Free Republic

For the past two years, the music industry has been watching a series of lawsuits centered on an obscure aspect of copyright law: whether the performers on older recordings should get royalties when their songs are played on digital radio services. One of those lawsuits was settled Friday when SiriusXM, the satellite radio provider, announced it would pay $210 million to the major record companies over its broadcasting of songs made before 1972. ...two years ago members of the 1960s band the Turtles, whose hits included “Happy Together” sued Sirius in three federal courts, saying their songs before 1972 were...

As we learned from Mad Men, the advertising industry is ever intent on harnessing trends that are bubbling up organically. Countercultural ideals (say, hippie-era peace and love) are wedded to a mainstream product (say, Coke) and blasted to the mainstream before anyone knows what’s hit them. Which is why hip-hop and advertising go together so well. Firmly rooted in youth culture, hip-hop is edgy but accessible, a combination that companies adore. It can be exciting to see your favorite rapper validated in big-name plugs, whether it’s Jay Z for Hewlett Packard or Eminem for Chrysler. But for every carefully considered,...

...This month, painter and photographer Richard Prince reminded us that what you post is public, and given the flexibility of copyright laws, can be shared — and sold — for anyone to see. As a part of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, Prince displayed giant screenshots of other people’s Instagram photos without warning or permission. The collection, “New Portraits,” is primarily made up of pictures of women, many in sexually charged poses. They are not paintings, but screenshots that have been enlarged to 6-foot-tall inkjet prints. According to Vulture, nearly every piece sold for $90,000 each. How is...

Bad news today for HBO, which is attempting to marry the recent debut of their HBO Now streaming service with season 5 of Game of Thrones. As of last night, the first four episodes of the new season, nearly half of the ten total episodes, have been leaked online to various torrent sites. After appearing online yesterday afternoon, the episodes have already been downloaded almost 800,000 times, and that figure will likely blow past a million downloalds by the season 5 premier tonight.

Making Big Media the issue could, in fact, be precisely the means to truly energize conservative and by making Democrats the obvious toadies of Big Media, to deflate the left in 2016. The enemy of conservatism in America is the leftist establishment, the leftist-controlled institutions of news, education and entertainment. Take away these big, fat incestuously connected institutions and the left in America is a circus sideshow and nothing else. Democrat “leaders” like Obama, Hillary, Pelosi and Reid are slow witted, mean-spirited, and narrow-minded sock puppets filled by the chubby hands of the leftist establishment. Indeed, the leftist establishment prefers...

Fox is suing a San Francisco digital music distribution company because of its name. According to TMZ, Twentieth Century Fox Television filed a federal lawsuit on Monday against EMPIRE Distribution over the name it shares with Fox's popular television series "Empire." Founded in 2010, EMPIRE Distribution releases digital music from urban artists including leading hip-hop stars Snoop Dogg, T.I. and Kendrick Lamar. Fox's fictional Empire Records releases urban music including hip-hop and R&B, but in a real life twist, songs from the series are actually available for sale. Columbia Records released songs from each episode for the duration of the...

If adopted, these proposals will impact record labels, music publishers, producers, royalty collection groups, terrestrial and satellite radio, and music streaming services. In a 245-page report issued on Thursday, the U.S. Copyright Office is throwing its weight behind what would be the most radical changes to how music is licensed in nearly a half century. Many of the copyright laws governing music were first erected at the time that player pianos became popular and have developed through the advent of radio, new recording devices and, most recently, digital networks. Maria Pallante, director of the Copyright Office, believes the law is...

A number of private security researchers are increasingly voicing doubts that the hack of Sony‘s computer systems was the work of North Korea. President Obama and the F.B.I. last week accused North Korea of targeting Sony and pledged a “proportional response” just hours before North Korea’s Internet went dark without explanation. But security researchers remain skeptical, with some even likening the government’s claims to those of the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq war. Fueling their suspicions is the fact that the government based its findings, in large part, on evidence that it will not release, citing the...

“Notorious piracy website The Pirate Bay was taken offline yesterday, as part of a raid by Swedish authorities,” Electronista reports. “The server raid in Stockholm, which took place yesterday morning, is said to be performed as part of a large operation to protect intellectual property, with several servers and other computers seized for further examination by the police.” “Yesterday’s event joins copious others in the history of The Pirate Bay where authorities have attempted to reduce piracy,” Electronista reports. “It also occurs just over a month after co-founder Fredrik Neij was arrested in Thailand, after fleeing Sweden following his 2009...

Facebook is mining its data of users' posts to find out how users feel about certain candidates or issues and sharing that data with ABC News and BuzzFeed for use in their 2016 reporting, the social-networking site will announce on Friday. The data will be gathered from the posts of Facebook users in the United States 18 and older, classifying sentiments about a politician or issue as positive, negative or neutral. The data can also be broken down into sentiments by gender and location, making it possible to see how Facebook users in the key primary states of Iowa or...

When it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds. There is little overlap in the news sources they turn to and trust. And whether discussing politics online or with friends, they are more likely than others to interact with like-minded individuals, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

The six-strikes Copyright Alert System has been active for one and a half years now and warnings are being sent out at an increasing rate. The program will double in size this year, according to its executive director, in the hope that it will eventually change people's norms toward piracy. February last year, five U.S. Internet providers started sending Copyright Alerts to customers who use BitTorrent to pirate movies, TV-shows and music.These efforts are part of the Copyright Alert System, an anti-piracy plan that aims to educate the public. Through a series of warnings suspected pirates are informed that their...

U.S. album sales hit 3.97-million last week, the smallest weekly total for album sales since Nielsen SoundScan first began tracking data in 1991, Billboard's Ed Christman and Glenn Peoples report. It's also the first time during that period that weekly sales have fallen below 4 million, they write.Sales for the week ending August 25 fell 18.6%. The best seller was rapper Whiz Khalifa's "Blacc Hollywood" which debuted with 90,000 units, Billboard says. For the first time in more than a year,  sales for the soundtrack to Disney's "Frozen" fell below 100,000 units.CD sales have practically vanished, down 19.2% year-over-year, with sales at...

Comedian John Oliver recently took an admittedly pretty funny shot at the concept of native advertising. His basic point was that the blurring lines between objective content and marketing pieces threatens journalistic integrity and consumer trust in the media. Now, I find Oliver to be a funny and talented guy, and he’s done some spot-on stuff (particularly his most famous piece on net neutrality). However, on this topic, he’s really off-base. Native advertising is everywhere, and all signs point to it becoming even more ubiquitous, particularly as news outlets try to come up with meaningful business models for their online...

Some of the world’s top PR companies have for the first time publicly ruled out working with climate change deniers, marking a fundamental shift in the multi-billion dollar industry that has grown up around the issue of global warming. Public relations firms have played a critical role over the years in framing the debate on climate change and its solutions – as well as the extensive disinformation campaigns launched to block those initiatives. Now a number of the top 25 global PR firms have told the Guardian they will not represent clients who deny man-made climate change, or take campaigns...

Rogers Communications says from now on it will require police to get a warrant before it hands over subscriber data. “After hearing feedback from our customers and reviewing the Supreme Court ruling from last month, we’ve decided that from now on we will require a court order/warrant to provide basic customer information to law enforcement agencies, except in life threatening emergencies,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. “We believe this move is better for our customers and that law enforcement agencies will still be able to protect the public.” The country’s second-largest telecom by revenue released its first-ever transparency...

It hardly gets more Orwellian than this. New technology would allow cable companies to peer directly into television watchers’ homes and monitor viewing habits and reactions to product advertisements. The technology would come via the cable box, and at least one lawmaker on Capitol Hill is standing in opposition.

The terrible 2s came early for this bogus baby. An animatronic infant wreaked havoc on the streets New York City for a viral marketing campaign that scared the hell out of some bystanders. The “devil baby” — cruising around the streets in a remote control stroller — would lie in wait for an unsuspecting person to check on the child before pouncing, growling and sometimes even flipping the bird.

On Friday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME enables content providers to integrate digital rights management (DRM) interfaces into HTML5-based media players. Encrypted Media Extensions is being developed jointly by Google, Microsoft and online streaming-service Netflix. No actual encryption algorithm is part of the draft; that element is designed to be contained in a CDM (Content Decryption Module) that works with EME to decode the content. CDMs may be plugins or built into browsers. The publication of the new draft is a blow for critics of the extensions, led...

The Twitter accounts of CBS's 60 Minutes and 48 Hours have been hacked and suspended. According to the Hollywood Reporter, before the suspension, anti-Obama messages were sent: "Exclusive: Terror is striking the #USA and #Obama is Shamelessly in Bed with Al-Qaeda," the tweet -- published around 12:30 p.m. PT to 60 Minutes' twitter feed and then re-tweeted on 48 Hours' feed -- reads. **SNIP** A group calling itself the "Syrian Cyber Army" took the credit this time - in a Tweet that originated in Indonesian. An outfit called the "Syrian Electrionic Army" launched a similar attack on NPR last week.