News Tidbits — week of Mon., June 22
News Tidbits — week of Mon., June 22
News Tidbits — week of Mon., June 22

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    Monday, June 22nd

    Addressing the French Parliament at Versailles, President Sarkozy announced his plan to “go all the way” in defense of the proposed 3-strikes HADOPI legislation that was deemed unconstitutional by the France’s Constitutional Council earlier this month. The legislation proposes kicking copyright infringers off the Internet for a year after receiving three warnings for infringing behavior.

    Tuesday, June 23rd

    Federal appeals court judge Richard Posner has a new idea for how to save the newspaper industry: tighten copyright law to “bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials”. Posner explains that the greatest threat to newspapers is free-riding aggregators that link to other stories and place advertisements on their website, profiting from the diligent, expensive news gathering of legitimate news agencies.

    Wednesday, June 24th

    A German court has ordered file-hosting service Rapidshare to filter for infringement and keep certain songs off its site. The decision puts the burden of determining infringing content on Rapidshare.

    In response to the Jammie Thomas Rasset ruling, long-time RIAA critic Moby called for the disbanding of the Association. More surprisingly, however, Richard Marx, one of the artists Rasset supposedly shared, has come out against the ruling, saying that “this show of force posing as judicial come-uppance is clearly abusive.”

    EA CEO John Riccitiello’s response to The Sims 3 leak came as a surprise to many. Going beyond optimism, he encourages people to “please pirate” and forging a new business model on money spent within the game, not on the game itself.

    Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls explained on her blog how she makes money on twitter. Despite having made absolutely no money from 30,000 record sales off her recent major-label solo album, she made $19,000 just this month using twitter.

    Thursday, June 25th

    Connecticut town New Milford refuses to pay bills sent by BMI and SESAC for $3,000 and $1,500 respectively. Town Council member Robert Guendelsberger says that he “[doesn’t] care if the amount of the money is decreased. I still don’t believe they are entitled to extract a fee from the town when we are a not-for-profit municipality. ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC would all like to collect royalties on music played in the local town center.

    A Swedish appellate court decided that the judge in the Pirate Bay case unbiased and denied retrial.

    Friday, June 26th

    AT&T handed Adam Savage of Mythbusters a huge bill—$11,000 to be exact—for surfing the web and downloading a supposed 9 gigabytes of data while on roaming in Canada.