1: Lawsuits Galore: Songbeat Silenced For Now, Won’t Go Down Without A Fight

Controversial German music start up Songbeat has temporarily shut its doors. It was sued successfully by Warner Music last week and has closed its site, putting up a tongue-in-cheek message about how Songbeat has been sent away to “enter the 36 Shaolin Chambers of Software Kung Fu”. Songbeat says the move is temporary pending either an appeal or a relocation to a more friendly location.

Songbeat was a service that allowed users to search for, stream and download virtually any song from various sources on the Internet, thus letting users listen to any music whenever they desired.

2: Nintendo asks for help against biggest piracy offenders

Second, in a move usually reserved for national governments, Nintendo has issued a press release calling out entire nations for what it feels are issues with piracy. In particular, the nations Nintendo sites are China, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and Paraguay.

Nintendo is asking the U.S. government to do more to thwart piracy in those nations and put pressure on their governments to pass new laws and more strongly enforce existing ones.

3: Music Labels Reach A New Low, Sue Developer For Using Seeqpod API

Finally today, EMI has followed the lead of Warner Music in suing music streaming service Seeqpod. While that is not a surprise in and of itself given the legal gray area of the service, which searches for MP3s on various sites and allows users to listen to music in a built-in media player, but what does make this suit interesting is that both one of the executives of the company personally and by suing a developer that used the Seeqpod API.

If this suit is successful, it could have serious implications for developers that build applications using the APIs of potentially infringing services.

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: Obama DOJ pick: RIAA lawyer who killed Grokster

Donald Verrilli yesterday annouced that he had been picked as Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice, making him the latest in a string of copyright industry-friendly picks Obama has chosen for the DOJ.

Verrilli is well known for his involvememt in many of the most important, and controversial, copyright cases including the Grokster case, the Jammie Thomas case and even the Viacom v. YouTube case.

No doubt Obama supporters who were hoping for radical copyright reform will be disappointed while the recording industries will breathe another sigh of relief.

2: 10 Questions for Mannie Garcia

Mannie Garcia is the photographer who took the now-famous photograph of President Obama has called into question much of the AP lawsuit over the image, mentioned in yesterday’s 3 Count.

According to Garcia, he was not an actual employee of the AP at the time the image was taken and had signed no agreemements. He was, a “temporary hire” and likely still owns the copyright in the image, not the AP.

Though he has not said whether he would sue for infringement, he did say that he was, “concerned about the usage of the photograph in a number of commercial ways that I’ve seen it on the street here in Washington DC.”

3: Warner Music Slaps Songbeat With Lawsuit

Finally, German music downloading service Songbeat has been sued by record labels in its native Germany. The service, which allows users to listen to and download tracks through an integrated MP3 search engine, seemed destined for a courtroom date since the beginning and it is unclear why it took the labels over a year to step in.

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 below or send me an email using the contact form above. 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.