You don’t hear much about a “war on Christmas” this year, but you do hear murmurings about a war on comedy. It’s a loggerheads that has Spotify under scrutiny for removing a significant number of comedy albums from its service, in response to many comics and their reps believing they have a right to the same kind of dual royalties that musicians have always gotten
Source: Are Spotify and the Comedy Community Headed Into Battle? What’s Behind the Faceoff
Hipgnosis Songs Fund (HSF), the UK-listed entity founded by Merck Mercuriadis, now owns a music rights catalog worth over USD $2.5 billion. That’s according to an independent valuation revealed within Hipgnosis’ new interim financial report, covering the six months to end of September 2021.
Source: Hipgnosis Songs Fund now owns a catalog of 65,413 songs… worth a combined $2.55bn
In what may be the biggest deal in music for an individual body of work, Bruce Springsteen has sold his masters to Sony Music and his music publishing to Sony Music Publishing in a combined deal that sources tell Billboard is in the area of $500 million. Sony has been in negotiations to purchase Springsteen’s album catalog, while the superstar was also shopping his publishing catalog, which Universal Music Publishing Group has been administering, at the same time.
Source: Bruce Springsteen Sells His Masters and Music Publishing to Sony in $500M Deal
In its latest move to placate European competition regulators, Google has offered a set of commitments to France’s antitrust watchdog — in the hopes of settling a costly (for it) intervention over legally mandated payments for displaying snippets of news publishers’ content.
Like a recently-passed law in Germany, the Austrian bill would create a limited exception for clips running fewer than 15 seconds in length. Austria is a fairly small market, with a music business less than a tenth the size of Germany’s. But the passage of this law would mean that Germany is no longer a single outlier, and it could potentially inspire other countries to take a similar approach – especially those in Eastern Europe, where copyright law has a relatively short history.
Source: Austria Poised to Loosen Online Copyright Protections — Will Other EU Countries Follow?
Publishers with licensed tie-in programs are struggling to adapt to shifting release dates and delayed shipments. Production hiatuses, shuttered theaters, changing distribution strategies, and other complications combined to create an uncertain landscape for the studios and the tie-in business, which is characterized by long development times, strict release dates, and short sales windows. And while the situation is improving somewhat, many of the challenges continue.
The second decade of what might be the world’s most flagrant fiasco in copyright may well open on January 31 and February 1. That’s when Pablo Rodriguez, minister of Canadian Heritage, will lead a two-day national summit of the nation’s arts, culture, and heritage sectors at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
A federal judge ruled Thursday (Dec. 9) that Taylor Swift must face a jury trial over accusations she stole the lyrics to “Shake It Off” from another song that also references “playas” and “haters.” U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald refused Swift’s request to toss out the case, ruling that a jury might eventually find that her 2014 chart-topping hit had infringed a copyright to “Playas Gon’ Play,” a track released in 2001 by the group 3LW.
Source: Taylor Swift Must Face Trial in ‘Shake It Off’ Copyright Lawsuit
The AAP filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to stop Maryland’s library e-book law for taking effect January 1 and also disclosed that it was one of more than 20 organizations to sign a letter to New York governor Kathy Hochul urging her to veto a similar bill. Both pieces of legislation require publishers who offer to license e-books to consumers in their state to also offer to license the works to libraries on reasonable terms,
Source: AAP Sues to Block Maryland, New York Library E-book Laws
Manga fans are responding with anger and disbelief after Toei Animation filed 150+ copyright takedowns against Totally Not Mark, decimating his YouTube channel and putting the popular reviewer’s livelihood in jeopardy. As cries of ‘fair use’ echo around the internet, it’s worth highlighting how YouTubers sit on a knife-edge when it comes to Content ID.
Source: Toei YouTube Blitz Shows That ‘Law of Content ID’ Can Trample Fair Use * TorrentFreak