so portal sites display their own advertisements, reaping a profit from their copyright-infringing videos. John Pace, a 17-year-old student who lives in Buffalo, N.Y., runs the portal site myturn.tvheaven.com. TVHeaven links to every episode of shows like The Simpsons and South Park on DailyMotion, and Pace says that in the first three weeks after his site's launch, its traffic has grown to about 2,500 daily hits. By hosting Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) AdSense ads at the bottom of his page, he makes about $5 a day. "Max," an administrator of the DailyMotion portal site All South Park, who provided only his last name and would communicate only through instant messenger, claims to earn an average of $220 a day from his site's ads. The portal has been up for only about four months, and its traffic is growing quickly, according to the British college student. He plans to spend the thousands of dollars he's accumulating on a BMW.Pace, "Max," and other portal administrators claim that their pet projects are legal. Many offer disclaimers on their sites, pointing out that their servers host no copyrighted content. "I let people watch the shows for free, I make a little money for my time and I'm not breaking any laws," Pace says. "I'm simply linking to videos hosted by another site."That legal argument doesn't quite hold water, says John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Because the portal sites have no use other than aiding copyright infringement, he argues they're illegal under American copyright law.It's unclear, however, whether DailyMotion specifically is infringing copyrights. Jason Schultz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a technology rights advocacy group, says the site might be protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provision. That provision allows sites to host infringing content if they aren't aware of it, don't profit from it and remove any infringing content immediately upon the copyright holder's request. Google is making a similar argument to ensure the legal use of YouTube, its recent $1.65 million acquisition. But YouTube also aggressively removes copyrighted material from the site and limits uploaded video clips to ten minutes. A spokesperson for Fox Network owner News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people ), whose shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy have often been uploaded to DailyMotion, said in an e-mail that takedown notices sent to the site are beginning to have some effect in removing infringing content. But it's an uphill battle: When Fox demands that the site's administrators remove a video, users can simply upload the file again within minutes. "It's kind of a whack-a-mole situation," Schultz says. Similarly, networks might be hard-pressed to stamp out the mini-industry of video portals linking to those files. Several popular portals, like All Simpsons and Daily Episodes, have already caved under pressure from Fox and removed their links to DailyMotion. But the Internet television audience is only growing, and new sites are constantly being created to fill the void. "What they're trying to do is like getting a bubble out from behind wallpaper," says Steve Thompson, whose DailyMotion links site, Quicksilverscreen.com, connects users with 22,000 videos a day. "If you try to squash the bubble under your thumb, it just moves." According to the EFF's Schultz, networks will have to learn to co-exist with sites that pirate content, or the corporations may even offer their own commercial-free sites on the Web. "Companies like Fox are slowly realizing that this is inevitable," he says. "So maybe eventually Fox will have its own portal."
MUSIC - SOCAN tells ACC to pay for the music 01dec2006 BUSINESS REPORTER by R.Westhead -- A trade group wants concerts barred at the Air Canada Centre until the arena's owners start paying music industry dues. The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) is suing Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. in federal court over the company's refusal to pay tariffs related to concerts staged by artists such as Placido Domingo, Kim Mitchell and rapper Lil Bow Wow. According to Canada's Copyright Act, concert promoters are obligated to pay a tariff to SOCAN based on money generated from ticket sales. Tariffs can be as much as 3 per cent of gross ticket sales, and much of the money paid to SOCAN by promoters is then distributed to its 80,000 members, who include composers, lyricists, songwriters and music publishers who own the copyright to the music in Canada. SOCAN is requesting an injunction barring Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment from holding concerts at the ACC but it's unclear when a judge might rule on that. The trade group's allegations have not been proven in court. In an interview, MLSE general counsel Robin Brudner argued the company isn't a concert promoter at all, merely a venue. "All we have received has been rent," Brudner said yesterday. In the instances where the company has paid SOCAN a tariff, it's been because it was directed to do so by concert promoters. "That came out of their share," she said. Created in 1990 and sanctioned by the federal copyright regulator, SOCAN has gone to interesting lengths to collect tariffs. It has coaxed some school boards across the province to pay blanket fees to cover music that's been used at school dances and sports events. It collects fees from doctors' offices, strip clubs and restaurants and even charges companies for the right to play music over the telephone when callers are put on hold. The dispute with MLSE, simmering since SOCAN's statement of claim was filed in December, 2004, has been quietly working its way through the discovery stage of Federal Court. SOCAN lawyer Kelly Gill expects it will be a least a year before the case will go to trial. In its statement of claim, SOCAN listed 29 concerts dating back to 1999 on which the sports company allegedly owes tariffs. "MLSE's conduct has been deliberate and high-handed and is deserving of the court's condemnation ...," it said. In its statement of defence, MLSE said that two concerts mentioned by SOCAN, a March 1999 date featuring V.I.P. and a February 2002 appearance by Fab U Lous with De La Soul, weren't held at the Air Canada Centre. Moreover, MLSE wrote that operational details relating to the concerts listed by SOCAN, "were the sole responsibility of the concert promoter and/or the performer or performers." Tony Tobias, a Toronto-based music industry consultant who has produced music videos for artists including Gordon Lightfoot and Honeymoon Suite, said most stakeholders support SOCAN's efforts, "in the same way a bank would want their collection agency to chase down someone who was in default. "Anything else is a cost of doing business but with music, people just want us all to take a bath," said Tobias, president of Pangaea Media & Music Inc. "Stop music for a week at events and see what happens. Everybody would be at one another's throats. "Music is society's Prozac. It's SOCAN's job to pull every penny out of every nook and cranny that it can on its behalf." The legal dispute could represent "significant" financial exposure for a sports company that, according to its website, sold more than 325,000 tickets to 38 concerts in 2002, generating $24 million that year alone. It's unclear how much money a judge could award SOCAN because Gill said MLSE hasn't revealed its concert revenues from the past seven years. But under Canada's Copyright Act, if a judge were to rule in favour of SOCAN, he or she would have the option of awarding 10 times any actual monetary damages, Gill said. That could result in an award of $50 million or more, based on the 2002 figures.
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