Freeplay Music, a company that sells so-called production music for use in web videos, television segments and other content – and hasn’t been afraid to sue over it – claims the cable news giant used the company’s library of music as “their own personal cookie jar” for segments on CNN Philippines, CNN Indonesia, CNN Chile.
Source: CNN Accused of Using Unlicensed Music In Hundreds of Segments: ‘Breathtaking Scale’
A spokesperson for the BPI, which represents independent and major record labels across the UK, welcomed what it called “the CMA’s objective, evidence-based report which confirms that the streaming market is competitive”. The BPI added that the org believes the industry is “delivering fans accessible and affordable music and artists greater choice in an environment in which many more are succeeding and where artist and songwriter royalty rates have increased”.
After selling out a collection of NFT access-passes, the holders will now gather in a Discord server to help develop artists together, share the credits of any future awards such as a Grammy, and ultimately offer intellectual property rights in some of the projects to NFT holders. The experiment is a collaboration between Warner Records UK and Web3 brand Probably Nothing, whose debut NFT collection fetched $500k in seven minutes in October.
Source: Warner Records’ Web3 Label Sold 5,555 NFTs in 7 Minutes. Now It Wants to Share IP Rights With Fans
A judge has rejected Meta’s motion to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit that it’s facing from Epidemic Sound. This latest development in the high-stakes legal showdown, which initiated in July of this year, just recently came to light in a court order. In the original complaint, Epidemic Sound claimed that Meta had infringed upon over 1,800 recordings and compositions during the preceding five years.
Source: Court Rejects Meta’s Motion to Dismiss Epidemic Sound Lawsuit
While creators and many collectors applauded OpenSea’s move, it wasn’t a clear-cut business decision for the company. Although the firm believes that royalties—typically a 5% to 10% fee paid by the seller and taken from the secondary sale price—are important to the industry, some traders are voting with their crypto at royalties-shunning platforms, cutting into OpenSea’s market share.
Source: Why OpenSea Is Sticking With NFT Creator Royalties – Decrypt
While the unlicensed and infringing use by the Door Christian Fellowship McAllen Church was quickly dealt with by Hamilton’s legal team, there have been other instances of recalcitrant producers who have only been held accountable for staging unlicensed theatrical works after years of infringement.
Details about the negotiations remain speculative, but an ad revenue share model aligns all parties’ incentives: when the platform earns revenue, the music industry earns revenue. Yet this upside was not always so obvious to the labels, whose initial “value gap” argument was based around YouTube’s ad revenue share model. Now — if the reports are true — the labels’ new value gap argument focuses on getting TikTok to adopt exactly what was the basis of the first value gap.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, poised to be the next Democratic leader, has co-sponsored key legislation to help musicians and songwriters. Music industry leaders are thrilled. Jeffries, who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens, co-sponsored the Music Modernization Act, the most important copyright law passed in decades, as well as the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020, a.k.a. the CASE Act.
Source: Nancy Pelosi’s Pick to Replace Her Is a Champion of Music Rights — and a Huge Hip-Hop Fan
Z-Library has responded to the U.S. criminal indictment against two of its alleged operators and associated domain name seizures. The remaining team members still haven’t confirmed the involvement of the two Russians but say they are determined to keep going. Z-Library also promises to take the complaints of authors seriously and asks for their forgiveness.
Source: Z-Library Responds to U.S. Crackdown, Asks Authors for Forgiveness * TorrentFreak
Two Russian nationals are now facing criminal charges in the U.S. for their role in running Z-Library, one of the world’s most notorious e-book pirate sites before its domains were seized by U.S. officials earlier this fall. Z-Library, which has been active since 2009, billed itself as “the world’s largest library” and claimed to offer more than 11 million e-books for free download in a variety of file formats via what court documents call a “complex network” of 249 interrelated web domains.
Source: Authors Guild Applauds Arrest, Indictment of Major E-Book Pirates