1: Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011

First off today, an article on Techcrunch over the weekend told us that maybe music executives aren’t as clueless as some people seem to think. According to the piece by Michael Arrington, he had a “Surprisingly candid lunch conversation last week with a big music label executive” and found out that the record labels are fully aware of what is happening to their business but that they are aware that they well have to alter their business models, but not until 2013.

According to the article, the math, predictions and other tools just say that there is too much money in the current model to engage in a shift of policies until at least 2011, probably 2013. CD sales, licensing deals, etc., though waning in their revenue potential, are still big income makers and will continue to be for the next few years at least.

What exactly will happen when and if the record labels change their business model is unclear.

2: Hulu Goes Medieval on Boxee

What started as a gentleman’s disagreement between Hulu and Boxee has now degenerated into a game of Whac-A-Mole. Recently, Hulu asked Boxee, a service that makes it easy to get online video to your TV, to disable access to Hulu at the request of Hulu’s content partners. Boxee complied and the matter seemed resolved in a very gentlemanly way.

However, Boxee decided it wasn’t done. It then re-added support for Hulu, this time using Hulu’s RSS feeds, in turn prompting Hulu to block Boxee from accessing their content. Boxee, then, modified their side to ensure that Hulu continued to work on their service.

Why Boxee did this is unclear as is what, if any, action Hulu plans on taking.

3: Re/Max says local agency’s logo too similar to its own

Finally today, in a trademark story from my native South Carolina, real estate agency Re/Max has filed a trademark dispute lawsuit against Charleston, S.C.-based agency Rehava saying that their logo is too similar to their own, even though Rehava’s logo doesn’t use any of the same fonts, colors, images or anything else in common with the Re/Max logo.

Rehava says the challenge to their trademark filing is a form of “harassment” and that they intend to fight the challenge, even though it will likely be expensive.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

1: Content Owners Force Hulu To Kneecap Boxee

Content owners who put their shows and movies on Hulu have demanded that Boxee stop carrying Hulu-based content. Boxee, a video conversion service that allows videos on the Web to be converted to a format usable by media centers and TVs, has removed the site from its list of compatible services as a show of “good faith”.

Though there is a lot of speculation as to why Hulu’s providers wanted Boxee cut off, it seems likely that the service’s function of moving content to a TV. Hulu has worked to be “TV for your Computer” and it is likely content creators worried that allowing Hulu to be shown trivially on TVs would make it a replacement for the original programs.

2: Judge reaffirms 1918 legal doctrine in AP lawsuit

A 90-year-old legal doctrine dealing with “hot news” has been upheld in a New York courtroom. In the lawsuit, the Associated Press has sued AHN claiming that AHN copies stories from legitimate AP subscribers and republishes them without permission or attribution. To help make its case, the AP cited a 1918 ruling, which it was also the victor in, that found companies can sue when others copy and redistribute timely or “hot news” without permission.

This is, of course, counter in many ways to recent changes in copyright law that have held facts can not be copyrighted. The judge, however, did not rule on the merits of the case and, instead, only allowed it to go forward in front of a jury.

This case is very similar to a 1997 case dealing with box scores from basketball games, where the “hot news” doctrine was also upheld.

3: U2’s New Album Leaks Early Despite ‘Private Hearings’

Finally today, despite serious security measures, private screenings where cell phones were banned and many threats by the band, U2′s latest album, slated for release in just over a week, has leaked out over Bittorrent. Though some of the music could be found on bittorrent for some time, the new recordings are said to be of end user quality and may actually harm the album’s sales.

According to TorrentFreak, the album has been downloaded some 100,000 times already with, almost certainly, many times the downloads to come.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.