Record label representatives have been caught issuing DMCA takedown notices for Radiohead’s In Rainbows album despite apparently not having any legal standing to do so.
Radiohead released In Rainbows online in 2007 after severing their relationship with EMI. It was initially offered online, with downloaders allowed to choose their own price - even if they chose to pay nothing.
The DMCA’s takedown provision allows rights holders or their agents to have infringing content taken down by service providers. But the rights in question would have to be for digital distribution.
A few months after it’s initial online release, the band made a distribution deal with a RIAA member, ATO Records, which doesn’t seem to include any digital distribution (ie download) rights.
In fact it appears that Warner/Chappell Music, a publishing company owned by Warner Music Group, is contracted to be Radiohead’s representative in digital licensing. Although public details of the arrangement are somewhat vague, Last.fm lists the company as the label for In Rainbows.
A guick search of the Chilling Effects database shows that the RIAA has included the album in at least one DMCA takedown request.
Another takedown notice which includes the album comes from the RIAA’s international equivalent, IFPI, which ATO Records isn’t even affiliated with. Even stranger is the frequent listing of In Rainbows in takedown notices by a Brazilian anti piracy organization called Anti-Pirataria Cinema E Música (APCM).
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Result for: Downloaders
Speaking at a seminar for the Cinema Expo this week, Paramount Pictures COO Fred Huntsberry said that average Joe unauthorized movie downloaders are no longer Hollywood’s biggest threat, with that spot being taken by “Cyberlockers,” illegal subscription services.
Huntsberry says cyberlockers are usually run by mobs in foreign nations, which download hot pirated films, then sell them to the public in unlimited streaming for as low as $5 a month for a subscription.
“Cyberlockers now represent the preferred method by which consumers are enjoying pirated content,” says the COO, via Reuters.
Cyberlocker businesses normally operate from Russia, Ukraine, Colombia and Germany, and most sties even have ads from such big-time names like Netflix, KFC and Samsung, which have unwittingly been placed there.
“Sometimes these sites look better than the legitimate sites,” adds Huntsberry. “That’s the irony.”
Huntsberry warned that users of cyberlockers risk having their credit card information stolen.
Result for: Downloaders
The Big 4 record label EMI sued Bluebeat.com this week, claiming the site is selling unauthorized digital copies of the Beatles albums.
The site sells each track for $0.25 but EMI says they have “not authorized content to be sold on Bluebeat.com.”
Bluebeat garnered the attention of the label and curious downloaders because the Beatles tracks have never been officially been digitized, and certainly would not sell for 25 cents when all other tracks on iTunes sell for $1.
Perhaps just as notably, Bluebeat allows for free streaming of some tracks, including those by the Beatles.
Bluebeat, in their defense, say that they actually own the tracks and the copyrights for those tracks. What? MRT, the parent company behind Bluebeat, says they ran the Beatles tracks through psycho-acoustic simulation and added new pictures to the MP3s, thus making them completely new pieces of media. Media of which they own the copyrights for.
For those confused, (everyone), “Psychoacoustic simulations are a synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance,” says MRT CEO Hank Risan.
Today, a federal judge has ruled in favor of EMI and granted the label a temporary restraining order against Bluebeat and MRT. Judge Walter almost immediately agreed that Bluebeat was not selling new tracks, just copyrighted materials run through “psycho-acoustic simulation.”
The judge also tore apart their other argument of having all new “audio visual work” by saying (via Ars): “However, as one court obviously pointed out. [Defendant] cannot invalidate the copyright of an independent and preexisting sound recording, simply by incorporating that sound recording into an audiovisual work.’”
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