Justin Bieber hit with 'Sorry' copyright suit

NEW YORK, United States - An indie pop singer has filed a copyright violation lawsuit against Justin Bieber, saying the superstar stole the distinctive vocal riff in his hit "Sorry" from her.

Casey Dienel -- who performs under the stage name White Hinterland and has won acclaim in indie music circles -- said she was entitled to "substantial" profits from Bieber's song, saying the amount should be determined at a jury trial.

"Ring the Bell," a track from White Hinterland's third album "Baby," released in early 2014, opens with a repeated four-note progression in her airy voice before synthesizers come in.

"Sorry," from the Canadian celebrity singer's album "Purpose," which came out in November, is also built on a repeated vocal riff interspersed with a dance beat.

"An ordinary lay listener would instantly recognize the sample and similarity between the songs," said the lawsuit filed this week in a federal court in Nashville.

The complaint alleges that the riff is so similar -- moving from the notes of B-flat to C to E-flat to F -- that Bieber's team took "Ring the Bell" as a sample and distorted it electronically without her permission.

Dienel said she repeatedly tried to contact Bieber's team to no response.

Bieber did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.

The suit also names Bieber's songwriters as defendants, including Skrillex, a leading electronic music producer.

Skrillex and Diplo, another prominent producer, helped Bieber craft a new tropical house sound for "Purpose," the third top-selling album in the United States last year.

Some fans interpreted "Sorry" -- with its refrain "Is it too late now to say I'm sorry?" -- as the former child star's apology of sorts for his past antics or a message to his ex-girlfriend, fellow singer Selena Gomez.

The 22-year-old has had a string of legal run-ins for incidents including throwing eggs at a neighbor's house, driving under the influence of alcohol without a license and allegedly assaulting a photographer.

The number of copyright cases against major musicians has been growing in recent months.

Last year, a Los Angeles jury ordered pop stars Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams to pay more than $7 million to the estate of the late Marvin Gaye over their hit song "Blurred Lines."

Dienel, who was raised in Massachusetts and lives in the indie rock capital of Portland, Oregon, was initially known for jazzy, piano-backed pop but has increasingly brought in electronic elements.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

US Judge hands Google victory in Oracle copyright fight

SAN FRANCISCO, May 31, 2012 (AFP) – A federal judge on Thursday put a stake in the heart of Oracle’s big-money lawsuit against Google by ruling that the application programming interfaces (APIs) at issue can’t be copyrighted.

The decision by US District Court Judge William Alsup came a week after a trial ended with jurors clearing Google of patent and copyright abuse charges leveled by the California business software titan.

Jurors ruled that Google violated copyrights owned by Oracle Corp. for the Android mobile platform but were unable to decide on a key point of whether Google’s use of the Java software was “fair use” that made it acceptable.

Alsup had told the jurors to assume, for the sake of deliberations, that APIs could be copyrighted but reserved for himself the right to make the legal decision in that regard.

Oracle’s challenge of Google in court over copyrights was an unusual tactic being watched intently in Silicon Valley.

In the fast-paced land of Internet innovation, it has been common for software writers to put their own spins on APIs that mini-programs use to “talk” to one another.

Oracle argued, to a degree, that it held copyrights to how the APIs worked even if different strings of code were used to orchestrate the tasks.

“When there is only one way to express an idea or function, then everyone is free to do so and no one can monopolize that expression,” Alsup said in his ruling.

“So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API.”

Oracle accused Google of infringing on Java computer programming language patents and copyrights Oracle obtained when it bought Java inventor Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion deal in 2009.

Google denied the claims and said it believes mobile phone makers and other users of its open-source Android operating system are entitled to use the Java technology in dispute.

Google unveiled the free Android operating system two years before Oracle bought Sun.

Jurors, and now the judge, have sided with Google in the case.

“The court’s decision upholds the principle that open and interoperable computer languages form an essential basis for software development,” Google said in an email response to an AFP inquiry.

“It’s a good day for collaboration and innovation.”

Oracle criticized Alsup’s ruling and vowed to appeal.

“Oracle is committed to the protection of Java as both a valuable development platform and a valuable intellectual property asset,” spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said in an email statement.

“It will vigorously pursue an appeal of this decision in order to maintain that protection.”

Hellinger contended that Alsup’s ruling undermines “protection for innovation and invention” in the United States.

Alsup was careful to narrow his ruling to the 37 APIs at issue in Oracle’s lawsuit against Google.

“This order does not hold that Java API packages are free for all to use without license,” Alsup said in a written conclusion to his 41-page decision.

“It does not hold that the structure, sequence and organization of all computer programs may be stolen,” he continued.

“Rather, it holds on the specific facts of this case, the particular elements replicated by Google were free for all to use under the Copyright Act.”

In a unanimous decision last week, 10 jurors agreed that Oracle had failed to prove its claims that Google infringed on Java software patents in Android operating software for smartphones and tablet computers.

Oracle had been seeking billions of dollars in damages from Google based on the copyright and patent claims.

The outcome of the trial leaves California-based Oracle eligible for a relative pittance in damages based jurors finding that it misused nine lines of Java code in Android in an inconsequential win for Oracle.

interaksyon.com

US authorities hit Megaupload with more charges

WASHINGTON — The US authorities have filed additional copyright infringement and fraud charges against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and other employees of the file-sharing site shut down last month.

The Justice Department said Friday that the new charges were added to the original indictment against Megaupload unsealed by a Virginia court on January 19.

The department said the superseding indictment also provides further evidence that Megaupload was engaged in massive piracy by facilitating downloads of copyrighted works.

While Megaupload claimed more than 180 million registered users, the site actually only had 66.6 million registered users, it said.

And of the total users, only 5.86 million had ever uploaded a single file to either Megaupload.com or Megavideo.com, the department said, demonstrating that more than 90 percent of Megaupload’s users only used the site to download.

The indictment also said that Megaupload never took action against one user, identified only as “VV,” who had been singled out as a repeat copyright infringer over a six-year period.

“VV” allegedly uploaded 16,950 files to Megavideo.com and Megaupload.com, which generated more than 34 million views, including copies of copyrighted movies such as “Ocean’s Thirteen,” “Ratatouille” and “Evan Almighty.”

“Internal records reflect no deletions of any of VV’s uploaded files,” the Justice Department said.

The superseding indictment also listed additional assets subject to forfeiture including property, bank accounts, jet skis, jewelry and watches.

According to the Justice Department, five of the seven people charged have been arrested, including Dotcom, who is being held in New Zealand, and at least $50 million in assets has been seized.

Megaupload is the most high-profile target to date of a US campaign which has seen the seizure of hundreds of sites accused of offering pirated music or movies or counterfeit goods.

source: interaksyon.com

Wikipedia, Google blackout sites to protest SOPA

Three of the Internet's most popular destinations--Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist--launched an audacious experiment in political activism this evening by urging their users to protest a pair of Hollywood-backed copyright laws.

Wikipedia's English-language pages went completely black at 9 p.m. PT, with a splash page saying "the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet." The online encyclopedia's blackout, intended to precede next week's Senate floor vote on the legislation, is scheduled to last 24 hours.

Craigslist and Google have taken a more modest approach. Unlike Wikipedia, the sites will remain online during Wednesday's virtual protest, but the home pages now feature exhortations to contact members of Congress and urge them to vote against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate version called Protect IP. Craiglist's snarky note: "Corporate paymasters, KEEP THOSE CLAMMY HANDS OFF THE INTERNET!" (See CNET's FAQ on the topic.)

It's a novel experiment in grassroots-outreach-by-the-millions that could, if successful, derail SOPA and Protect IP, which have come under increasing criticism since last fall. Their authors -- Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) -- responded in the last week by offering some changes. But Smith said in a statement today that, one way or another, a House committee vote will be held in February.

CNET predicted the protest in a December 29 article that said opponents of the bills may "simultaneously turn" their home pages "black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress."

This is "classic Hollywood trying to do heavy handed legislation to protect its business interests," Casey Rae-Hunter, deputy director of the Future of Music Coalition, told reporters this morning.

Among the other Web sites that, in one way or another, have joined the blackout: Metafilter, the Consumer Electronics Association, BoingBoing, OpenDNS, WordPress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and what is almost certainly the Internet's most popular dinosaur comic strip. Some physical protests are also planned tomorrow.

Because Web companies are typically reluctant to involve their users in political spats, nothing exactly like today's protest has ever been tried before, and it's difficult to predict how it will affect Congress' willingness to proceed. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indicated on Sunday that he expected the floor vote on Protect IP to happen as scheduled.

But Google.com is the most popular Web site in the world, according to Alexa, with about half of global Internet users visiting it per day -- meaning that if only a small percent sign the company's petition against SOPA and Protect IP, the total number of voters lodging protests could be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. (Google pointedly refrained from asking its users to call the U.S. Capitol's switchboard at (202) 224-3121 , which likely would have overwhelmed the system within minutes.)

In a blog post this evening, Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, predicted that Protect IP and SOPA "will censor the Web," "risk our industry's track record of innovation and job creation," and ultimately be unsuccessful in curbing piracy.

SOPA, of course, represents the latest effort from the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and their allies to counter what they view as rampant piracy on the Internet, especially offshore Web sites. It would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to be served on search engines, Internet service providers, and other companies, forcing them to make a suspected piratical Web site effectively vanish. It's opposed (PDF) by many Internet companies, users, and civil liberties groups.

Some Internet companies including Facebook, Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo have expressed concerns about the bill but have not said they would join the blackout. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo wrote that "closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish."

In one early sign that the blackouts and protests are having an effect, the MPAA today characterized them as "stunts." The group's chairman, Chris Dodd, took a thinly veiled swipe at Wikipedia by denouncing the protests as "an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on [the sites] for information and [who] use their services." News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter to offer similar thoughts.

Tomorrow's protest was originally designed to coincide with a hearing that SOPA foe Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had scheduled on the measure's technical aspects, especially the portions relating to Domain Name System, or DNS, blocking. Issa said over the weekend that the Republican leadership had promised him that a floor vote would not happen "unless there is consensus on the bill," a rather implausible scenario. As a result, Issa postponed the hearing.

"There's a lot of sort of technologically ignorant language in" SOPA and Protect IP, said Erik Martin, general manager of Reddit, which has become a focal point of anti-SOPA activism and can probably claim credit for convincing GoDaddy to flip-flop on the legislation. Both bills, he said, were "done without a lot of thought about the impact and the execution and without a lot of knowledge technically about how the Internet operates."

Mozilla will join the protest at 5 a.m. PT (8 a.m. ET) tomorrow in what it's calling a "virtual strike" against SOPA and Protect IP. It will black out the default start page for Firefox users and ask them to take action.

"SOPA makes all of us potential criminals if we don't become the enforcement arm of a new government regulatory and policing structure," Mozilla chairwoman Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post today.

The protest had a few hiccups. For the first 20 minutes or so, Google's initial sign-this-petition Web page delivered this message: "Error: Server Error / The server encountered an error and could not complete your request."

Not all of Wikipedia's pages are blacked out. Entries for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are still visible. More than a few users of the encyclopedia seemed confused.

source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57360754-281/wikipedia-google-blackout-sites-to-protest-sopa/?tag=mncol