The file-sharing site Rapidshare has been found guilty of violating German copyright law by The Regional Court of Hamburg, and ordered to pay about €24 million ($34 million) to the country’s royalty-collection agency GEMA. More importantly, though, the court put the burden of figuring out whether or not copyrighted material was on Rapidshare’s servers on the people running the service, and not the infringees; the court also said that the site’s current efforts to figure out whether or not content on its servers infringed copyrights were insufficient. MORE »
Posts Tagged ‘the biz’
The Law
Rapidshare Ordered To Transfer $34 Million To German Record Industry
the cutout bin
The Cutout Bin: Peach Pit Memories, Moving Bees, And Fake Woombles In The Wild
Before we run off to the combination Pizza Hut / Taco Bell with our copies of Infinite Jest tucked underneath our arms, a few links worthy of your clicking / browsing:
• Steve Sanders may not have been much of a fan of alternative music, but rest assured that Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne is super-into the “kind of absurd extras that come with being in a rock band”–i.e. being on Beverly Hills 90210. [Spinner]
• A fan was so pissed about the new fan-funded album by Idlewild leaking, he posed as frontman Roddy Woomble on Twitter and threatened legal action against the villainous uploader. [paidContent UK] MORE »
the new model
Buy a slogan-printed T-shirt, get the song whose lyric it’s emblazoned with as a free download with it? Eh, you know, why not: Universal Music Group and the Wal-Mart-owned UK supermarket chain Asda are teaming up on such a promotion, with four shirts featuring lyrics from Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be Wild,” Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back In Town,” the Cure’s “Lovecats,” and, uh, a Hard-Fi song. (NB: The shirt at left is not in the promotion, it’s just something I found while searching on “lovecats shirt.” There were a lot of shirts with similar sentiments!) Given peoples’ willingness to buy shirts that say anything on them, I can see this actually working in an “opening up songs to new audiences” way, provided that the featured lyrics are stoopid enough. [Music Radar] MORE »
Rumors
So What Is Jay-Z Up To, Anyway?
Last week, it came to light that Jay-Z had bought the rights to his long-in-the-works album The Blueprint 3 back from Def Jam, the label where he served as president from 2004-2007. The album was his final commitment to his Def Jam contract, and he’s now free to put it out on his Live Nation-backed imprint Roc Nation. In the past 24 hours, two stories regarding the fate of both Blueprint 3 and Jay’s newly minted label have emerged, with one saying that Jay is going to partner with Epic Records and another claiming that he’s going to enter the warm embrace of Warner Music Group. Which tale sounds more believable? An armchair analysis after the jump. MORE »
the biz
What Happens To An Album’s Pre-Release Cycle In An Era Of Leaks, Low Sales, And Dead Magazines?
One of the main reasons for album leaks is the nature of the traditional press cycle. Press outlets–in particular, print outlets–have what’s called a “lead time,” a reasonable (but sometimes unreasonable) amount of time necessary for them to have the record in order to cover it around its release date. The industry standard is three months, but it can vary based on frequency of publication. And as print media tries to compete with online media for timeliness, some outlets have demanded even longer lead times–which, of course, means more time for a record to be out there, and more time for it to leak. Preventive measures like watermarking can help, but in a big office, it can only take one unscrupulous writer or an intern who didn’t know better to screw the whole thing up. MORE »
