Clear Channel Radio Under Fire
Clear Channel Communications, the radio industry's 900-lb gorilla, may be getting too big for its britches.
Clear Channel Settles Lawsuit
Clear Channel Communications, Inc. has settled the first of what could be a long string of lawsuits over its purportedly monopolistic marketing tactics.
Clinton Signs Repeal of "Works for Hire" Law
Artists' groups are celebrating what they hope will be more than a symbolic victory over the recording industry in the wake of legislation signed by President Clinton the last week of October. Known as "The Works Made for Hire and Copyright Corrections Act," the repeal negates a provision that was inserted into last year's "Satellite Home Viewer Act" at the insistence of the Recording">http://www.riaa.com/">Recording Industry Association of America, designating musical recordings as "works for hire." Such a designation catergorizes a musical recording as a commodity that can be purchased at a fixed price, such as a table built by a furniture craftsman, rather than as a performance subject to syndication and royalty fees.
Closing the Analog Hole
On December 16, Congressmen James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and John Conyers (D-MI) introduced HR">http://static.publicknowledge.org/pdf/HR-4569-DTCSA-Analog-Hole.pdf">HR 4569, a bill "to require certain analog conversion devices to preserve digital content security measures"—in other words, to mandate that electronic devices and software manufactured after a yet-to-be-specified date respond to a copy protection system or watermark embedded in a video signal and pass that along when converting the signal to analog or vice versa. It also mandates copy protection for analog signals. This is referred to as "plugging the analog hole," since analog signals, even those converted from protected high-definition digital sources, are currently "in the clear" or open for copying. (Standard-definition signals can be protected by systems like Macrovision, but no such protection exists for high-definition signals.)
Coming Soon Down Under: Copy Kiosks
The copy cat will soon be out of the bag down under. Australia's musical copyright society has reluctantly agreed to the deployment of CD-copying kiosks throughout the nation in exchange for what an Australian news site calls "a modest royalty payment" of about 6% of the $5AUS copying fee—or 30¢ per disc.
Coming Soon: Napster II: The Undead
Napster may rise from the dead and live again, this time as a commercial venture.
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Common CD Compatibility Complaint Conquered?
Recently, the Optical">www.osta.org">Optical Storage Technology Association (OSTA) announced the release of a new CD compatibility specification called "MultiPlay"">www.osta.org/multiplay">MultiPlay" for the computer and consumer electronics industries. OSTA says that the new specification is intended to ensure that Compact Disc Recordable (CD-R) and Compact Disc ReWritable (CD-RW) discs created on personal computers can also be played in consumer CD and DVD players.
Company Introduces the first Artificial Intelligence Beatle
Need proof that baby boomers and their attendant interests are having an effect on the frontiers of computer research? Look no further than Triumph PC Online's announcement that it has introduced The">http://www.triumphpc.com/john-lennon">The John Lennon Artificial Intelligence Project (JLAIP), the first AI-based clone of the late Beatle. The project, initially titled The Plastic Digital Karma Project, has been under development for two years.
Compression 101
We were taking our morning constitutional around the Interwebs one day last week when we happened upon an article on Timesonline titled "Why">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music… Music Really Is Getting Louder". Oh boy, we thought, a mainstream outlet is catching on to the whole issue of dynamic compression—a subject we have inveighed against repeatedly over the years. (JA first preached that particular sermon back in 1999http://stereophile.com/asweseeit/177/">1999;.)