Category: muzak

  • Studio must consider fair use before taking down video, court rules – Fortune

    Studio must consider fair use before taking down video, court rules – Fortune:

    This is a big win for those people who would like to use copyrighted materials in any way they want.

    Simply wind up your baby to copyrighted muzak and press <record>.


    Of course it probably does no great publicity to Prince to have law suits against babies at play with his music.


    The unanimous vote to allow the mom to use the prince music centers around fair use.

    Here’s the key quote from this article:

    Fair use, as the court made clear, is an independent right that permits people to use copyrighted material in certain situations such as parody or news reporting. Under the law, there is a four-part test for fair use but, for practical purposes, the deciding factors are usually whether the new work is transformative and if it will impact the market for the original work.

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  • Pono – HiRes Music – Kickstarter 250% funded – Muzak will never be the same!

    Pono Music – Where Your Soul Rediscovers Music by the PonoMusic Team — Kickstarter:

    Pono Music… a project funded at Kickstarterhttp://kck.st/1g5xVf3

    High resolution music in a world that has gone Digital!

    Finally, I can put those olde (analog) records back on the shelf!

    This Kickstarter.com campaign is set to roll over $2M in fund raising today. !Oops, took too long to blog! It is already over $2M! Original goal was only $800k. It is headed by Neil Young but has lots and lots of celec muzak backers. Two more added since I took too long to write this (James Taylor autographed player).

    If you like this idea, jump on board. You can get a Pono muzak player for $300 this way with 128GB of storage. That actually is less than 1,000 tracks if you store them at the highest resolution. Of course, nobody has music at that high resolution… 

    Pono will work with any artist or music company to get the highest resolution available (from masters) for the site. They won’t stream initially in part because the size of the stream. Compression gets us the muZak we have today for our MP3 players — maybe good, but definitely not great.

    So, for 300 bucks or so, you to can sponsor this event, and the music site and the player devise. You will get a Pono player free for your sponsorship… well, $99 off of a $399 player. It should play any music, and the high resolution music you can put on it (now, really from PonoMusic.com, once the project is launched). Since the project is 200% funded, one can assume that it will launch. The plan is to build by this summer everything if the money came through from pre-sales and such on Kickstarter. Then all of the sponsors could expect their memorabilia and Pono players soon thereafter, say August.

    The IP behind the player.I’m asking the question at Kickstarter about the IP behind the player. But, one of the key components of their IP is a patent by none other than Neil Young, himself. 

    Patent Application: PCT/US2012/038099
    Title: Multiple-resolution audio and video systems, methods of production, delivery and uses thereof
    Priority date: Jan 20, 2009.

    It will be interesting to see if it issues?

    It will also be interesting to see if they go for a more open architecture like MP3 or proprietary approach.?

    Kids, who have been listening to bad (quality) muzak all their lives, will never be the same.:-)

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  • June 28, 1846: Parisian Inventor Patents Saxophone | This Day In Tech | Wired.com

    June 28, 1846: Parisian Inventor Patents Saxophone | This Day In Tech | Wired.com:

    Wired. This day in Tech.
    It was a great day, June 28, 1846 with a great sound: the Sax.

    Even then, coming up with a great idea was no guarantee that you’d make money at it.

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