Label:Life

On Tuesday the US Supreme Court will begin hearing a lawsuit brought against Grokster and StreamCast networks that could change the legal landscape governing copyright infringement

Billionaire Mark Cuban has announced that he will finance Grokster’s defence against MGM’s peer-to-peer lawsuit, which is expected to be argued before the US Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Cuban, the entrepreneur who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7bn and who is now president of HDNet, a provider of high-definition TV programming, wrote in a blog entry on Saturday that he had agreed to fund the software company’s defence after he was approached by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others. [more @ www.zdnet.co.uk]

Recording industry executive Andy Gershon sees opportunity in the online file-sharing networks that most of his rivals decry as havens for music pirates. As president of V2 Records, home to such established acts as The White Stripes and Moby, Gershon mines such Internet distribution channels for new fans and revenues.

“The cat is so far out of the bag and so far gone that it’s pointless to keep fighting it,” Gershon said. “I might as well make as many people fans of our music, whether they illegally download it or not.”

A number of mostly independent recording artists and labels have experimented with and embraced the freewheeling digital distribution that the Internet affords. And many worry that a victory by major recording companies in a landmark file-sharing case now before the U.S. Supreme Court could short-circuit the very technologies that they believe are making a more level playing field of the music business. [more @ www.abcnews.go.com]

Arts minister Estelle Morris has for the first time invited the British music industry to give its opinion on what the government can do to help strengthen the provision of live entertainment in the UK.

The consultation will be led by the Live Music Forum, a body created by the DCMS last year to promote live performance and to monitor the impact of the new Licensing Act on the industry.

Over 12 weeks the group will collate comments from a wide range of industry figures and present the findings along with a series of recommendations in a report that will be submitted to the government in 2006. [more @ www.thestage.co.uk]

Many in the music industry agree that the iTunes Music Store has changed the face of music, possibly saving the industry from turmoil decline, but one reporter is suggesting that the advent of online music distribution has done more than that, it has spelled the end of the album.

Sidney Morning Herald’s (free subscription required) Steve Dow has declared that the album will die when Apple launches its iTunes Music Store in Australia. [more @ www.macworld.co.uk]

It’s been the great “Whodunit?” of two big technology shows: Who put the gag in Motorola Corp.’s mouth just as it was going to unveil a new cell phone featuring the iTunes music download service from Apple Computer Inc.?

Motorola initially said it acted alone, then quickly pointed to Apple, citing the computer company’s long practice of never unveiling new products until they’re actually available to buy.

Many industry players, however, suspect that a wireless service provider intervened, essentially telling Motorola that, ‘I’ll be darned if I’ll sell your phones to my customers if it means they can buy songs through Apple and Motorola without giving me a piece of the pie.’ [more @ www.businessweek.com]

Apple’s iPod is the must-have gadget of this decade. Over 10 million have been sold so far, dwarfing sales of other MP3 players. Apple claims over half the digital music player market.

But this pales into insignificance when set against that other iconic consumer device, the mobile phone. Worldwide mobile handset sales amounted to 652 million units last year. The race is now on to make the mobile phone the portable media player of choice.

Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Siemens are all working on phones with better music functions, For Apple the worry is that, just as “camera” phones have made instant cameras virtually redundant, the iPod’s days could be numbered. [more @ www.independent.co.uk]

It is not often that the advertising industry gets excited about the events at a district court in north London.

But last week, in outdoor media circles at least, all eyes were on Highbury Corner Magistrates’ Court and the proceedings against one Timothy Horrox, managing director of Diabolical Liberties.

After months of legal wrangling, Camden Council won its fight to slap Horrox with an anti-social behaviour order for his firm’s role in fly-posting in the London borough. [more @ www.mediaweek.co.uk]

Canada’s CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic) says it’s, “cautiously optimistic” regarding government plan to amend the Copyright Act.

The current proposal is better than the, “one-sided approach to copyright we saw in the May, 2004, Interim Report on Copyright Reform of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage,” says CIPPIC lawyer David Fewer.

But all is not rosy, and, “Our privacy is under attack, our right and ability to use content we’ve paid for is under attack,” says CIPPIC’s Alex Cameron. “We’d like to see the government go further in recognizing that technology can be used by copyright owners in a way that is harmful to individuals, downstream creators and innovators who build upon digital works, and to the good of the public at large.” [more @ www.p2pnet.net]

Swedish anti-piracy organization AntipiratbyrA has been accused of illegally downloading copyright-protected films and games in an effort to plant evidence against Internet service provider Bahnhof. Two weeks ago, the APB led the raid against Bahnhof, where authorities confiscated servers containing thousands of film, music and games files.

APB lawyer Henrik PontEn reportedly admitted the organization had hired an infiltrator to use against Bahnhof, which raised its own internal investigation and, according to managing director Jon Karlung, discovered the APB infiltrator had himself carried out over 68,000 uploads and downloads of copyright-protected material on Bahnhof’s servers. [more @ www.thewhir.com]

An Australian head teacher has banned pupils from bringing their iPods into school, because they encourage social isolation. “People were not tuning into other people because they’re tuned into themselves,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.

As we noted this week, all kinds of fascinating social possibilities elude the iPodder. Music is a social activity, but the children are only responding to corporate advertising that encourages solipsism – “to shield ourselves,” as Oscar Wilde put it, ironically, “from the sordid perils of actual existence”. [Read on for an amusing and thought provoking piece on why i-Pods should carry health warnings! -Ed.] [more @ www.theregister.co.uk]