Law & Policy

This is great news for musicians and more bad news for Tower Records. Not only can young musicians and garage bands introduce their music to millions of fans everywhere via MySpace, now they can sell it to them too – right from their own pages. "Assuming that the songs for sale do not violate a copyright, the artist or label can set a price and allow Web users to buy songs the way they might with … [Read more...] about Mini music stores at MySpace

Project Gutenberg was the first supplier of free out-of-copyright books on the Web and it's more comprehensive, but Google Book Search just made things easier – at least for when it has your book of choice. "Just one click and a PDF file of the book is on your desktop," reports The Guardian. "You can then either read it online (in which case you deserve to have it free), print it out page by page … [Read more...] about Free books online

That probably sounds like a strange question just about everywhere but in the world of digital entertainment. The Los Angeles Times takes a sweeping snapshot of current thinking on the part of music consumers and copyright law experts. For example, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that "among teens ages 12 to 17 who were polled, 69% said they believed it was legal to copy a CD from a … [Read more...] about How legal is it?

Here's a good idea: If you're a movie studio and you're worried about copyright theft, just acquire a site that could contribute to the problem, and come to learn and control its piece of the business of online video sharing, which is a piece of the future. That, it appears, is what Sony is doing in buying Grouper.com. It's a business story more than a family-tech one, but it will affect the … [Read more...] about Sony and Grouper mash it up

Who actually owns those millions of video clips on YouTube.com – their creators? Nope. YouTube does. In "What goes on the Net stays on the Net," PBS tech writer Robert Cringley says that, apparently in preparing for a copyright-related lawsuit and in "feinting toward going public," YouTube just "clarified" in its terms of use "exactly who DOES own all that video." Not that YouTube would, but under … [Read more...] about What can happen to teens’ Web videos