Microsoft, Real, & Yahoo All Sued for Music Store Copyright Infringement

SEOBizNiche — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:35:15 +0000

On Tuesday,Microsoft, Yahoo, and Realwere named in a lawsuit filed by some music publishing companies claiming that each of their online music stores – Zune, Yahoo Music, and Rhapsody – infringe upon their copyrights. If youre shaking your head and wondering how that is possible, with all the royalties they pay out, youre not alone.This copyright business is a real mess. As consumers we know not to illegally download music or share it online, or wecould potentiallyface crazy fines from the RIAA, such as the $1.92 million one recently handed down to Minnesota mom who downloaded 24 songs. For websites and companies looking to distribute or allow the playing of music on their sites, its far more complicated than that and the stakes are incredibly higher. In fact the copyright laws as related to music are so complicated that even places we consider to be legitimate sources are being slapped with lawsuits alledging infringements.

In the case of this latest lawsuit, the publishers claim that all three companies may have licensed the copyrights on the recordings, but didnt license the copyright on the compositions.There are a whole lot of details out yet explaining the legalities and issues at hand in the case, but it is assumedthese music services struck deals with record labels, but somehow the publishers and labels are separate entities and the rights are separate.

In many cases we assume that the publishing rights were also covered by the major record labels. But in some cases the publishing rights were owned by independent companies, and the claim looks to be that the publishing rights were never cleared with them.

What this means is that Microsoft, Yahoo and Real were all streaming music that they only had partial rights too. And since the publishers consider each instance a song is played to be an infringement yikes! They could be looking at some pretty hefty fines if the court agrees.

If youre interested in reading the entire court filing, which I will warn you is a massive 104 pages long, here you go. Have at it. In the meantime, well definitely be following this closely. Any ruling in favor of the music publishers could potentially have major ramifications for all three companies. I imagine that Google right now is pretty darn happy that theyve stayed out the music game, and that their search engine competitors are being tested.

Go to Source

Bing Starts Indexing Twitter Updates, Sort Of

SEOBizNiche — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:35:14 +0000

As real-time search and Twitters growing importance in producing valuable information is getting into the mainstream, Bing is joining the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter in bringing real-time search feature in their respective search algorithms. Starting today, Bing will be integrating more real-time data into its search results, beginning first with tweets of famous people – bloggers or celebrities.While this may be a welcome development, this new feature is somewhat limiting though. To get the tweets of this prominent people, you will have to construct your search terms like – Name Twitter or Name Tweets or @Name, where name is the Twitter account of the person. The thing is how many famous people use their full name as their Twitter username? Or how many users do their search on web search engine just to get these peoples latest Tweets?

It would have been great if Bing (or the other search engines for that matter) will start indexing the Twitter stream and display Tweets along with the other web data that they crawl and display as search results. Thats more like a real-time search, right?

Anyway, this could be a good start though. As the Bing community blog explained via a post:

Were not indexing all of Twitter at this time just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitters public API to surface Tweets in people search. Wed love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search.

Go to Source

SEO BizNiche » Microsoft

Microsoft, Real, & Yahoo All Sued for Music Store Copyright Infringement

Bing Starts Indexing Twitter Updates, Sort Of