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Court nixes individual track downloads of Pink Floyd albums
Posted by: | CommentsIndividual Pink Floyd songs will soon disappear from online music stores. The British High Court has ruled against EMI, the band’s record label, saying that the band’s contract requires EMI to “preserve the artistic integrity of the albums.” In this case, that means keeping all the tracks together and in the order they were meant to be in, leading some to worry whether Pink Floyd’s music will disappear from popular online music stores altogether.
When Pink Floyd signed with EMI back in the late ’60s, its members probably did not imagine an age when we would be ditching physical media en masse in favor of cherry-picked songs on a series of Internet tubes. It’s unsurprising then that the contract stipulated for the label to maintain the artistic integrity of the album itself—back then (and today as well, but perhaps to a lesser degree), musicians spent painstaking amounts of time crafting the entire album as a whole artwork. Those who only listened to select tracks were totally missing out.
Indeed, as EMI has discovered, that still appears to be the case, at least when it comes to Pink Floyd. The High Court ordered EMI to pay £40,000 in court costs with the possibility of future damages and EMI may have to pull Pink Floyd’s individual offerings from places like the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3. (As of this writing, the albums with per-track purchases were still available. Get ‘em while they’re hot.) In addition, EMI must pay Pink Floyd an undisclosed amount in royalty payments.
This doesn’t mean they wouldn’t become available again as full-album purchases, though—iTunes, for example, regularly offers albums that have one or two tracks that only come with a full album purchase. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Dark Side of the Moon come back to iTunes with every track marked “Album only.”
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The Best Tools for Hacking Your Next Big Conference (Like SXSW) [Travel]
Posted by: | CommentsThe Office of 38one [Featured Workspace]
Posted by: | CommentsX.minutes.at Sets Time Limits for Browsing Any Site, No Extension Required [Distraction]
Posted by: | CommentsThe UK’s Conservative Party plans to drum up £29 billion to invest in superfast broadband if returned to power.
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Reuters
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Controversial Amazon 1-Click patent survives review
Posted by: | CommentsAmazon’s patent on one-click shopping has survived the scrutiny of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In an official notice published this month, the USPTO declared its intent to issue a reexamination certificate affirming the validity of Amazon’s amended version of the patent.
The patent, which was filed in 1997, describes a method of enabling consumers to purchase goods without having to provide credit card and shipping information during every shopping session. Amazon enforced the patent against competitor Barnes and Noble almost immediately after it was granted in 1999. The patentability of one-click Internet shopping is broadly disputed. It has become the textbook example of how a broad patent on a trivially obvious software concept can have a profoundly anti-competitive impact on a wide segment of the industry.
Peter Calveley, an actor and patent law enthusiast from New Zealand, launched a campaign against the one-click patent in 2006 and filed for a reexamination with funding that he collected from his supporters. A year later, the USPTO issued a decision rejecting 21 of the patent’s 26 claims, largely due to the broad availability of well-documented prior art. Amazon decided to amend the patent in order to address some of the specific issues raised by the reexamination.
The amended version has a slightly smaller scope, limiting the patent’s coverage to online shopping cart systems rather than all one-click e-commerce. In its statement today, the USPTO declared that the new version of the patent is valid, despite the fact that it has no functional difference from the original version. This outcome, which took years four years to reach, reflects the deficiencies of the reexamination process.
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Remains of the Day: The Best Jobs in America Edition [For What It's Worth]
Posted by: | CommentsDeep Water Bath Fills Your Tub to the Brim [Stuff We Like]
Posted by: | CommentsGoogle has introduced Google Reader Play, a product intended to “make Google Reader more accessible for everyone.”
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Google
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