Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘music and musicians’

On TV discussing Apple, music-teacher cases

I was a guest Friday on Fox Business Network’s The Willis Report, with guest host Dennis Kneale, to discuss two antitrust cases in the news: Apple’s vigorous efforts to fight back against a monitor appointed as part of its e-books antitrust case [Roger Parloff/Fortune, Alison Frankel/Reuters], and the FTC’s enforcement action against music teachers for anti-competitive practices. You can watch here.

I’ll save the (highly significant) Apple-vs.-monitor case for another post. The Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement action against music teachers, skillfully told by Kim Strassel in the WSJ, demonstrates what officialdom is willing to do with the legal sledgehammer that it claims to need to take on giant corporations like Apple: it uses that weaponry against the mild-mannered piano teacher next door and her little trade association. In a sane world, when the association said its hortatory statement had never been enforced and it would delete it from now on, the FTC’s enforcers would declare victory and move on to some more important case. That they did not do so here speaks volumes about the zeal, careerism and lack of proportion that add up to runaway government. More: George Leef, Forbes.

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June 28 roundup

  • Record-setting tenure of bullying Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) “nothing to celebrate” [Dan Calabrese, Detroit News] Compare: “How to shut down a restaurant in Mexico” [Rob Beschizza]
  • How far does discrimination law go? Bill Baldwin interviews John Donohue [Forbes, and thanks for further-reading link]
  • Claim: bonding company responsible for actions of criminal after tracking failed [Insurance Journal, S.C.]
  • Memo to California legislature: don’t abolish statute of limitation on abuse claims [Prof. Bainbridge]
  • Here Come the Other “Happy Birthday” Lawsuits [Lowering the Bar, earlier]
  • SCOTUS story someone should cover: Christian-right legal groups backed “right to advocate prostitution” brief in AID case [Volokh, earlier]
  • “A TSA employee spotted [the beautiful jeweled lighter] and I swear his eyes lit up.” [David Henderson]

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“Lawsuit Filed To Prove Happy Birthday [the song] Is In The Public Domain”

Warner/Chappell Music continues to demand and collect royalties for public performance of the ditty, although its melody was first published more than 120 years ago and the familiar celebratory words have been sung to it for more than a century. A new lawsuit seeks a judicial ruling that the song is in the public domain and asks a return of wrongfully collected royalties. [The Hollywood Reporter via Mike Masnick, TechDirt]

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Labor and employment roundup

  • For most private-sector employers it’s illegal to let workers take comp time off in lieu of overtime; H.R. 1406, the Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013, would fix that [Hyman]
  • Christine Quinn take note: laws requiring paid sick leave do not constitute social progress [Richard Epstein]
  • Occupational hazards of bagpipe playing (other than being chased out of your neighborhood) [Donald McNeil Jr., New York Times]
  • “Phoenix ‘Not Looking for Strong Swimmers’ for Lifeguard Jobs” [David Bernstein; earlier on discrimination against deaf lifeguards]
  • Decline of full-time work in retail sector in response to ObamaCare: year’s biggest employment story? [Warren Meyer, FoxNews (largest movie theater chain cuts hours for thousands of employees)]
  • City of Philadelphia not doing well on workers’ comp program, to say the least [Workers’ Compensation Institute]
  • “New labor rule will violate attorney-client privilege” [Diana Furchtgott-Roth, D.C. Examiner]
  • “Calling a Co-Worker ‘Stupid’ Not Enough to Prove ‘Disability’, Court Says” [Daniel Schwartz]

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Time to fix copyright on sound recordings

Terry Teachout, WSJ (via About Last Night):

…In Europe, sound recordings enter the public domain 50 years after their initial release. Once that happens, anyone can reissue them, which makes it easy for Europeans to purchase classic records of the past. In America, by contrast, sound recordings are “protected” by a prohibitive snarl of federal and state legislation whose effect was summed up in a report issued in 2010 by the National Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress: “The effective term of copyright protection for even the oldest U.S. recordings, dating from the late 19th century, will not end until the year 2067 at the earliest.… Thus, a published U.S. sound recording created in 1890 will not enter the public domain until 177 years after its creation, constituting a term of rights protection 82 years longer than that of all other forms of audio visual works made for hire.”

Among countless other undesirable things, this means that American record companies that aren’t interested in reissuing old records can stop anyone else from doing so, and can also stop libraries from making those same records readily accessible to scholars who want to use them for noncommercial purposes. Even worse, it means that American libraries cannot legally copy records made before 1972 to digital formats for the purpose of preservation—not unless those records have already deteriorated to the point where they may soon become unplayable.

That’s crazy.

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Intellectual property roundup

  • “The patent, used as a sword” [NY Times, Flowing Data]
  • Default judgment over 528 songs against contumacious defendant: “Website ordered to pay $6.6 million for posting song lyrics” [NLJ]
  • “Monsanto Seed Patent Case Gets U.S. Supreme Court Review” [Bloomberg Business Week]
  • New book tells story of Ira Arnstein, whose frivolous suits against Cole Porter, Irving Berlin et al set important precedent [WSJ]
  • “Do it ‘on the Internet,’ get a patent, sue an industry — it still works” [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica]
  • “Court rules book scanning is fair use, suggesting Google Books victory” [Timothy Lee, ArsTechnica]

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“Pandora defeats privacy suit over Facebook integration”

From the summary: “Judge throws out multibillion dollar suit arising from obscure CD-and-audiotape rental law, saying there’s no evidence anyone was actually harmed by Pandora’s integration with Facebook two years ago.”

The suit [by class action firm Edelson McGuire] claimed violations of an obscure pre-Internet era Michigan law, which says a company “renting or lending” sound recordings may not disclose details about customers’ transactions without their written permission. Because it specifies $5,000 penalty per violation, the possible damages could total in the tens of billions — far more than Pandora’s actual $1.8 billion market capitalization.

The judge, however, said the law did not create a right of action on behalf of unharmed consumers, and also was unpersuaded that the music-streaming service was “renting or lending” songs. [Declan McCullagh, CNet]

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Great moments in damages calculation? Nope

Update: That’s what we get for posting hastily on a holiday weekend. We — and a great many other sites from CBS News to Business Insider to The Onion — took the below report seriously, but per Mike Masnick at TechDirt, it’s both outdated — Judge Kimba Wood rebuked RIAA’s damage demand as excessive, and the LimeWire case settled for a far lower amount — and more broadly questionable (while the original demands might have reached trillions, and were justly subject to ridicule on that account, the jump to $72 trillion seems to be at best someone’s subjective extrapolation).

Masnick’s story is here. What follows is the original post.

“It’s no secret that LimeWire was once a hotbed of peer-to-peer music piracy, but the RIAA has now attempted to sue it for $72 trillion – more money than exists in the world today. LimeWire was shut down in October 2010, but litigation continues from music bodies around the world…” [Ultimate Guitar]

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