By , September 09, 2011.

The 2011 Music-Sales Boost, By the Numbers — Billboard reports some good news: music sales are up in 2011. Nielsen presented the numbers at a NARM-sponsored webinar and looked at possible causes. One of them: the shutdown of LimeWire late last year. “The spike in sales was immediate, noticeable and lasting.”

Great Digital Expectations — The Economist surveys the rapidly-changing publishing industry. This year, for the first time, e-book sales overtook adult hardcover sales. And shuttering physical book stores — long the primary promotional channel for publishers — cast a gloom over the industry.

Visual Cues Impact Judgment of Piano Performances — Very interesting article about recent research that shows that what we see effects what we hear. “Despite the fact the soundtracks were identical, ‘Nearly all participants identified differences between the pairs of video recordings,’ the researchers report. Duplicating the results of the 1990 study, the ‘performances’ by the male pianists were perceived as more precise, while the female pianist’s ‘performance’ of Chopin was judged as more dramatic.”

Tunes on the Tube, What Does it all Mean? — “Have you noticed how much more music is on television today?” asks the RIAA’s Mitch Glazier. From shows like The Voice, Glee, and Dancing With the Stars to the record-high ratings for music award shows, the common theme seems to be “fans’ healthy appetite for music discovery and their desire to be blown away by a voice, a song, a talent.”

Copyright law puts brakes on Internet traffic — After New Zealand’s recent graduated response laws went into effect, ISPs have reported that international P2P traffic has dropped by as much as 10% before a single warning notice had even been sent.

Tech Execs Should Read the PROTECT IP Act Before Attacking It — The MPAA responds to yesterday’s letter from tech company bosses opposing the PROTECT IP Act. It notes specifically that the definition of infringing sites is anything but “vague” and the “burdens for smaller tech companies” are largely imaginary.

Still a Long Way to Go for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — The ACTA largely dropped from the news once negotiations wrapped up last year, but it is open for signature until May 2013. IP Watch takes a look at where that process is at and some of the issues that have cropped up.

In the Courts

To the extent that Perfect 10 can be read to stand for the proposition that inline linking can never cause a display of images or videos that would give rise to a claim of direct copyright infringement, we respectfully disagree. In our view, a website’s servers need not actually store a copy of a work in order to “display” it. The fact that the majority of the videos displayed on myVidster reside on a third-party server does not mean that myVidster users are not causing a “display” to be made by bookmarking those videos. The display of a video on myVidster can be initiated by going to a myVidster URL and clicking “play”; that is the point of bookmarking videos on myVidster—a user can navigate to a collection of myVidster videos and does not have to go to each separate source site to view them.

FLAVA WORKS, INC. v. Gunter, No. 10 C 6517, Memorandum Order (N.D.Illinois September 1, 2011)

1 Comment

  1. To the extent that Perfect 10 can be read to stand for the proposition that inline linking can never cause a display of images or videos that would give rise to a claim of direct copyright infringement, we respectfully disagree. In our view, a website’s servers need not actually store a copy of a work in order to “display” it. The fact that the majority of the videos displayed on myVidster reside on a third-party server does not mean that myVidster users are not causing a “display” to be made by bookmarking those videos. The display of a video on myVidster can be initiated by going to a myVidster URL and clicking “play”; that is the point of bookmarking videos on myVidster—a user can navigate to a collection of myVidster videos and does not have to go to each separate source site to view them.

    How do you dig this stuff up? 🙂