Nature sound recordist Martyn Stewart sued Apple Inc. and application developer Mitch Waite on Friday, alleging copyright infringement for use of his recordings in iBird. iBird, available from the Apple App Store in a variety of editions, provides an interactive field guide for novice and expert birders. Awarded Best Reference App by Macworld (2009), iBird [...]

Slicing Up Eyeballs reports that a musical featuring the songs of Depeche Mode has been canceled. Titled Playing the Angel, the production was slated to begin open auditions June 27th. Unifaun, the theater company behind the play, hoped to bring it to MITP theatre in Valletta, Malta early next year. The Playing the Angel website [...]

Japanese far right blocks dolphin hunting documentary “Noisy rallies, online slanders, intimidating phone calls and veiled threats of violence” are compelling theaters into canceling showings of The Cove. The documentary depicts dolphin hunting and warns of high levels of mercury in fish — “a disturbing disclosure in this seafood-loving nation.” From NYT. Google backs down [...]

YouTube’s head of user experience, Margaret Gould Stewart, talks about how the site manages copyright and contributes to an “ecosystem of culture.” Stewart notes that content owners deliver “assets” into a database. Uploads are compared to reference files in the YouTube database. Interestingly, content owners provide a usage policy on how to handle matches. “Most [...]

Aviary announced the release of its online music creator (codenamed Roc) on Thursday. The Long Island, NY based company added the tool to its web-based creative suite which includes vector, color and audio editors, among others. Roc is released under a Creative Commons – Attribution 3.0 Generic license, giving users unrestricted access to its instrument [...]

LimeWire owes RIAA millions billions? Thirteen music industry giants and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are looking freeze the assets of P2P file sharing service LimeWire post copyright suit: via Reuters. Judge questions copyright lawsuit jamming US District Court Judge Collyer demands a justification for the US Copyright Group joining 4,577 defendants into [...]

Buy it once, shame on me — Sell it — you can’t get sell it again. It turns out I can’t get the saying right either. Three years ago, Troy Augusto, operating as roastbeastmusic, was sued by Universal Music Group (UMG) for selling used CDs on eBay. At issue were 26 CDs (Promo CDs) originally [...]

It’s campaign season and flaps between musicians and politicians are on the rise. Early last week we noted that Talking Heads frontman David Byrne sued Florida Governor Charlie Crist for releasing an attack ad using the band’s Road to Nowhere. The Crist camp posted the commercial on the campaign website and YouTube without first obtaining [...]