Bob Marley Family Loses Case Over Hit Records

Bob Marley's family lost a lawsuit seeking the copyrights to several of the late Jamaican reggae singer's best-known recordings.
U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan said the UMG Recordings unit of Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group is the rightful owner of copyrights to five albums that Marley had recorded between 1973 and 1977 for Island Records.
The albums "Catch a Fire," "Burnin'," "Natty Dread," "Rastaman Vibrations" and "Exodus" were recorded with Marley's band The Wailers. They include some of Marley's best-known songs, including "Get Up, Stand Up," "I Shot the Sheriff," "No Woman, No Cry" and "One Love."
Marley died of cancer in 1981 at age 36.
Friday night's ruling is a defeat for Marley's widow Rita and nine children who had sought to recover millions of dollars in damages over UMG's effort to "exploit" what they called "the quintessential Bob Marley sound recordings."
L. Peter Parcher and Peter Shukat, who are lawyers for the family, did not immediately return calls seeking comment. UMG spokesman Peter LoFrumento said the company is pleased with Cote's ruling.
Marley's family accused UMG of intentionally withholding royalties from their company Fifty-Six Hope Road Music Ltd, and ignoring a 1995 agreement assigning them rights under the original recording agreements, court papers show.
It also accused UMG of failing as required to consult with them on key licensing decisions, including the use of Marley's music as "ringtones" on AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile phones, the papers show.
But Cote concluded that Marley's recordings were "works made for hire" as defined under U.S. copyright law, entitling UMG to be designated the owner of those recordings, for both the initial 28-year copyright terms and for renewals.
"Each of the agreements provided that the sound recordings were the 'absolute property' of Island," Cote wrote. "Whether Marley would have recorded his music even if he had not entered the recording agreements with Island is beside the point."
She added that it was irrelevant that Marley might have maintained artistic control over the recording process. What mattered, she said, was that Island had a contractual "right" to accept or reject what he produced.
Cote also denied the Marley family's request for a ruling upholding its claims over digital downloads, citing ambiguity in a 1992 royalties agreement.
She directed the parties to enter court-supervised settlement talks, and scheduled an October 29 conference.
The case is Fifth-Six Hope Road Music Ltd v. UMG Recordings Inc, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 08-06143.

@'Billboard'

Addiction & Learning: More Than Glutamate and Dopamine

“Addiction is a brain disease,” Alan Leshner declared in Science in 1997. Back then it was dopamine the magical molecule that explained destructive substance use (and before that, tolerance…). Dopamine drove craving, dopamine made pleasurable irresistible, dopamine made addicts chase rewards that existed only in warped neural chemistry.
I am drinking a fine Pinot Grigio as I write those words. Sure, the wine and the taste and pleasure can be reduced to brain chemicals. But does that really explain why I bought this bottle, crystalline, on my wife’s first day back to full time work? Does it explain our “cheers” before dinner, and the memories of other Pinot Grigios with my wife? No, of course not. Craving matters, and deeply so in addiction. But it is not the whole story...

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Daniel Lende @'PLOS'

William Gibson interviewed by Richard Metzger

Victims Fear Unabomber Could Upload His Screeds To Internet 

His manifesto is

HERE 

It is actually a very interesting read

Jean-Luc Godard donates €1K for accused MP3 downloader's defense: "There is no such thing as intellectual property"

 

We should stand up for Assange: Geoffrey Robertson

Jon Stewart is the First “Journalist” To Hold Tony Blair Accountable for His Iraq War Position

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Tony Blair Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com

On yer Jon!!!

Brian Eno describes new album as anthology of 'sound-only movies'

Brian Eno has revealed details of his new album for Warp Records, describing the collaboration with Leo Abrahams and Jon Hopkins as a collection of "sound-only movies". Small Craft on a Milk Sea is apparently an album of improvised electronic music, the product of years of intermittent sessions.

"Mostly the pieces on this album resulted not from 'composition' in the classical sense, but from improvisation," Eno explained. "The improvisations are not attempts to end up with a song, but rather with a landscape, a feeling of a place and perhaps the suggestion of an event. In a sense they deliberately lack 'personality': there is no singer, no narrator, no guide as to what you ought to be feeling."

According to Hopkins, many of the album's "more melodic pieces" were born out of randomness. "Brian [asked] Leo and myself to write down a series of random chords, which he would then write on a white board, along with a number – the number of bars we should stay on that chord for," he said. "Brian would then stand and point to chords at random, not knowing how (and if) they will link to each other, and Leo and I would lay down parts in the corresponding keys for the written number of bars."

These are the first substantive comments on the music of Small Craft, due for release on 15 November. Previously, Eno had only detailed the album's deluxe editions and paper stock. This week's description is rather more personal, with Eno recalling his experience of hearing Federico Fellini soundtracks before seeing the films. "Listening to [Nino Rota's music] I found I could imagine a whole movie in advance, and though it usually turned out to be nothing much like Fellini's version, it left me with the idea that a music which left itself in some way unresolved engaged the listener in a particularly creative way," he wrote.

Eno has tried to recapture this feeling with Abrahams and Hopkins, "gifted young player/composers whose work, like mine, is intimately connected to the possibilities and freedoms of electronic music". They created the album "over the last few years" – though Hopkins and Abraham have been making music together since they were teenagers.

"In the absence of [a] film," Eno said, soundtracks "[invite] you, the listener, to complete them in your mind. If you [haven't] even seen the film, the music [remains] evocative – like the lingering perfume of somebody who's just left a room you've entered." Small Craft on a Milk Sea, perhaps, will be the perfume of a film that never even was.

Sean Michaels @'The Guardian'

Privacy Tool for Iranian Activists Disabled After Security Holes Exposed

A highly lauded privacy tool designed to help Iranian activists circumvent state spying and censorship has been disabled after an independent researcher discovered security vulnerabilities in the system that could potentially expose the identities of anonymous users.

Users have been instructed to destroy all copies of the software, known as Haystack, and the developers have now vowed to obtain a third-party audit of the code and release most of it as open source before distributing anything to activists again.

Haystack is designed to encrypt a user’s traffic and also obfuscate it by using steganography-like techniques to hide it within innocuous or state-approved traffic, making it harder to filter and block the traffic. Despite its nascent status, Haystack got widespread media attention, including from Newsweek recently.

The tool is still in development, but an initial diagnostic version was being used by “a few dozen” activists in Iran when security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, a U.S. volunteer with WikiLeaks, discovered vulnerabilities in the source code and implementation of the system that could potentially place the lives of activists at risk.

Austin Heap, one of the tool’s developers, has faced sharp criticism from Appelbaum and others for failing to vet the tool with security professionals before distributing it for use. The media have also been criticized for failing to properly examine the system before praising it as an option for activists.

“The more I have learned about the system, the worse it has gotten,” Appelbaum said. “Even if they turn Haystack off, if people try to use it, it still presents a risk…. It would be possible for an adversary to specifically pinpoint individual users of Haystack.”

Heap told Threat Level that distribution of the test program had been highly controlled among a small group of select users, and that all of the participants, except one, had been informed beforehand that there were potential risks in using software that was still in development...

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Kim Zetter @'Wired'

New DJ Shadow Trax - Free Download for 24 hours

DrSamuelJohnson The Goodfolk of Hampstead are safe now Hemp-haz'd Hellenic Highwayman Mister George MICHAEL goes unto Prison

News of the World may face torrent of litigation over phone hacking

Oxford scientist calls for research on brain change

 

Scientists believe it is too early to know whether modern technology's effect on the brain is a cause for concern. Photograph: Science photo library

Lady Greenfield reignited the debate over modern technology and its impact on the brain today by claiming the issue could pose the greatest threat to humanity after climate change.

The Oxford University researcher called on the government and private companies to join forces and thoroughly investigate the effects that computer games, the internet and social networking sites such as Twitter may have on the brain.

Lady Greenfield has coined the term "mind change" to describe differences that arise in the brain as a result of spending long periods of time on a computer. Many scientists believe it is too early to know whether these changes are a cause for concern.

"We need to recognise this is an issue rather than sweeping it under the carpet," Greenfield said. "We should acknowledge that it is bringing an unprecedented change in our lives and we have to work out whether it is for good or bad."

Everything we do causes changes in the brain and the things we do a lot are most likely to cause long term changes. What is unclear is how modern technology influences the brain and the consequences this has.

"For me, this is almost as important as climate change," said Greenfield. "Whilst of course it doesn't threaten the existence of the planet like climate change, I think the quality of our existence is threatened and the kind of people we might be in the future."

Lady Greenfield was talking at the British Science Festival in Birmingham before a speech at the Tory party conference next month. She said possible benefits of modern technology included higher IQ and faster processing of information, but using internet search engines to find facts may affect people's ability to learn. Computer games in which characters get multiple lives might even foster recklessness, she said.

"We have got to be very careful about what price we are paying, that the things that are being lost don't outweigh the things gained," Greenfield said. "Every single parent I have spoken to so far is concerned. I have yet to find a parent who says 'I am really pleased that my kid is spending so much time in front of the computer'."

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London and co-author of the book The Learning Brain, agreed that more research was needed to know whether technology was causing significant changes in the brain. "We know nothing at all about how the developing brain is being influenced by video games or social networking and so on.

"We can only really know how seriously to take this issue once the research starts to produce data. So far, most of the research on how video games affect the brain has been done with adult participants and, perhaps surprisingly, has mostly shown positive effects of gaming on many cognitive abilities," she said.

Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University in Massachusetts and author of Proust and the Squid, said that brain circuits honed by reading books and thinking about their content could be lost as people spend more time on computers.

"It takes time to think deeply about information and we are becoming accustomed to moving on to the next distraction. I worry that the circuits that give us deep reading abilities will atrophy in adults and not be properly formed in the young," she said.

Ian Sample @'The Guardian'

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