I was on a panel with some great music lawyers at ASCAP Expo on 4/30 in Los Angeles.  We had a great room of songwriters and artists, and I told them I’d post my notes. 1.  What makes someone  a joint author? The US Copyright Act defines joint authorship as a contribution by two or more […]

We’re huge Mike Lombardo fans here at MTP.  This video is a very insightful talk about the creative process that I think every artists should listen to–and also watch.

Tipitina’s hosts the annual “Instruments A’ Comin’” program fundraiser in New Orleans.  The program has raised money to provide new instruments to New Orleans school kids–for 10 years.  Year in, year out, in good times and not so good times Instruments A’ Comin has raised over $2.2 million to purchase instruments for over 4,000 students in […]

Rumors abound about Google Music, but at the moment it looks like they screwed up again.  According to News.com and  Billboard.biz, Google is talking to Spotify about powering the Google Music service.  That would mean that any Google Music service would probably be a hybrid of an unlicensed “cloud” thumb in your eye service such as the […]

The UK passed a graduated response statute last year that drove the anti-copyright crowd berserk (and which nearly had an orphan works section that would have allowed the wholesale exploitation of orphan works through a bad case of moral hazard until it was removed at the request of visual artists, but that’s another story). Needless to […]

Interesting story in CNET: “Blogger Targets AOL Seeks Class Action Status“.  “Blogger”?  You can almost hear the implied “mere” before the word “blogger”.  Perhaps true, but not just any “blogger”. In New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483 (2001), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the New York Times could not license back issues in electronic databases like LexisNexis if […]

First we found the bizarre “Winning the Web” organizers manual from Open Society Institute for the EFF/ORG/generally anti-professional creator groups.  Now The Register has a story (“Dying Quango Says Britons Oppressed by The Man“) about Consumer Focus, what the Brits call a “quasi-nongovernmental organization” or “quango” (not to be confused with “bongo”): “Britons are suffering […]

According to Digital Music News today, “Amazon was rumored to be negotiating for ‘enhanced’ cloud licensing in New York this week, but that’s just gravy.  The extra licenses would include consolidating multiple copies of the same song into one, cloud-stored version, though Amazon made it abundantly clear that it is not seeking licenses for its […]