Broadcast Music Inc. settled with a Louisiana restaurant over its alleged infringement of songs in BMI’s repertory, said documents filed in U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge Tuesday. Papi’s Mexican Cuisine allegedly failed to license songs played there, which included the works of Van Morrison and Vince Gill. BMI was joined by other plaintiffs including Universal Music and Praxis International Communications. Papi’s will make regular payments to the plaintiffs through Feb. 15, 2016, said the documents in docket 3:14-cv-758. Papi's didn't comment.
Zenbu Magazines filed four lawsuits seeking class-action certification against Apple, Google, Rdio and Sony, claiming the defendants failed to pay performance royalties on pre-1972 sound recordings, according to court documents filed last week. Zenbu, which owns the sound recordings of several songs by The Flying Burrito Brothers, Hot Tuna and New Riders of the Purple Sage, filed the suits in the U.S. District Court for Northern California. “Sony profits from its unauthorized reproduction, distribution, and public performance of pre-1972 recordings by charging subscription fees to its users, without paying royalties or licensing fees for pre-1972 recordings,” Zenbu’s complaint against Sony said. Zenbu said in each of the complaints that the value of the recordings in question exceeds $5 million but that an exact value hasn’t been determined. The defendants didn’t comment. California courts have recently ruled in favor of artists on the issue of a performance right for such sound recordings (see 1410160001). U.S. District Court in Los Angeles Judge Philip Gutierrez and Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mary Strobel ruled against SiriusXM on pre-1972 recordings in 2014 (see 1409240079 and 1410090092). The plaintiffs in the SiriusXM case, Flo & Eddie, are also seeking class-action certification in the U.S. District Court for New York on the performance right for pre-1972 sound recordings (see 1501160053). Public performance royalties are expected to play a key role in music licensing debates this Congress.
Some groups were disappointed that investigative journalist Barrett Brown was sentenced on Thursday to 63 months in prison and ordered to pay $890,000 in restitution for hyperlinking to illegally obtained documents on the Internet. U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay in Dallas sentenced Brown to serve 63 months. Brown will have to serve only 32 months in prison, as he has already been in prison for 31 months. Kevin Gallagher, director of the Free Barrett Brown campaign, said in a statement that he was disappointed with the sentencing, since Brown’s case sets a precedent that “if you share a link to publicly available material without knowing what’s in it -- maybe it could contain stolen credit card info -- you could be prosecuted.” An Electronic Frontier Foundation statement said it also was disappointed and encouraged the public to continue to fight for transparency. In his sentencing statement, Brown also encouraged the public to understand the privacy, transparency and free speech issues at play in his case. In 2011, Brown, who reported for The Guardian, Huffington Post and Vanity Fair, founded Project PM. It’s a “think-tank which researches and reports on matters related to the intelligence contracting industry” that allows the public to review documents for journalistic and transparency purposes, said Free Barrett Brown. It said Brown was taken into custody for linking to, and therefore publicizing, documents that he received from online hacktivist groups. Brown and supporters argued the emails included proof that there were ongoing discussions at government contractor HBGary to assassinate certain individuals and silence groups of individuals including journalists, political groups and foreign leaders. The government said it was concerned with the privacy violations that stemmed from the release of the emails, since they contained tens of thousands of credit card numbers and their verification codes. Brown originally was charged on 12 counts, including aggravated identity theft. Brown and supporters argued that in the interest of having a transparent government, journalists should be allowed to hyperlink their stories to documents that are of interest to the public, even if the documents were illegally obtained before they were given to the journalist. In March, the U.S. government dropped 11 of the hyperlinking charges against Brown. A month later, Brown signed a plea agreement reducing the remaining charges against him to three, and pled guilty to being an accessory to the unauthorized access of computers of another government contractor, Stratfor.
A nationwide lawsuit accusing Google and Viacom of illegally tracking children under the age of 13 who visited the Nickelodeon website to watch videos and play videogames was dismissed Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Stanley Chesler in Newark, New Jersey. “Children do indeed warrant special attention and heightened protections under our laws,” said Chesler. But he said that there's no evidence that the children's privacy was violated by either company as established under the U.S. Video Privacy Protection Act, nor is there evidence that either company engaged in “highly offensive” behavior when it came to tracking the children for advertising purposes.
Fox Networks emphasized that the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ruled (see 1501210056) that Dish Network breached its contract with Fox Networks with its Sling and Hopper Transfers features. Fox said in a statement Tuesday that Dish also was found to have infringed Fox’s copyrights and breached its contract by making unauthorized copies of Fox programming with its AutoHop feature, which lets customers skip commercials on programming they record. “While we are still disappointed the court felt that PrimeTime Anytime and AutoHop do not violate our copyrights or contract, Dish has been largely disabling AutoHop anyway,” said Fox. This case doesn’t involve consumer rights or new technology, but “protecting creative works from being exploited without permission,” Fox said. Dish didn’t have an immediate comment.
The Department of Justice asked the U.S. District Court in San Francisco to dismiss Twitter’s lawsuit against it for refusing the social media company’s request to release a redacted transparency report, according to court documents filed Friday. Twitter sued the FBI and Justice Department in October, asking the court to let it release the “actual scope of surveillance of Twitter users by the U.S. government,” a company blog post said (see 1410080057). “The additional material that Twitter seeks to publish is information that the Government has judged is properly protected classified national security information, the disclosure of which would risk serious harm to national security,” said DOJ's Friday filing. “The law is clear that the First Amendment does not permit such publication, and any restrictions imposed by statutory authority or judicial order on the publication of classified information are lawful under the First Amendment, both on their face and as they may have been applied to Twitter." Twitter didn’t comment. The case number is 14-cv-4480.
Former Department of Health and Human Services cybersecurity official Timothy DeFoggi received a 25-year prison sentence for his conviction on child pornography charges, the Department of Justice said Monday. DeFoggi, 56, was convicted in August on the charges, which stemmed from his use of a Tor-network-based child pornography website. The site was one of three the FBI shuttered in a December 2012 sting (see 1408270094). “DeFoggi attempted to sexually exploit children and traffic in child pornography through an anonymous computer network of child predators,” said Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell in a news release. “But dangerous criminals cannot be allowed to operate on-line with impunity. Today’s sentence shows that the Department of Justice will bring criminals and child predators to justice, even when they employ anonymous networks like Tor.”
Apple’s allotment of onboard storage for consumer use on mobile devices is under fire in a class-action lawsuit brought in Northern California District Court in San Jose over what plaintiffs Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara, of Miami, call “storage capacity misrepresentations and omissions” about iOS 8. The complaint charges Apple with failing to disclose to consumers that as much as 23.1 percent of the advertised storage capacity of 8 and 16 GB iPhones, iPads and iPods will be consumed by iOS 8 and “unavailable for consumers” who buy the devices with iOS 8 installed. The suit cites the “marked discrepancy” between the devices' advertised capacity and available capacity, as the OS and other storage space unavailable to consumers consume "an extraordinary percentage” of the devices’ “limited storage capacity.” The complaint also says harm to consumers is compounded by the way Apple “aggressively markets” the fee-based iCloud storage system using “sharp business tactics” that involve offering to sell cloud capacity “in a desperate moment” such as when a consumer is trying to record an important event. “Each gigabyte of storage Apple shortchanges its customers amounts to approximately 400-500 high resolution photographs,” lawyers for the plaintiffs maintain. The suit says Apple’s advertisements of capacity are “deceptive and misleading” because they omit facts a consumer might consider when evaluating a product for purchase, including that as much as 3.7 GB of a 16 GB device is not available to the buyer for content storage. More than 20 percent of an iPhone 6+ with iOS 8 pre-installed is not available for consumer file storage, the suit says. The claimants also charge “misrepresentations” to device owners with predecessor operating systems who aren’t told that upgrading from iOS 7 to iOS 8 will cost a device 600 MB to 1.3 GB of storage space, “a result that no consumer could reasonably anticipate.” An Apple spokeswoman told us the company had no comment on the lawsuit. She referred us to the Apple website where the company offers iOS users 5 GB of iCloud storage for free and noted that the total user storage available to users -- on a device plus free iCloud storage -- exceeds the amount of storage the claimants said was unavailable to users.
The FCC’s ruling that confidential programming contract and retransmission consent deal information would be available to parties involved in the AT&T/DirecTV and Comcast/Time Warner Cable transactions is “an abrupt and unexplained departure” from its prior policy, said content companies Monday in their initial brief on the matter before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The FCC “disregarded its own past practice, judicial precedent, and the rights of entities like Petitioners,” said CBS, Univision, Viacom and the other programmers involved in the petition for review. The content companies want the court to vacate the portion of the Media Bureau’s Modified Confidentiality Orders that would make Video Programming Confidential Information available to parties to the mergers. Because of the scale of the deals, access to the contracts those companies are involved in would give the parties involved access to contract information “covering most of the major television markets in the United States,” NAB said Monday in an intervenor brief filed in support of the content companies. “The sheer size of the merging parties and the scope of their agreements exacerbate the risk of harm from disclosure to third parties of broadcasters’ negotiating strategies and contract terms with the five affected” multichannel video programming distributors, NAB said.
Attorneys of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht asked the U.S. District Court in New York to bar any evidence of the defendant’s alleged attempts to pay for the murders of six people, said court documents filed Wednesday. They said the U.S. government “acknowledges” that the alleged murders for hire didn’t result in “any homicide or even violent behavior” and that such evidence is “irrelevant and/or unfairly prejudicial” to Ulbricht. Judge Katherine Forrest rejected in July Ulbricht’s motion to have all criminal charges against him dismissed, including the continuing criminal enterprise or “kingpin” statute (see 1407110074). Ulbricht's Silk Road site is alleged to have served as an online market for the sale of illegal drugs and other black market items.