Pink Floyd, EMI Brawl Over iTunes Royalties

Wired.com
By David Kravets
March 9, 2010

Pink Floyd and its label, EMI, are battling over online royalties stemming from a contested clause in their decade-old contract.

The developer of The Dark Side of the Moon and other top-selling albums claims its contract with EMI requires its music to be sold as an entire album, not the single tracks that EMI has permitted iTunes to distribute.

The band’s attorney, Robert Howe, told a London court on Tuesday, “It’s a matter of fact that the defendant has been permitting individual tracks to be downloaded online and that therefore they have been allowing albums not to be sold in their original configuration,” Bloomberg News reported.

The case highlights the common dispute between rights holders and publishers over how to deal today with royalties for intellectual property born and contracted prior to the explosion of online digital sales.

Pink Floyd, however, said more was at stake than royalties in the internet age. The psychedelic-music band’s musical craft is being misrepresented when sold in singles, Howe said.

“Pink Floyd is well-known for performing seamless pieces. Many of the songs blend into each other,” Howe told the High Court of Justice, Chancery Division.

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Last post made by: rastaX on Today, 05:53 PM

POPULAR P2P FILE SHARING SERVICE Limewire has enlisted the help of anti-virus outfit AVG to offer its Pro users with free file scanning.

If the likes of the MPAA and the RIAA are to be believed, the only people who use Bittorrent sites are so called 'pirates' scouring the underbelly of cyberspace trying to get hold of the latest movies and music for free, robbing poor defenceless artists of their livelihoods in the process.

With this in mind you might think that these downloaders deserve any form of malware their PCs get infected with in their pursuit of ill-gotten gains, but Limeware appears to disagree and has licensed the AVG Anti-Virus SDK engine and integrated the anti-virus and anti-spyware protection into LimeWire Pro.

This means that any file being downloaded by a premium LimeWire Pro user will get a 'Protected by AVG' label stuck onto it, indicating that the file has been safely scanned and cleaned.

Read More @ The Inquirer

Last post made by: Project-Buckfast on Today, 05:53 PM

Open Wi-Fi 'outlawed' in Digital Economy Bill

ZDNet UK
February 26, 2010
By David Meyer

The government will not exempt universities, libraries and small businesses providing open Wi-Fi services from its Digital Economy Bill copyright crackdown, according to official advice released earlier this week.

This would leave many organisations open to the same penalties for copyright infringement as individual subscribers, potentially including disconnection from the internet, leading legal experts to say it will become impossible for small businesses and the like to offer Wi-Fi access.

Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in an explanatory document would effectively "outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses", and would leave libraries and universities in an uncertain position.

"This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in," Edwards said.

"Even if they password protect, they then have two options — to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café."

In the explanatory document, Lord Young, a minister at BIS, described common classes of public Wi-Fi access, and explained that none of them could be protected. Libraries, he said, could not be exempted because "this would send entirely the wrong signal and could lead to 'fake' organisations being set up, claiming an exemption and becoming a hub for copyright infringement".

Universities cannot be exempted, Young said, because some universities already have stringent anti-file-sharing rules for their networks, and "it does not seem sensible to force those universities who already have a system providing very effective action against copyright infringement to abandon it and replace it with an alternative".

Continued

Last post made by: Mazer on Mar 7 2010, 08:00 PM

Microsoft Plans Antipiracy Update for Windows 7
c|net
by Ina Fried
February 11, 2010 9:00 AM PST

An optional update to Windows closes a number of hacks that counterfeiters have used to bypass the product activation technologies built into Windows 7. With the update, Windows will try to restore Windows to its proper state, as well as marking tampered versions as non-genuine copies of the operating system.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it is planning an update to Windows 7 that will close a number of loopholes that counterfeiters had used to thwart the operating system's built-in antipiracy measures.

The Windows Activation Technologies Update for Windows 7, which will be released later this month, closes more than 70 "activation hacks," according to Joe Williams, general manager of Microsoft's Genuine Windows unit, responsible for anti-counterfeiting measures. The update will also check with a server periodically to see if there are further hacks that need to be addressed, though Williams said no personally identifiable information about the user will be sent to the server.

In an interview, Williams cautioned about the dangers that come with using nongenuine versions of the operating system, citing a German study that looked at several hundred copies of Windows 7 that were posted online and found that nearly a third had some type of malware.

"We do see malicious code--everything from easily discoverable malware to keyboard recording," he said. "There's all sorts of things we've seen that puts our customers at risk and their data at risk."

The update will be available for manual download from Microsoft's genuine Web site on Feb. 16 and from the Microsoft Download center the following day. Later this month, the update will also be offered through Windows Update as an "important" (but optional) update.

Read More Here

Download Here

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