Buskers beat the Metro ban

Busker in Washington, DC, have had a tough time of it in the last couple of years. Transit police have been moving them on from their pitches with more-than-required firmness.

Also more than legal firmness, too. Alex Young had already faced down the Metro transit authority and had the courts put a stop to the practice; this week he went back to court and won his costs. Which by that time, had got up to USD50,000.

The Metro had made things worse for themselves by trying to argue down the costs:

Jeffrey Louis Light, a private civil rights attorney who represented Young in conjunction with the Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville group that advocates for civil liberties, said Metro’s decision to contest the fees increased them by about $20,000 as the issue was drawn out in court.

“They’re a business,” said Light, who will take home $33,447.10 in the case at hourly rates of up to $661. “They need to make sensible business decisions. This is not one of them.”

Jeffrey had a further burn for the transportation authority:

“They spent time arguing over whether this guy should have his guitar case open, and for what?” he said.

The head of the Metro, Paul J. Wiedefeld, is currently learning the chords from The Boxer in order to cover the costs.

Let's not inflict Wireless on Finsbury Park

Last year's Wireless Festival was a bit of a nightmare. For two weeks, a huge chunk of Finsbury Park was put behind a massive fence. Ironically, this meant local people couldn't use their park, but didn't mean that Festival goers couldn't use the local area.

And use it they did:

The fence of a local school playground had to be wrapped in protective plastic as festival goers were urinating through it while children were in school.

The Friends Of Finsbury Park don't mind the idea of a festival taking place in the park, they just don't want such a huge festival.

They're trying to raise money to bring legal action against their local council:

We want to stop Wireless Festival in Finsbury Park. We understand that council budgets have been slashed so there is less money to spend, but the Park already makes income for the council from smaller events such as the circus and funfairs, and location filming. We’d like Haringey Council to be open and transparent about how much the park costs to run and maintain, what income it generates without large scale events, and work with us to find alternative, more imaginative, streams of income which are more appropriate in type and scale for our wonderful Park, and inclusive of the local community.

You'd have to wish them luck. And maybe throw them a quid or two.

Justin Bieber faces spray-can backlash

Just when Justin Bieber was in the throes of reinvention as a sort-of-sensitive artist, his past catches up with him.

Admittedly, it's only his past from the end of October, so it didn't have very far to travel to catch up with him.

Back then, his people sprayed teasers for his new album all over San Francisco. This sort of thing happens all the time, but unluckily for Biebs, this was the point where the people said that's enough:

The censure doesn't refer to the Nas song mural installed in NorCal, but rather to a slew of permanently stenciled sidewalk-graffiti ads that read "Justin Bieber Purpose #Nov 13." (The tags have survived rainstorms and persisted for nearly two months now, because they were applied with spray paint instead of sidewalk chalk.) "This prohibited marketing practice illegally exploits our City's walkable neighborhoods and robust tourism; intentionally creates visual distractions that pose risks to pedestrians on busy rights of way; and irresponsibly tells our youth that like-minded lawlessness and contempt for public property are condoned and encouraged by its beneficiaries," Dennis Herrera wrote, "including Mr. Bieber and the record labels that produce and promote him."

Bieber could be fined USD2500 for each stencilling, plus the cost of putting things right.

Meek Mill is piss weak

If you're on probation, and have to submit urine samples to convince the court you're keeping to the terms of that probation, handing over cold water instead of piss is probably a stupid idea.

Didn't stop Meek Mill doing it though:

Mill failed check into court every 60 days to have his travel approved, while a urine sample he submitted was in fact reported to be cold water, although Mill says he did not tamper with it.

Yeah. Taking it straight from the tap doesn't make it any better, Meek. The judge isn't annoyed that she thought you'd put it through a Britta Filter.

The Dancing Baby is free to dance

Eight years after a dancing baby created a shitstorm, a Federal Appeals Court has told Universal that it needs to think things through before issuing takedown notices:

Today, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that copyright holders like Universal must consider fair use before trying to remove content from the Internet. It also rejected Universal’s claim that a victim of takedown abuse cannot vindicate her rights if she cannot show actual monetary loss.

“Today’s ruling sends a strong message that copyright law does not authorize thoughtless censorship of lawful speech,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “We’re pleased that the court recognized that ignoring fair use rights makes content holders liable for damages.”

The baby in question danced for a few seconds while a Prince song played in the background. Universal sued with a straight face claiming that this would stop Prince from being able to make a living.

Judge suddenly changes US copyright status on pre-1972 recordings

There's no copyright on recordings made before 1972 in America. Except now there is, as a judge in California has told Sirius that it needs to pay when it plays such recordings.

Sirius aren't happy:

SiriusXM disagreed. "I think everybody should get paid, and I think everybody should pay," David Frear, the company's chief financial officer, said during a banking conference, as quoted in the New York Times. "But to get there, there needs to be a change in the laws. And it shouldn’t be coming from the bench. It should be coming from the legislature."

You might wonder if David Frear really wants to pay everyone why he chose not to pay everyone, but instead fought a legal case to stop paying anyone. 'I really want to pay but think there ought to be a law compelling me to pay' isn't a coherent position.

The record companies - who, rather than musicians, will pocket most of the cash - are happy:

"It's increasingly clear that SiriusXM, Pandora and other digital music firms who refuse to pay legacy artists and rights holders are on the wrong side of history and the law," Cary Sherman, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the labels, said in a statement. "It's time for that to change."

The RIAA are charmers, aren't they? Every time a business finds a way to help them hold onto revenue streams in the 21st Century, rather than work with them, they're there, demanding more and effectively calling those businesses crooks.

If Sherman was ever in an accident and needed a transfusion, you suspect he'd be demanding to know where the blood taken from him was and why he wasn't getting the usual donation fee for it.

Michael Jackson: AEG cleared

The procession following the death of Michael Jackson continues to march grimly forward, yesterday reaching a key point where a jury decided that AEG weren't responsible for killing him by hiring Conrad Murray.

The New York Times reports:

A California jury decided on Wednesday that Michael Jackson’s final concert promoter, A.E.G. Live, was not responsible for the pop star’s death.

After a five-month trial filled with gruesome details of Jackson’s last days, the case came down to basic questions of contractual relationships and the professional competence of Dr. Conrad Murray, the cardiologist who gave Jackson a fatal dose of the anesthetic propofol four years ago.

After deliberating for about 13 hours over four days, the jury of six men and six women agreed with lawyers for Jackson’s 83-year-old mother, Katherine, that A.E.G. Live had hired Dr. Murray. But they rejected arguments that the doctor was unfit to care for Jackson as he prepared for a series of comeback concerts.

It could have cost AEG USD1.5billion if they'd been found to be culpable. (That's roughly the annual GDP of Belize, if you'd like a meaningless but impressive comparison.)

Refreshingly, the jury decided to treat Michael Jackson as a grown-up who made his own poor decisions.

We're now in a curious place, where Murray is serving a sentence for the involuntary manslaughter of Jackson, but has been found fit to practice. The jury think they can make sense of that, though:

"We felt he was competent," [jury foreman Gregg] Barden said. "That doesn’t mean we felt he was ethical. If ethical was in the question, it might have been a different outcome. In the end, he was very unethical. He did something he shouldn’t have done. "

It's not entirely clear if someone who is unethical is fit to practice, but the jury seemed to think that wasokay.

Barden shakes his head sadly, though:

"There are really no winners in this ... Somebody had to die for us to be here.... It was really a tragic situation."

No winners? As the lawyers pack up and move on to Conrad Murray's appeal hearing, they might disagree, were they not struggling with suitcases packed with money.

It's PJP v DWP

PJ Proby was, you might recall, cleared of benefit fraud last year. He's been wondering aloud if the DWP didn't waste a lot of time and money pursuing him:

I was apparently being investigated for seven years before they arrested me in 2007, and then it took another five years to get to court. I wasn’t worried about going to prison.

Far from being worried, Proby had planned ahead to such an extent I think he might have already been working in the prison library:

I’d have coped in prison.

I had it all worked out. I was going to keep prison diaries under the name JL Bird and sell them when I got out.

I was on the verge of telling my secretary to go out and buy me an electric razor to shave my head, ready for prison.

Jesus, I know Group 4 are awful, but surely they don't make you share your own head.

But Proby - at least by his account - has been really ill-served by the DWP. They dropped the charges after finding "a box of evidence" but won't tell him what it was; as a result of all the upheaval Proby lost his home of 13 years:

They threw me out of that house at the trial. I’d rented it for 13 years and didn’t expect to move, but the owner didn’t want tour buses coming by showing everyone where the criminal lived.

I'm not sure they'd have been running tour buses on that basis; and even if they did, I'm not convinced they'd have attracted more visitors than a tour bus to go and look at where trouser-splitting music legend PJ Proby lived.

So, understandably, Proby holds a bit of a grudge against the DWP. Is there any part of the UK state that he's okay with?

I thought the judge and jury could be bought like they can be in America. But I learned so much about English law and I was very impressed by the legal system. They followed protocol and it was handled correctly.

Don't worry. Chris Grayling's working on that.

Ex-HMV man forced to bow to His Ex-Master's Voice

Tony Cregan had been managing HMV in Derry when the brilliant minds who had restructured the chain suddenly realised they didn't know what they were doing and closed the place down.

Cregan, being enterprising, and understanding the local market, reckoned this would be an opportunity, bought an empty retail unit, and opened up a new record shop.

Cheekily, he branded it HVM. (I really wish I could tell you he sent out press releases from Castalro Gennado, but he didn't.)

Were HMV's new owners Hilco delighted to see one of the people they no longer wanted doing well in a market from which they had chosen to withdraw?

Of course not:

In a letter from its legal team it warned Mr Cregan that he was causing confusion in the minds of the public that the business "is associated with or connected with that of our client".

The warning added: "The continued presence in the market of your business operating under the name HVM has caused and will continue to cause substantial damage to our client's reputation and goodwill."

You know what else harms goodwill towards HMV? HMV behaving like asshats. In fact, that probably does far more damage to any feelings of goodwill towards HMV, given that they've come across as humourless and bullying on a national level.

Rather than get into a legal battle, Cregan has simply turned the sign upside down and rebranded as WAH.

Funnily enough, an identical thing happened to a woman who took over a defunct Woolworths.

Pirate Party UK ducks fight with BPI

The Pirate Party UK has closed its proxy access to The Pirate Bay, rather than face a ruinous battle with the major labels.

The decision came after the BPI chose to make its battle personal - rather than attacking the party, the BPI chose to take action against six individual members of the organisation.

Obviously, the BPI is legally within its rights to do this, but it distorts the battle - a well-funded music industry business against private individuals stacks the odds completely in the favour of the business, making it effectively an impossible fight.

Gordon in the morning: Gordon in the limelight

Rather than bothering with Bizarre this morning, instead here's a quick look at a story in MediaGuardian where the fallout from scuttlebutt about Louis Walsh continues.

Last year, The Sun had to apologise to Walsh after admitting its story claiming he was being "probed" over a "sex attack" was total bollocks. It continued to unravel, as the Sun's "source" and claimed victim Leonard Watters was sent to jail.

Walsh, though, still has a burning curiosity about how the story came to be published in The Sun, and on Friday, a Judge in the Irish Republic ordered the paper to hand over all its paperwork:

The judge ruled on Friday that Walsh was entitled to all documents associated with the investigation by the newspaper's crime writer Joanne McElgunn. He also directed that the newspaper should provide all documents identifying or referring to any payments made or offered by the newspaper to Watters and statements of McElgunn's expenses.

The documentation must include the booking of a hotel room for Watters, bank statements, text messages, emails and records of phone calls.

The orders, made by Mr Justice Iarfhlaith O'Neill, also apply to The Sun's editor, Dominic Mohan, its Irish editor Michael McNiff and the editor of its Bizarre column, Gordon Smart.

Still, I'm sure everything will be in order.

Gordon in the morning: Worried for Tulisa

Gordon Smart picks up the keyboard this morning to paint a worrying picture of Tulisa's finances:

TULISA will have to watch her pennies – she faces paying more than £100,000 in legal bills for suing over her leaked sex tape.

The X Factor star has to foot the bill because the people she accused of releasing the clip don’t have that kind of wedge.

Gordon's worried that Tulisa is spending a lot of cash on "top flight lawyers" but might only end up with "a moral victory".

Why, it's almost as if he's keen to try and put a halt to Tulisa's continued pursuit of the people who put the sex tape online, and then attempted to draw an audience to it. But, of course, if Tulisa stopped now we might not get to hear the interesting story of how the tape got noticed by newspapers. I'm sure Gordon wouldn't want us to miss out on that.

Mind you, if the idea is to shake Tulisa by laying out the costs of justice...

..you might want to be a bit more careful with the numbers. More than one hundred pounds, eh?

The British music industry discovers what victory tastes like

How has the battle against The Pirate Bay gone? The BPI's expensive legal blockade might not be a roaring success, according to TorrentFreak:

Yesterday, The Pirate Bay had 12 million more visitors than it has ever had, providing a golden opportunity to educate users on how to circumvent blocks. “We should write a thank you letter to the BPI,” a site insider told TorrentFreak.

Great news, then: in effect, the BPI have spent a small fortune on giving the Pirate Bay a luxurious advertising campaign.

I was amused to spot on Saturday that the BPI share a doorway with the Diana, Princess of Wales memorial fund - the charity which lost a fortune pursuing a pointless battle against a manufacturer of tacky plates. You have to wonder if the two organisations swap legal advice when they bump into each other in the corridors.

German court might just make YouTube, internet unworkable

GEMA, the German rights organisation, has won a significant victory in a case against Google.

In short, the German courts have decided that YouTube is responsible for the content posted on its site, not the individual posting videos, and as such should be paying royalties for any music that winds up there.

BBC News explains what the ruling means:

If enforced, the ruling could also slow the rate at which video is posted to the site as any music clip would have to be cleared for copyright before being used.

With sixty hours of new video hitting the servers every sixty seconds, the "slow the rate" here would mean, in effect, stop video being pushed to YouTube.

It's a silly move for GEMA to seek this sort of judgement, as it won't stop the content being posted online - their pyrrhic victory over Rapidshare shows how all they do is scatter the content - and backs into a corner an organisation which is sort-of-trying to do the right thing.

The obvious move would be for YouTube to just bow out of Germany. And who, exactly, would be better off as a result of that?

I'll bet Pinterest were watching this judgement with, erm, interest.

Musical Youth must pass on The Dutchie

Given that you couldn't move at the time for people pointing out that Pass The Dutchie used to be a song about drugs, the real surprise is that it's taken until 2012 for the legal process to completly decide that it wasn't Musical Youth's song.

After they didn't get any cash when the song was in The Wedding Singer, they tried to sue their solicitors for bad advice. That's failed too.

Of course, this sort of behaviour in court didn't exactly help the case, either:

The artist formerly a Sugababe makes the artists formerly known as The Sugababes

I'm using "artists" in a sarcastic sense, obviously, but you'd expect that, right?

Yes, Mutya Buena has gone to court and won the rights to the Sugababes name, stripping the title from the band that, up until today, had been known as the Sugababes despite not containing any original members of the act.

It's arguable that Mutya doesn't really have any rights to the name, either - it's a bit like a sausage claiming that it owns the trademark Walls, but the court has made its decision.

The band-that-we-cannot-call-the-Sugababes-anymore will have to come up with a new name for their ongoing activities. Which, to be fair, seem to be less about music and more about this sort of thing:

If I were that scummy bloke who stole the Amy Winehouse Foundation name, I'd be registering SugarBabez right now.

Celine Dion: Not that she takes herself too seriously or anything

Celine Dion discovered there was a site called "ridiculous pictures of Celine Dion" and, rather than having a wry smile to herself, or thinking "gosh, yes, my advisors do allow me to appear in a number of stupid photos that make me look ridiculous", she had it closed down.

Thereby making herself look even more ridiculous, and drawing much more attention to the endeavour.

Perhaps the people who let her do those awful photos hugging babies are the same people that suggested a legally-drafted admission of a lack of self-awareness or sense of humour was the way to go with this one.

Meanwhile, here is a photo of a lovely horse:

[Horse under a Creative Commons licence by Freefoto]

Glastonbury 2011: Legal highs and lows

Yesterday, Micheal Eavis was bristly. Well, he's always bristly, what with the beard and all, but mainly he was bristly about the idea of testing Glasto waste water to see what was in it, drug wise.

Today, festival organisers are busily co-operating with police testing produce on sale in the site to see what's in it, drug-wise:

Police spokesman Paul Bunt said: "Because there are so many new drugs, we know very little about them."
[...]
He said it was "essential" festival organizers co-operate with the project, adding there were a number of legal high shops on the Glastonbury site.

The BBC report on this testing of legal highs doesn't quite answer all the questions it raises:

Police at Glastonbury have set up an off-site lab to test "legal highs" seized at the festival.

It comes after a rise in unidentified drugs found at large music events across the UK.

The Forensic Early Warning System allows government scientists to analyse and detect traces of potentially harmful and illegal substances.

Police remove drugs seized at Glastonbury to a laboratory located several miles off site where they are tested, identified and catalogued.

What this doesn't explain is by what right the police are "seizing" substances that, by their own admission, they can't identify.

Yes, there needs to be something done to stop dubious crap being sold in shiny wraps, but letting police look at something, go "dunno what that is" and seize it seems to be an odd process to follow.

[Bunt] said shop owners had worked with police to narrow down the range of merchandise they sold to make sure their products did not contain illegal or harmful substances.

It was a "condition of their entry", he added.

So if the sellers are co-operating, is it just the word "seize" is wrong? It sounds as if the people selling this stuff are as keen to know what it is they're selling as the police are, and are co-operating. Which might be a positive, collaborative way of working. So why frame it as if there's bad guys being thwarted here?

[Part of Glastonbury 2011 full coverage]

RIAA lobbyist now hearing cases of interest to RIAA

There are times when it might be hard to find a judge who is not only impartial, but can be seen, clearly, to be impartial - if, for example, a lawsuit is brought against an ubervillain who planned to kill everyone on the planet, you'd have to have a judge with an interest. Or if Piers Morgan was in the dock, it'd be impossible to find a judge who didn't start from the thought 'let's throw the book at him'.

But usually, it shouldn't be beyond the wit of the justice system to offer have a bottom on the bench who doesn't appear to be tainted in one direction or another.

How, then, are unlicensed file sharing cases being heard in Washington DC by a judge who has made a living lobbying for the RIAA?

Ars Technica suggests that Beryl Howell hasn't strictly broken any rules in hearing the cases, mainly because Howell was paid by the RIAA and the cases she was hearing were related to movies, but given that rulings on .mp4 files can have influence on cases about .mp3 files that seems a slight defence.

There's an important point about perception of the law. Even if Howell is able to hear a case from the copyright industry without recalling that her rent was paid for a while by the copyright industry, her verdicts in this field will always have a shadow on them.

There's no shortage of judges. Couldn't they find one whose judgement isn't open to the suspicion that they're remembering those who helped them on their march to the bench?

[via @simonth]

Judge gently points out to music industry it isn't worth all the music in the world, ever

Judge Kimba Wood, who is hearing the claims for damages against LimeWire for unlicensed filesharing through its network, has told the music industry it needs to be realistic. The Register explains:

In an opinion published ahead of the damages hearings, Judge Kimba Wood revealed that the record companies, seeking statutory damages against the music-sharing service, are seeking damages predicated on the “number of direct infringers per work” – leading to a damages claim of as much as $75 trillion dollars (according to Wikipedia, total global GDP is around $69 trillion”).

“The absurdity of this result is one of the factors that has motivated other courts to reject Plaintiffs’ damages theory”, the judge wrote.

If only everyone took the time to work through the figures and spot that record companies seriosuly oversetimate their losses. Might stop bad laws being made to plug these trillion-pound crimes.