Court rules that Pandora won't pay higher royalties to songwriters

Pandora has been fighting tooth and nail against potential songwriting royalty increases, and it appears that this tenacity is largely paying off. A court has ruled that the streaming radio service should pay the same 1.85 percent royalty rate that it has paid for years, resisting both Pandora's call for 1.7 percent (like traditional radio) and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers' (ASCAP) demand for 3 percent. Details of the ruling are under a court seal, so the motivations behind the decision aren't yet clear. However, ASCAP is more than a little upset by its loss; it sees the verdict as proof that full-scale licensing reform is necessary to "reflect the realities" of modern music. Whether or not that's true, the Society may have inadvertently sabotaged its own case. It pointed to iTunes Radio's higher royalty rate as a model for fair compensation, but Apple is willing to make little to no profit from its music services -- ASCAP may have unintentionally suggested that its proposal wasn't realistic.

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Via: Billboard

Source: ASCAP

More Coverage: Wall Street Journal

Tags: ascap, internet, internetradio, mobilepostcross, music, pandora, radio, royalty, ruling, songwriter, streaming Next: Torrent front end Popcorn Time made streaming movies free and easy, so of course it's gone .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Nokia ordered by Indian Supreme Court to pay more to get factory returned

35 billion ($571 million) before the Indian government transfer the manufacturing facility to Microsoft.

This ruling rejects Nokia’s appeal the India’s high court, comes less than two weeks after Nokia escalated its tax dispute and after the company already set aside

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California Court Rules In Favor Of Using Cellphone Maps While Driving

Good news, Californians. You can now, once again, use Google Maps on your phone while driving. That is, legally. Until this court ruling, map use was in a shady legal gray area.

This comes two years after a Fresno, Calif., man was ticketed for looking at a map on his iPhone while stuck in construction. He was looking for an alternative route. As you do. The cop issued the $165 ticket under a law that prohibits listening and talking on cellphones while driving.

The man thankfully challenged the law and won.

The 5th District Court of Appeal reversed the ticket on the ground that the law specifically limits the use of “listening and talking” without the use of a hands-free device, but does not apply to other uses of the phone.

Next up, Californian man challenges traffic ticket issued for playing Threes while driving.

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Court Decision Could Change Rules for Online Price Comparisons

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FISA court reauthorizes NSA to collect call metadata (again)

Need another sign that the NSA's phone surveillance program is considered legal? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is happy to oblige. This week FISA renewed the agencies' authority to collect call metadata, echoing an October approval from the same court. That's actually standard -- the program needs to be reassessed every 90 days, but typically the authorizations fly under the radar. This time around, the Director of National Intelligence declassified the action "in order to provide the public with a more thorough and balanced understanding of the program."

Even so, its not giving detractors any ground: the announcement also reasserts the program's legality, citing the "holdings of the United States District Courts of the Southern District of New York and Southern District of California, as well as the findings of 15 judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on 36 separate occasions over the last seven years." The statement at least closes on an amicable note, promising to be open to tweaking the program in ways that "achieve our counterterrorism mission in a manner that gives the American people greater confidence." Check out the full statement at the source link below.

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Via: Huffington Post

Source: Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Tags: fisa, metadata, nsa, ODNI, prism, transparency, verizon Next: Billboard: Digital music sales decrease for the first time ever, vinyl continues to grow .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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The ACLU Will Appeal Court Decision Declaring The NSA’s Phone Metadata Program Legal

In an expected move, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today announced that it would appeal the dismissal of its case relating to the National Security Agency’s telephony metadata program. Recently, US District Judge William Pauley III ruled that the program was constitutional.

The case in question, ACLU v. Clapper, was set back by Judge Pauley III who invoked past terror attacks as reason for the metadata program’s existence, and argued that protections under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were stiff enough to protect constitutional rights.

The ACLU disagrees, and in a statement claimed that “the NSA’s call-tracking program violates both statutory law and the Constitution.”

There have been two legal decisions of note thus far regarding the NSA’s surveillance programs and their relation to the rights of American citizens. The first ruling, Judge Richard Leon indicated that the metadata program was likely unconstitutional. The second, and the one under new appeal by the ACLU, came to the precise opposite conclusion.

The Pauley III decision contains a piece of argument that I find, as have hosts of others, particularly troubling.

Regarding the statutory arguments, there is another level of absurdity in this case. The ACLU would never have learned about the section 215 order authorizing collection of telephony metadata related to its telephone numbers but for the unauthorized disclosures by Edward Snowden. Congress did not intend that targets of section 215 orders would ever learn of them. And the statutory scheme also makes clear that Congress intended to preclude suits by targets even if they discovered the section 215 orders implicating them. It cannot possibly be that lawbreaking conduct by a government contractor that reveals state secrets – including the means and methods of intelligence gathering – could frustrate Congress’s intent. To hold otherwise would spawn mischief: recipients of orders would be subject to section 215′s secrecy protocol confining challenges to the FISC, while targets could sue in any federal district court. A target’s awareness of section 2015 orders does not alter the Congressional calculus. The ACLU’s statutory claim must therefore be dismissed.

The argument that if a party learns of potential government abuse via a leak there should be no legal recourse for them due to the source of the information is unsettling, in my view. This case is therefore more broad in its impact than the fate of a single NSA program.

The ACLU hopes that the Second Circuit of Appeals “will set an expedited briefing schedule and that it will hear oral argument in the spring

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Google Street View case headed to court (again)

It's good news, bad news for Google. A federal appeals court agrees to rehear the Street View case but also affirms its earlier ruling that tech giant violated wiretap laws when collecting data for Street View.

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