Free for a Fee

A Boston federal jury has ordered Joel Tenenbaum to pay a total of 5,000—,500 per song—to the major record labels for willfully infringing 30 songs by downloading and distributing them over the KaZaA peer-to-peer network. The figure is closer to the 2,000 award in the first Jammie Thomas-Rasset trial than the .92 million figure from the second trial.

The verdict came down at late Friday afternoon after less than three hours of deliberation.

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Hold onto your iPhones—a company called VoloMedia was yesterday granted a patent on a “method for providing episodic media content.” Or, as the company puts it in today’s announcement, VoloMedia now owns the “US patent for podcasting.” Prepare to pay up?

Even the patent’s chief inventor, Murgesh Navar, knows that the claim is controversial. Before anyone had time to start asking questions about the patent, Navar authored a blog post explaining just why he’s entitled to control podcasting. The short answer: he’s been working on it for years.

The patent in question “was filed in November 2003, almost a year before the start of podcasting. This helps underscore the point, that for nearly six years, VoloMedia has been focused on helping publishers monetize portable media… Today, podcasting is 100 percent RSS-based. However, the patent is not RSS-dependent. Rather, it covers all episodic media downloads. It just so happens that, today, the majority of episodic media downloads are RSS-based podcasts, which is why we titled our announcement the way we did.”

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When Wal-Mart announced in 2008 that it was pulling down the DRM servers behind its (nearly unused) online music store, the Internet suffered a collective aneurysm of outrage, eventually forcing the retail giant to run the servers for another year. Buying DRMed content, then having that content neutered a few months later, seemed to most consumers not to be fair.

But that’s not quite how Big Content sees things—just ask Steven Metalitz, the Washington DC lawyer who represents the MPAA, RIAA, and other rightsholders before the Copyright Office. Because the Copyright Office is in the thick of its triennial DMCA review process, in which it will decide to allow certain exemptions to the rules against cracking DRM, Metalitz has been doing plenty of representation of late.

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Computerworld

July 29, 2009 06:22 PM ET

I The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) took exception today to Apple’s claims that “jailbroken” iPhones could cripple a mobile carrier network, calling the argument nothing but “a hill of beans.”

Apple’s claims came in a filing to the U.S. Copyright Office (PDF document), which is conducting a regular review of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Last year, the EFF requested an exemption to the DMCA for cell phone jailbreaking.

The EFF, and other technology companies that support it, including Firefox maker Mozilla, want the Copyright Office to let users install applications not available through Apple’s App Store on their iPhones without fear of copyright infringement penalties.

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The content in this post was found at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136065/EFF_Apple_s_claim_that_jailbroken_iPhones_can_crash_cell_towers_a_hill_of_beans_?source=CTWNLE_nlt_dailyam_2009-07-30 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

lawsuit out of Cook County, Ill., in which a management company filed a ,000 lawsuit over a tenant’s “malicious and defamatory” Twitter tweet. Such tweets, as of course you know, LBers, have a maximum length of 140 characters. And yes, apparently they can lead to defamation lawsuits.

The tweet was made by the tenant, Amanda Bonnen, in reference to the state of her apartment to her 20 followers. “You should just come anyway,” it read. “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s OK.”

Click here for the story, from Chicago Bar-Tender (hat tip: ABA Journal). The complaint notes that because Bonnen’s account was public, “anybody in the world can view the account holder’s tweets.” The complaint says that because the “statement damaged the plaintiff’s reputation in its business, the statement is liable per se.”

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The content in this post was found at http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/07/28/the-shortest-allegedly-defamatory-statement-in-history/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.