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Earth to Ofcom: They’re our airwaves. Give us them back
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Andrew Orlowski
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Sometimes Ofcom, Britain’s media and telecomms uber-regulator, likes to agonise in public whether Britain needs a media and telecomms uber-regulator. It must feel like a stag night in SE1, as the executives fly in expensive blue-sky wonks and consultants, and Ofcom gets quite giddy with itself at the prospect of a world without Ofcom. Then…
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Billy Bragg: Why should songwriters starve so others get rich?
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Billy Bragg interviewed. With audio, it’s all here.… Read More
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Anti-trust looms over major labels legal blitz
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is embroiled in a legal fight against the recording business – and not for the first time. His MP3Tunes locker service has raised the ire of EMI in a case that continues this week. But isn’t it weird, he asks, how the Big Four divvy up the litigation against music start-ups…
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Right idea, wrong time: Snocap’s corpse washes up at Imeem
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Andrew Orlowski
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Timing is everything in business, and having a visionary idea too early can prove fatal. So it is with Shawn Fanning’s Snocap, which has formally announced today that it’s being acquired by Imeem. Or what’s left of it – most Snocap employees were laid off last year, with Fanning long gone. Snocap was created to…
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So is sharing a folder copyright infringement?
by
Andrew Orlowski
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A US Judge on Monday upheld the view that sharing copyrighted music is infringement. It’s a defeat for defendant Denise Barker and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a victory for the four record labels in the case, led by Warner’s Elektra. The Copyright Act is fairly clear. It defines “publication” as “offering to distribute copies…
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Creator haters at the LSE
by
Andrew Orlowski
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“one last fag, then bop, bop, bop” – Wolfie Smith London School of Economics I saw one of the most disturbing of all. If you thought people don’t behave in real life like they do online, think again. Here were all the most unpleasant aspects of online behaviour – ignorance, rudeness, groupthink, and a general…