3 Count: Forgiveness

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: Sony lawyer: $150K damages per song “certainly” appropriate

First off today, the Thomas trial got off to an exciting start with the Thomas’ attorney Kiwi Camara being chastised twice by the judge during his cross-examination of his very first witness, Sony Entertainment’s Gary Leak.

However, he did get Leak to admit on the stand that he could not place a number on the amount of damages Sony had incurred but felt that up to $150,000 per infringement may be reasonable as it was the maximum allowed under the law.

All in all, Camara proved himself to be a very aggressive litigator, perhaps too much so, as he interrupted opposing council and witnesses alike with his questions. Despite this, most of his gambles, including the registrations, the MediaSentry evidence and the fair use defense have all gone against him, leaving him and his client to try and show that she did not actually share the files in question.

2: Coldplay Forgiving for Plagiarism By Cat Stevens

Next up, Coldplay, the band that can not catch a break when it comes to plagiarism, has finally caught a break. Cat Stevens, who now goes by the name Yusuf Islam, had accused the band of plagiarizing his song “Foreigner Suite” in their song “Viva La Vida”. However, he now says he has forgiven the band believing their plagiarism was not intentional.

However, this doesn’t help them too much. Joe Satriani is still suing the band, over the same song no less, and that case is still moving forward.

Still, it is at least one fewer musician upset with them over plagiarism claims…

3: Bezos: We’ve got issues with Google Book Search

Finally today, Amazon Jeff Bezos has said that he is not particularly happy with the Google Book Search settlement either. In an interview, he said that, “Clearly, that settlement in our opinion needs to be revisited and it is being revisited.”

He then went on to say that , “There are many forces of work looking at that and saying it doesn’t seem right that you should do something, kind of get a prize for violating a large series of copyrights,” Bezos said.

Amazon, famously, markets the Kindle series of eBook readers and operates the store for the devices and has stated that they want to make every book ever written available on the device.

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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