Free Republic

So the Copyright Office is currently in the middle reviewing proposed exceptions to the DMCA, and one of the proposals on the table would allow teachers and students to rip DVDs and edit them for use in the classroom. Open and shut, right? Not if you're the MPAA and gearing up to litigate the legality of ripping -- it's trying to convince the rulemaking committee that videotaping a flatscreen is an acceptable alternative. Seriously. It's hard to say if we've ever seen an organization make a more tone-deaf, flailing argument than this. Take a good look, kids. This is what...

TV Guide bought the famous Jump the Shark website, and pretty much got rid of it. (You can still see most of it archived at www.archive.org) So someone came along and created a brand new website to fill that void, they call it "Bone the Fish" What Happened to JTS? Jump the Shark? You can do the same here as you did on Jump The Shark. You can comment, submit topics for discussion, and vote.

...when the second annual Record Store Day arrives Saturday, artists and labels will be out in force: More than 1,000 stores worldwide... will offer in-store events or performances by dozens of artists... ...A resurgence in interest in vinyl records (with sales climbing 89 percent last year to 1.8 million) has helped these independent operators stay in business... "The reality is we were over-retailed," says Michael Kurtz, president of Record Store Day and the marketing company Music Monitor Network. "We had about four times as many stores as the market could bear... But there are new ones still coming, and it's...

A US columnist is out of a job after posting an online review of an illegally downloaded copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Roger Friedman, who wrote the piece on his regular column, had worked at the Fox news website for 10 years.

CHICAGO Newspapers perform a public service for democracy and should be allowed to operate as tax-exempt non-profits, U.S. Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D.-Md., proposed Tuesday. Cardin introduced a bill that would explicitly include newspapers among organizations eligible for 501(c)(3) status. The non-profit status is the same that public radio and television have now. The legislation would give a national green light for newspapers to adopt the so-called Low Profit Limited Liability Company business model, often shortened to L3C. The L3C model, which the Newspaper Guild supports as an alternative newspaper ownership model, is the subject of a feature story in the...

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes"The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held...

According to Politico and PJM’s own Jennifer Rubin, barely two months after the inauguration, the mainstream media has its proverbial knickers in a twist over Obama’s ineptitude in office. Even Thomas Friedman - that most conventional of all purveyors of the conventional (except David Gergen - and he’s been straying off the reservation too) - is now complaining the onetime Messiah is not taking the financial crisis seriously enough, “getting in trouble cracking jokes on Jay Leno comparing his bowling skills to a Special Olympian.” Meanwhile, CNN is appalled the President pushed through a skillion page skillion dollar stimulus bill...

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights. Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958." The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the...

By Julia Wallace,The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday, March 08, 2009 Two weeks ago, you heard from our publisher, Doug Franklin, about the economic challenges at this newspaper and newspapers across the country. Last week, you heard from our head of sales and marketing about his team’s efforts to effectively sell advertising in the Atlanta market. Today, it’s my turn. I want to give you more detailed information on the content changes ahead in the next two weeks. I also want to respond to your questions to our publisher about what we are doing to make sure our news and editorial pages...

A couple of years ago, when speaking to a local group, I mentioned that The Chronicle was losing money. A couple in the back of the room rudely applauded. How thrilled those two must have felt when - if - they learned of Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega's announcement Tuesday that the Hearst Corp. will implement "significant" workforce cuts. If the cuts don't pay off, then the Hearst Corp. will "offer the newspaper for sale or close it altogether." Bloggers and e-mailers are crowing. If The Chronicle is shuttered, they'll be dancing a jig. Many conservatives feel a warm glow at...

We'll find no greater example of what happens when the government runs any non-military operation that requires coordination, business acumen, technical skill, financial management and inventory control than we've seen in the "digital transition." In this arena, the government has once again made the Three Stooges look like the U.S. Marine Corps Silent Drill Team. After the broadcast industry spent billions in technical costs and on-air inventory to run a huge amount of FCC-required PSA's, many in Congress, along with President-Elect Obama, want to push back the transition date: The Obama team decided to push for a delay after the...

...These grass-roots music events... have come up against the demands of US copyright law, as enforced by a handful of companies who act as collection agents for songwriters and composers. The law states that no performer in a public venue can present someone else's copyrighted music without their permission and, usually, without compensating them. A number of agencies, chief among them... BMI and... ASCAP, charge music venues an annual copyright "license fee" ranging from $300 to nearly $10,000 for the privilege of presenting someone else's music. Much of the music at those Ragged Edge open mics was written by the...

Celebrities crave access with Barack Obama By TINA DAUNT January 9, 2009 One of the things that makes Hollywood so attractive to politicians is not just the depth of its pockets, but the fact that its hand isn't out. Collecting contributions from any other industry usually comes with an implicit understanding that it wants something in return, usually something that has an economic benefit. Yes, the entertainment industry cares about copyright and distribution, but these days nearly everybody is on the same page when it comes to those issues. What celebrities care most about are causes and the access that...

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party. That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the...

President-elect Barack Obama has offered the job of surgeon general to Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and correspondent for CNN and CBS, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation. Gupta has told administration officials that he wants the job, and the final vetting process is under way. He has asked for a few days to figure out the financial and logistical details of moving his family from Atlanta to Washington but is expected to accept the offer. When reached for comment today, Gupta did not deny the account but declined to comment. The offer followed a two-hour Chicago meeting...

Some call it "the dead tree edition" of the news media. But as 2009 dawns, trees may not be the only casualties. Newspaper companies as an investment are less lucrative than they once were. Alan D. Mutter, a Silicon Valley CEO, pointed out on his blog that newspaper companies took a hit in 2008 in terms of share value to the tune of $64 billion. "In the worst year in history for publishers, newspaper shares dropped an average of 83.3% in 2008, wiping out $64.5 billion in market value in just 12 months," Mutter wrote on Jan. 1. "Although things...

This is a column on awards for the year's worst reporting. You will read what an expert panel determined to be the most outrageous quotes of the mainstream liberal media for 2008. I think you will find them amusing for openers. But they have significance far beyond their considerable entertainment value. The quotes that follow show you how extreme the biased, dishonest and fraudulent journalism of the mainstream media has become. The media monitors that I have confidence in agree that bias during the past presidential campaigns reached new extremes far beyond anything of recent memory. The easiest way to...

Just how popular is Kay Hymowitz’s City Journal essay, “Love in the Time of Darwinism,” which decries the phenomenon of marriage-avoiding man-children? So popular that it was sent to me by no less than three different friends today (all males) and it’s been featured on two different traffic engines this week: Arts & Letters Daily and Real Clear Politics. Her brief is actually a mild apology for a previous essay in which she reprehended the jaded and loveless men of my generation for, as she puts it here, “whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of...

With many major labels posting significant losses every quarter, Warner Music have decided that enough is enough and as such have decided to require all of their artists to sign the new '360 deal' before working with them. Whereas previously, labels only got a cut of album sales and related airplay, under the '360 deal' they will entitle themselves to a slice of the merchandise and touring pie. In effect, the band will become a subsidiary company to the record label and be required to declare its earning in every field which the label will then take a cut of. The...

October 15, 2008 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Today, KDKA Radio in Pittsburgh, PA, the oldest radio station in the country, and a CBS affiliate, censored Kevin Miller, one of its conservative talk show hosts while he was on the air.

John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and EMI Records, the world's fourth largest music company, dropped copyright infringement lawsuits against the makers of a documentary that used the portion of the song "Imagine" without permission. The news was made public on Tuesday by a Stanford Law School's Fair Use Projects release. The dismissal follows unsuccessful attempts by Yoko Ono in federal court and EMI Records in state court to enjoin Premise Media Corp's documentary, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," because it uses a 15-second clip of the song. "We think it was clear from the beginning that our clients had every right...

When I was a kid, rumor had it that “antidisestablishmentarianism” was the longest word in the English language. I actually looked it up once, and discovered it had something to do with the status of the Church of England — which sort of took the fun out of the word. But in college, I decided I liked the idea of defending the establishment against those who sought to disestablish it. Well, I’m older now, and have consorted a bit with various establishments. To know them is not to love them. I’m now a disestablishmentarian. I’ve come to believe that, to...

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s two daughters, Malia, 9, and Sasha, 6, are big fans of Hannah Montana – and maybe there’s a reason why. Teen star Miley Cyrus, known as Hannah Montana in the Disney Channel TV series television of the same name, is now crusading for global warming alarmism. But she admits she isn’t really sure what it means. Disney, conveniently owns ABC, a network that often hypes climate change alarmism. On the 15-year-old singer’s recently released album “Breakout,” she sings that she wants America to wake up and deal with global warming. The song, “Wake Up...

A certain amount of celebrity glow has long been a part of both political parties’ gatherings. But thanks in part to the youthful charisma of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee, the Democratic convention, which begins on Monday in Denver, is shaping up as an unlikely hot spot for the music world, with multiplatinum rappers, indie-rock scenesters, D.J.’s and Jennifer Lopez arriving by the van- and private planeload to perform, rally or schmooze with the political elite. “It’s the Sundance Film Festival for politicos,” said Laura Dawn, the cultural director of MoveOn.org, who also happens to sing with Moby... Kanye...

ASPEN, Colo.--Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States. A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out." "Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the...

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote of the great elephants of India, who, although they have the physical capacity to uproot trees during the day, can be restrained all night long by a piece of twine and a twig. How is this possible? The elephant’s training begins when it is still young and considerably less powerful. Removed from its mother, the elephant is then shackled with an iron chain to a large tree. For days and weeks on end, the baby elephant strains against its restraints, only to find that all exertion is useless. Then slowly, over a...

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. -- A new state law went on the books Tuesday saying people could bring guns to work if they kept them locked in their car. Disney, though, said it was exempt from the new law and its 62,000 employees needed to keep their guns at home. Friday, a worker who protested the park’s decision told Channel 9 he was suspended. The worker was well aware that he could end up losing his job when he took the gun to work Friday morning, but said that the principle at stake means enough to him that he was willing...

Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap by Peter Burrows The Associated Press unleashed a firestorm in the blogosphere earlier this month when it demanded that a political site take down AP content it said violated copyrights. Bloggers, including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com and Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, cried foul, saying the AP's move threatened the free flow of information over the Web. The furor abated a few days later when the AP tempered its demands. But the dustup between the AP and bloggers...

Not content with the current (and already massive) statutory damages allowed under copyright law, the RIAA is pushing to expand the provision. The issue is compilations, which now are treated as a single work. In the RIAA's perfect world, each copied track would count as a separate act of infringement, meaning that a copying a ten-song CD even one time could end up costing a defendant $1.5 million if done willfully. Sound fair? Proportional? Necessary? Not really, but that doesn't mean it won't become law. The change to statutory damages is contained in the PRO-IP Act that is currently up...

Chances are that as you read this article, it is passing over part of AT&T's network. That matters, because last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws. The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster...

Today, the NY Times has the first part of a special series - War Torn:Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles. It appears that the troops are coming home and becoming murderers. Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: "Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife." Pierre, S.D.: "Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress." Colorado Springs: "Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring." Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the...

The RIAA has quickly become one of the most disliked organizations in the world. Working ostensibly with the interests of the artists in mind, the organization has single-handedly instituted a policy of lawsuits and education in an attempt to curb the piracy of music. Although this has been going on for quite some time now, I recently read a press release from the organization outlining its successes and what 2008 will look like for its College Deterrence program. The press release tells us that the RIAA (on behalf of the music industry) has sent out "a new wave of 407...

TORONTO (Billboard) - A revolutionary plan that would effectively legitimize file-sharing here has been slammed as "a pipe dream" by Canadian labels. The Songwriters Assn. of Canada proposes to allow domestic consumers access to all recorded music available online in return for adding a $5 Canadian (2.5 pound) monthly fee to every wireless and Internet account in the country. The SAC claims that the proposal, which has been presented to labels' bodies the Canadian Record Industry Assn. (CRIA) and Canadian Independent Record Production Assn. as well as publishers' groups, would raise approximately $1 billion Canadian ($993 million) annually. Although the...

Things are looking up for the World's Dumbest File Sharer, Jammie Thomas, who became the first American to go to court in a P2P case in October A jury of her peers found Thomas guilty of copyright infringement and set a fine of $222,000 - but now she's been dumped by the person most responsible for leaving her in this predicament (apart from Jammie herself) - her attorney Brian Toder. It was Toder who foolishly advised her to make a principled fight of the matter in court - thereby turning what would have been a $2,000 tax into a candidate...

Border broadcasters fret over digital switchFree stations in Mexico may mean many viewers won't convert sets By SUZANNE GAMBOA Associated Press Dec. 21, 2007, 11:39PM WASHINGTON — Broadcasters along the U.S.-Mexico border fear they will be at a competitive disadvantage when the U.S. switches to digital television in 2009 because residents can still pick up Mexican stations on old TVs. On Feb. 18, 2009, tens of millions of televisions that are not equipped to receive digital signals will no longer be able to receive programming. People in the U.S. with old televisions will have to buy converter boxes or subscribe...

In the year ahead, a long-heralded revolution in wireless communications will finally come to pass. It may throw handset makers and service providers into turmoil, but over time it should be great for consumers. Fast, wireless data will become more widely available, the choice of data devices and mobile handsets will expand, and service just might get cheaper. The biggest driver of change is an event slated for February, 2009. It is, of all things, the shutdown of analog television broadcasting. The conversion to digital TV will free up space now occupied by UHF channels 52 to 69. A chunk...

In the aftermath of the $222,000 jury verdict that the Recording Industry Association of America recently won against a Minnesota woman who shared 24 songs on Kazaa, the U.S. Congress is preparing to amend copyright law. Politicians want to increase penalties for copyright infringement. It's no joke. Top Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday introduced a sweeping 69-page bill that ratchets up civil penalties for copyright infringement, boosts criminal enforcement, and even creates a new federal agency charged with bringing about a national and international copyright crackdown. "By providing additional resources for enforcement of intellectual...

Back in April, a court found that Kaleidescape's high end DVD jukebox was perfectly legal, despite complaints from the entertainment industry. The DVD jukebox clearly was not for pirating materials. It would rip DVDs and store them on a hard drive, but it included all kinds of copy protection and cost $27,000. This wasn't for kids ripping DVDs in their bedrooms. When that lawsuit came out, the group in charge of the DVD spec, DVD-CCA whined that the lawsuit would delay the rollout of the latest DVD specs -- though it wasn't clear why. Now we know. PC Magazine has...

MUSIC and software industry lobby groups have been accused of touting "absurd" piracy figures in an effort to get tougher copyright laws and more police resources to enforce them. A draft Australian Institute of Criminology report on intellectual property crime - obtained by The Australian- describes some industry research as "self-serving hyperbole" and warns that exaggerated statistics are being used to get government attention. "Demonstrated higher levels of piracy and counterfeiting would invariably result in additional federal government resources being diverted to enforcement activities," the report says.

PARIS, Oct. 8 — It took more than 10 minutes to persuade the Paris police station’s highest-ranking officer that a crime might have taken place, but that did not deter Jérôme Martinez and his two companions. After all, the three had marched halfway across the Latin Quarter one evening in late September, accompanied by about 40 fellow advocates, waving banners and handing out parking-ticket-style leaflets that claimed they had committed a number of offenses. Among their crimes was listening to a song purchased from iTunes on a device not made by Apple Computer. The group, StopDRM, largely made up of...

The back cover of “Southern Smoke 27” also says something about the current status of mixtapes. It’s chock-a-block with corporate logos: BET, MTV and Geffen Records (Field Mob’s label) are all represented, and there are advertisements for DJ Smallz’s syndicated radio shows (on both satellite — Sirius — and terrestrial radio). “Southern Smoke 27” is a corporate-sponsored CD, even though you can’t legally buy it, which means that it’s probably also an endangered species; the era of major-label bootlegs can’t last forever. But then, mixtapes aren’t supposed to last forever. Like magazines, which they resemble in both price and energy,...

As experts weigh what's happening in Iraq, Baghdadis just know things are getting worse BAGHDAD, IRAQ - Deep within the Pentagon, they're trying to piece together a picture of an Iraqi civil war. What would it look like? Donald Rumsfeld asks. Here on the streets of Baghdad, it looks like hell. Corpses, coldly executed, are turning up by the minibus-load. Mortar shells are casually lobbed into rival neighborhoods. Car bombs are killing people wholesale, while assassins hunt them down one by one. Is it civil war? "In Iraq it is no longer a matter of definition — 'civil war' or...

Is anyone watching this Hisory Channel hitpiece on the Bush Admin? Katrina: American Catastrophe

When Dan Rather retired a year early as anchor of CBS Evening News this March, his departure symbolized the end of an era of liberal media dominance and the onset of the new media era that is proving far friendlier to the ideas and arguments of the Right. Gone are the days when the Big Three networks, plus the New York Times and the Washington Post, decided what was newsworthy, usually with a liberal spin. Even if intrepid bloggers hadn’t debunked Rather’s specious September 60 Minutes II scoop that President Bush shirked his National Guard duties decades ago—a humiliation to...

The execution of Terri Schiavo -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: April 4, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Terri Schiavo is dead. She did not die a natural death, unless you believe a court order to cut off food and water to a disabled woman until she dies of starvation and thirst is natural. No, Terri Schiavo was executed by the state of Florida. Her crime? She was so mentally disabled as to be unworthy of life in the judgment of Judge George Greer. The execution was carried out at Woodside Hospice. An autopsy will reveal that Terri's vital organs...

AUSTIN - For years journalists have been hesitant to lobby for a shield law to protect their notes and tapes, but now is the time, many say, before it becomes too late. "We run the very real risk of seeing our reporters and photographers and editors jailed for simply doing their jobs," said Donnis Baggett, publisher of the Bryan-College Station Eagle and legislative chairman of the Texas Daily Newspaper Association and the Texas Press Association. "We are on dangerously thin ice." A Senate committee heard testimony last week on a bill that would give journalists a qualified privilege for the...

Congressional leaders are playing a dangerous game with their intrusion into the hotly publicized fight in Florida over maintaining life support for a severely brain-damaged woman. With state legislative and court appeals being exhausted, the House and Senate began some grim one-upsmanship to stop the removal of the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo. She is the 41-year-old woman who has been in a persistent vegetative state for the last 15 years, with her parents contesting that sad diagnosis. They also challenged the careful decisions by Florida's trial and appellate courts, based largely on the testimony of her husband that their...

Subject: Politech Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:32:44 -0500 From: Jamey Vester Websense is now blocking foxnews.com as an advocacy group. I really don't have any comment about this, except that cnn, msnbc, etc. are not blocked at all except for their sports sections. I have attached a screenshot. Jamey Vester ------------ Access to this web page is restricted at this time. Reason: The Websense category "Advocacy Groups" is filtered. URL: http://www.foxnews.com/

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) - Lawmakers' pique over the networks' incredible shrinking news hole is prompting legislation that will both shorten the time broadcasters have between license renewals and require full commission review of 5% of all licenses. The legislation was introduced by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on Tuesday after the release of a report by the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California found evening TV newscasts contained little coverage of local political campaigns last year. It also would require broadcasters to post on their Internet sites information detailing their commitment to local public-affairs programming, and it calls...