An epic space adventure that holds danger at every turn... The human cadets on the interstellar transport, Bright Star, are heading home after eight long years of military training...but things don't go according to plan. After a bloody battle with a group of space pirates, the Bright Star and its survivors are taken prisoner with the intent of selling them into slavery...or worse. Cadet Alec Horn, along with the captain of the Bright Star escape, taking an emperor's ransom in loot with them. Together they set out on a dangerous adventure to rescue their friends and comrades. But can they succeed without bringing forth a war that will bring death and destruction across the universe?
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The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter suggests that many
online streaming services might be relying on the wrong company to properly
license her work.
In the past
week, there's been quite a bit of chatter about Radiohead frontman Thom
Yorke's decision to pull his music from Spotify, a popular streaming
service. In a comment that had many in the industry discussing the economics of
digital music, Yorke's longtime producer Nigel Godrichcomplained that "new artists get paid f--- all with this
model."
Now comes a
lawsuit from another acclaimed songwriter, Aimee Mann, who presents the
argument that artists like her are being systematically robbed of digital
royalties. According to Mann's lawyer, Maryann Marzano of Gradstein
& Marzano, "Not only does this case seek redress for Aimee Mann
against one of the world's largest but least known providers of online music,
it also serves as a call to other artists to follow the lead set by Radiohead
and Pink Floyd to put an end to the unlicensed, uncompensated use of their
music by online services."
In the
cross-hairs of the lawsuit is a company called MediaNet, which might be
somewhat obscure but plays an important role. The company was founded in 1999
as a venture backed by EMI, AOL, BMG and RealNetworks before being sold to a private equity firm in 2005. Today it is
essentially a white label that serves up more than 22 million songs to over 40 music
services, including Yahoo Music, Playlist.com, eBay and various online
radio services.
But according to
Mann's lawsuit, not all of the music being provided by MediaNet is properly
licensed. Mann is demanding statutory damages for willful copyright
infringement of some 120 songs, which could amount to damages as high as $18
million.
The laws that
govern the distribution of music are complicated and have grown more complex
over time. Every song starts out as a composition, which is protected by its
own copyright. When that composition becomes a sound recording, there is a
separate copyright that protects it as well. The owner of the sound recording
pays a mechanical licensing fee to the owner of the composition.
Starting in the
1990s, music began to be distributed digitally, and Congress amended U.S.
copyright laws to extend compulsory licensing to the delivery of phonorecords
in digital form. However, the statute didn't apply to certain services that
offered on-demand streams and limited downloads. That was confirmed
by a New York judge in 2001.
To address this
absence, representatives from the Recording Industry of America and the
National Music Publishers Association began negotiating with each other and
reached an agreement whereby RIAA members were able to make payments through
the Harry Fox Agency. Later, an entity called the Copyright Royalty Board
emerged that set rates and allowed some digital services like Pandora to pay compulsory licensing fees.
Other services, such as Spotify, have made direct deals with record
labels.
MediaNet falls
somewhere in the middle of all of this. The company appears to have had an
interesting, legally contentious journey toward becoming some form of
back-office aggregator of music for dozens of online music services.
After being sold
to private equity firm Baker Capital, MediaNet continued to distribute works,
which led to a class action lawsuit filed in 2008 by the Harry Fox Agency. That
matter was settled in 2008, but another lawsuit came from various song
publishers in 2011.
According to a
declaration that was filed in the case by Stephen Grauberger, an
attorney representing the plaintiffs, MediaNet attempted about a decade ago to
seek compulsory licenses. But the lawyer said that notices sent by the company
"were facially defective" for various reasons, including the failure
to reference other entities who would utilize the music.
Also in
Grauberger's declaration (read it here) was the astounding claim that sworn testimony
had revealed that by 2012, "23 percent of MediaNet's catalog remains
unlicensed."
The lawsuit was
then confidentially settled.
Enter Aimee
Mann, who hit it big in the mid-1980s with her band 'Til Tuesday and the single
"Voices Carry," earned Academy Award and Grammy Award nominations for
her song "Save Me" from Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia,
and has been producing critically celebrated music ever since.
According to her
complaint (which can be
read here), filed on Monday in California federal court, Mann
entered into a license agreement in 2003 with MediaNet (then known as
MusicNet). The term of the license agreement was scheduled to end in 2006 but
had automatic two-year extensions unless terminated by either party.
Mann's representative
is said to have sent a termination notice in 2005, but nevertheless,
"MediaNet continued after the Termination Date to transmit, perform,
reproduce and distribute the Compositions as part of MediaNet's service,
despite having no right or license to do so."
Besides suing
for direct infringement, Mann is also claiming that MediaNet induced its
business partners to commit copyright infringement. Mann also says she has not
been paid any royalties by the company since Sept. 30, 2005, with the exception
of a $20 advance this past March that was returned.
MediaNet hasn't
yet responded to a request for comment.
8:23 AM PDT 7/23/2013 by Eriq Gardner – The Hollywood Reporter
Young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken by
the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they
travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their
journey indelibly.
"Cenizas Eternas" ("Eternal
Ashes") tells the story of a mother, Ana and her daughter, Elena. Although
they are separated, in the space and time they remain united forever.
The people and the millenarian culture of Yanomami are the framework of this
story about the unbreakable bonds of filiations.
After an accident in the furious flow of the mythical Orinoco River, in the
fifties, Ana was considered dead. Elena as an adult and facing the negligible
possibility that her mother is alive decides to leave to the Amazon to search
her.
"Eternal Ashes" is a story of filiations, poetry, wisdom and
especially of humanity.
Jeff Bezos, chief of Amazon, introducing new models of the
company’s Kindle e-readers in 2012.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, loves disrupting
markets. In that regard, he must be having a delightful summer. The book
business, once so mired in the past it seemed part of the antiques trade, is up
for grabs.
A federal judge ruled on
Wednesday that Apple had illegally conspired with five of the six biggest
publishers to try to raise prices in the budding e-books market.
The decision came two days after Barnes & Noblelost its chief executive and said it would not
appoint another, signaling that the biggest chain of physical bookstores could
be immediately broken up.
The verdict in the Apple case might have been a foregone
conclusion, telegraphed by the judge herself, but it emphatically underlined
how the traditional players in the book business have been upended. Only
Amazon, led by Mr. Bezos, seems to have a plan. He is executing it with a skill
that infuriates his competitors and rewards his stockholders.
“We’re at a moment when cultural power is passing to new
gatekeepers,” said Joe Esposito, a publishing consultant. “Heaven forbid that
we should have the government telling our entrepreneurs what to do, but there
is a social policy issue here. We don’t want the companies to become a black
hole that absorbs all light except their own.”
The Apple case, which was brought by the Justice Department, will
have little immediate impact on the selling of books. The publishers settled
long ago, protesting they had done nothing wrong but saying they could not
afford to fight the government. But it might be a long time before they try to
take charge of their fate again in such a bold fashion. Drawing the attention
of the government once was bad enough; twice could be a disaster.
“The Department of Justice has unwittingly caused further
consolidation in the industry at a time when consolidation is not necessarily a
good thing,” said Mark Coker, the chief executive of Smashwords, an e-book
distributor. “If you want a vibrant ecosystem of multiple publishers, multiple
publishing methods and multiple successful retailers in 5, 20 or 50 years, we
took a step backwards this week.”
Some in publishing suspected that Amazon had prompted the
government to file its suit. The retailer has denied it, but it still emerged
the big winner. While Apple will be punished — damages are yet to be decided —
and the publishers were chastened, Amazon is left free to exert its dominance
over e-books — even as it gains market share with physical books. The retailer
declined to comment on Wednesday.
“Amazon is not in most of the headlines, but all of the big events
in the book world are about Amazon,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the
Authors Guild. “If the publishers colluded, it was to blunt Amazon’s dominance.
Barnes & Noble’s troubles may stem from a misstep with its Nook tablets,
just as Borders’ bankruptcy might have been hastened by management mistakes,
but its precarious position is that of any rent-paying retailer facing a
deep-pocketed virtual competitor.”
Last week, Penguin and Random House officially merged,
creating a publishing behemoth that might be able to determine its future
rather than suffer the fate of Barnes & Noble, a once-swaggering entity
that now seems adrift. Random House was not a target of the Justice Department;
Penguin was.
Penguin and Random House were innovators who made paperbacks into
a disruptive force in the 1940s and ’50s. They were the Amazons of their era,
making the traditional book business deeply uneasy. No less an authority than George
Orwell thought paperbacks were of so much better value than hardbacks that they
spelled the ruination of publishing and bookselling. “The cheaper books
become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”
Orwell was wrong, but the same arguments are being made against
Amazon and e-books today. Amazon executives are not much for public debate, but
they argue that all this disruption will ultimately give more money to more
authors and make more books more widely available to more people at cheaper prices,
and who could argue with any of that?
This was not a prospect that many on Wednesday were putting much
faith in.
Amazon, its detractors argue, is not a nonprofit or public trust
but a hard-nosed company whose investors hope will make lots of money someday
soon. It shares closed Wednesday at $292.33, a record.
“The Justice Department’s guns seem pointed in the wrong
direction,” Mr. Aiken said.
But the more pressing concern for the industry is the fate of
Barnes & Noble. When Borders collapsed two years ago, analysts said there
was an unexpected consequence to the loss of 400 stores: the e-book growth rate
began to taper off, as readers could no longer examine new titles before
ordering them from Amazon.
E-books, in other words, were not a magical technology that could
shed all the existing infrastructure of publishing. They needed the existing
ecosystem.
“If all of those corporate outlets vanish, there is suddenly a
hell of a lot less space devoted to showcasing a large number of titles,” said
J. B. Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. “We’ll probably see a
continuing shrinking in print runs, maybe fewer titles published, fewer authors
published and the New York houses retreating into the known best-sellers. Which
means more novice and midlist authors scrambling to find a way to stay in print
and more authors self-publishing their print books — or more likely releasing
their works as e-files.”
All of that sounds dire. Perhaps the only consolation for those
who fear the power of Amazon is the knowledge that all companies eventually
peak, no matter how unlikely that seems when they are in the ascendance.
Mr. Esposito, the consultant, remembered that 30 years ago there
was a book called “The Media Monopoly,” which worried about the excessive power
of the Gannett chain of newspapers as well as the three major television
networks.
“The book reads almost quaint now,” Mr. Esposito said.
A
version of this article appeared in print on July 11, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: E-Book Ruling
Gives Amazon An Advantage.
Newly divorced Sarah and her daughter Elissa
find the house of their dreams in a small, upscale, rural town. But when
startling and unexplainable events begin to happen, Sarah and Elissa learn the
town is in the shadows of a chilling secret.
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