3 Count: Seeqing Music

This is daily column on Plagiarism Today where the site brings you three of the days biggest, most important copyright and plagiarism news links. If you want to offer your feedback on the column, use the contact form or just follow me on Twitter at @plagiarismtoday.

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.

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