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Eninem's Publisher Sues Apple
- Thread starter ~Shard~
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I guess Apple is just getting a taste of their own medicine with this lawsuit.
There's a 30-second copyright rule, where you can use 30-seconds of a song IF you're doing an article about the song or selling the CD itself. But, if you're using the 30-second clip to sell a different product, the rule doesn't apply and you need permission. I'm a bit fuzzy on details, but that's the gist of it.
Apple is stupid to have not known this, especially being that they are obviously working with the "sue anyone and everyone" RIAA. All this suing only leads to more suing. Great for the lawyers, bad for the rest of us.
There's a 30-second copyright rule, where you can use 30-seconds of a song IF you're doing an article about the song or selling the CD itself. But, if you're using the 30-second clip to sell a different product, the rule doesn't apply and you need permission. I'm a bit fuzzy on details, but that's the gist of it.
Apple is stupid to have not known this, especially being that they are obviously working with the "sue anyone and everyone" RIAA. All this suing only leads to more suing. Great for the lawyers, bad for the rest of us.
LethalWolfe
macrumors G3
MontyZ said:
Close, but not quite right. You can use a small sample (no quantified size is set) of a copyrighted work for academic, newsworthy, or review purposes. And that's it. Anything else, especially a commercial endeavor, requires you get permission to use the copyrighted material.
I'm not sure why there is so much negativity in your post. People (including Eminem) and companies (including Apple) have a right to protect their property (including intellectual property).
I have to disagree. If copyrights didn't exist and people weren't allowed to protect their intellectual property I'd hate to see what state the world would be in.
Lethal
BenAKL
macrumors member
Why Apple and folly go hand-in-glove
Foolish decisions prove that Apple is a slow corporate learner. You've really got to hand it to Apple. It keeps making great technology, and keeps offending everybody it can. It's a good thing its products are so good, or the company would have disappeared long ago, such is its serial capacity for poor decisions. Apple's latest act of corporate lunacy is to pull all books published by Wiley from sale in its Apple centres. Wiley, one of the world's leading scientific publishing houses and purveyors of the Complete Idiot's Guide series, is being punished for the sin of releasing a unauthorised biography of Apple boss Steve Jobs.
The book is iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, by Jeffery Young and William L. Simon. Young wrote a biography of the young Jobs 20 years ago, a fine book called The Journey is the Reward. Both books portray Jobs pretty much as he is, a bad-tempered genius. Companies pretty well reflect the personalities of those at the top. Apple's spitefulness will, of course, serve only to increase publicity for the book. Will censors never learn that their actions are invariably counterproductive?
Not Apple. It is a slow learner. Its history is dotted with foolish decisions that have ensured the opposite outcome to that intended. That's a common enough phenomenon in this world.
And you see it everywhere in the IT industry. Vendors continually adopt counterproductive strategies or release products that drag the business down. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was good at this - its founder Ken Olson famously said that he couldn't see any reason why someone would want a computer in their house. He also dismissed Unix as "snake oil". Ten years ago Novell totally misread the way the networking market was going. Until it was too late, it believed its own hype rather than the glaring evidence of Microsoft Windows' growing capabilities as a network operating system.
Or consider also the tale of Siebel, currently struggling to remain an independent company. It sells software that helps people look after their customers (CRM - customer relationship management), but for years it has neglected its own customer base, selling them inferior products and providing lousy service, chasing market share at the expense of all else.
But Apple does folly better than all of these. Ever since it blew the chance in the early 1980s to make the Apple II the microcomputer standard instead of the IBM PC, it has committed one act of corporate foolishness after another. The Apple III was a disaster, rushed onto the market way before it was ready. The Lisa, the company's first attempt at a machine with a graphical user interface, was overpriced and underfunctioned, and disappeared without trace.
Even the Macintosh, a great computer and one of the most seminal products ever released, has suffered from constant poor decisions. And don't even get me started on the first Macintosh "portable", or on Apple's repeated half-hearted attempts to address the corporate market.
But by far Apple's biggest mistake has been in not opening the Mac's architecture to other developers. It actually did do this for a short time but then reversed its decision when it found that other companies could make and sell perfectly good Mac clones at a much lower price.
Rather than work with these people, Apple peremptorily withdrew its licensing from the clone makers to ensure that only Apple could make Macintoshes. It's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Another giant mistake was the "Star Trek" balls-up. In the early '90s, following the initial success of Microsoft Windows, Apple thought it might be a good idea to port its much-superior operating system to the Intel platform. It developed the software, a technological tour de force that made an ordinary PC indistinguishable from a Macintosh. But the software, codenamed "Star Trek" (to boldly go where no Mac has gone before) was never released, because Apple didn't want to muddy the waters at the same time it was moving from the Motorola to the PowerPC chip.
And a dozen years ago, Apple also walked away, at the 11th hour, from discussions with IBM about merging. It would have created a PC powerhouse, and the deal was all but done. Apple and IBM senior executives met at a hotel near Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in October 1994 to thrash out the final details. At the last minute, Apple's CEO Michael Spindler demanded more money, and the IBM guys walked away.
Apple's recent dummy spit over Young's book comes just after it sued some young bloggers for publishing details of new Macs they had heard about from friends working at Apple. Apple is paranoid about controlling information about itself, while pretending to champion free speech and creativity. Apple's corporate slogan is "Think different" - memorable, if ungrammatical. The problem is, Apple always thinks the same.
In the past few years the iPod and continued innovation of the Macintosh architecture have ensured Apple's survival where many - myself included - had predicted its demise. But if it continues its own march of folly, that demise will be inevitable.
From: The Sydney Morning Herald.
http://smh.com.au/news/Perspectives...go-handinglove/2005/05/09/1115584883745.html#
Foolish decisions prove that Apple is a slow corporate learner. You've really got to hand it to Apple. It keeps making great technology, and keeps offending everybody it can. It's a good thing its products are so good, or the company would have disappeared long ago, such is its serial capacity for poor decisions. Apple's latest act of corporate lunacy is to pull all books published by Wiley from sale in its Apple centres. Wiley, one of the world's leading scientific publishing houses and purveyors of the Complete Idiot's Guide series, is being punished for the sin of releasing a unauthorised biography of Apple boss Steve Jobs.
The book is iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, by Jeffery Young and William L. Simon. Young wrote a biography of the young Jobs 20 years ago, a fine book called The Journey is the Reward. Both books portray Jobs pretty much as he is, a bad-tempered genius. Companies pretty well reflect the personalities of those at the top. Apple's spitefulness will, of course, serve only to increase publicity for the book. Will censors never learn that their actions are invariably counterproductive?
Not Apple. It is a slow learner. Its history is dotted with foolish decisions that have ensured the opposite outcome to that intended. That's a common enough phenomenon in this world.
And you see it everywhere in the IT industry. Vendors continually adopt counterproductive strategies or release products that drag the business down. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was good at this - its founder Ken Olson famously said that he couldn't see any reason why someone would want a computer in their house. He also dismissed Unix as "snake oil". Ten years ago Novell totally misread the way the networking market was going. Until it was too late, it believed its own hype rather than the glaring evidence of Microsoft Windows' growing capabilities as a network operating system.
Or consider also the tale of Siebel, currently struggling to remain an independent company. It sells software that helps people look after their customers (CRM - customer relationship management), but for years it has neglected its own customer base, selling them inferior products and providing lousy service, chasing market share at the expense of all else.
But Apple does folly better than all of these. Ever since it blew the chance in the early 1980s to make the Apple II the microcomputer standard instead of the IBM PC, it has committed one act of corporate foolishness after another. The Apple III was a disaster, rushed onto the market way before it was ready. The Lisa, the company's first attempt at a machine with a graphical user interface, was overpriced and underfunctioned, and disappeared without trace.
Even the Macintosh, a great computer and one of the most seminal products ever released, has suffered from constant poor decisions. And don't even get me started on the first Macintosh "portable", or on Apple's repeated half-hearted attempts to address the corporate market.
But by far Apple's biggest mistake has been in not opening the Mac's architecture to other developers. It actually did do this for a short time but then reversed its decision when it found that other companies could make and sell perfectly good Mac clones at a much lower price.
Rather than work with these people, Apple peremptorily withdrew its licensing from the clone makers to ensure that only Apple could make Macintoshes. It's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Another giant mistake was the "Star Trek" balls-up. In the early '90s, following the initial success of Microsoft Windows, Apple thought it might be a good idea to port its much-superior operating system to the Intel platform. It developed the software, a technological tour de force that made an ordinary PC indistinguishable from a Macintosh. But the software, codenamed "Star Trek" (to boldly go where no Mac has gone before) was never released, because Apple didn't want to muddy the waters at the same time it was moving from the Motorola to the PowerPC chip.
And a dozen years ago, Apple also walked away, at the 11th hour, from discussions with IBM about merging. It would have created a PC powerhouse, and the deal was all but done. Apple and IBM senior executives met at a hotel near Chicago's O'Hare International Airport in October 1994 to thrash out the final details. At the last minute, Apple's CEO Michael Spindler demanded more money, and the IBM guys walked away.
Apple's recent dummy spit over Young's book comes just after it sued some young bloggers for publishing details of new Macs they had heard about from friends working at Apple. Apple is paranoid about controlling information about itself, while pretending to champion free speech and creativity. Apple's corporate slogan is "Think different" - memorable, if ungrammatical. The problem is, Apple always thinks the same.
In the past few years the iPod and continued innovation of the Macintosh architecture have ensured Apple's survival where many - myself included - had predicted its demise. But if it continues its own march of folly, that demise will be inevitable.
From: The Sydney Morning Herald.
http://smh.com.au/news/Perspectives...go-handinglove/2005/05/09/1115584883745.html#
I did say my details might be fuzzy.LethalWolfe said:
There is? Just because I said Apple is getting a taste of their own medicine? Well, they are.LethalWolfe said:
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with or who's post you're actually responding to, because I didn't say copyrights should not exist. I said some companies, like Apple and the RIAA, are sue-happy, and so many of their recent lawsuits are frivilous.LethalWolfe said:
LethalWolfe
macrumors G3
And I politely corrected you...MontyZ said:
Posting that people are sue happy and that these types of lawsuits only helps lawyers seems to imply that you think that people protecting their IP is frivilous. And if protecting your IP is frivilous what's the point of IP in the first place?
I probably just read too much into your post...
Lethal
imz
macrumors newbie
geerlingguy said:
I'm no lawyer either but have had experience with trademark/patent attorneys through my university when we patented something I developed.
A copyright is different to a patent though...basically it protects the initial expression of an idea, and not the idea itself (if your idea becomes a novel invention, it is then protectable by a patent).
When a song, piece of music or lyric is written down or recorded, it is automatically protected by copyright. This is also the case for anything you draw, paint, film or tape. For musical works, the rights exist not only in the composition but also in the performing and recording of the original works.
For the music industry, things that can be protected by copyright include lyrics, musical arrangements, the recorded sounds and I think even the recorded "moving images" (am not sure if that exclusively means the video clip for the music or a video of someone performing the musical works).
Copyrights can vary depending on the nature of the work, eg musical work can be treated differently to artistic or literary works.
"Fair use" is available for most copyrights. A certain amount of copying of copyrights is usually available for research/study. For books, students can usually photocopy up to 10% of the book.
Copyright protection is usually provided under some national Law or Act. You don't need to register for a copyright. You just do the "(c) 2005" thing.
I'd think that Eminem's lyrics would be protected under copyright even though the singing wasn't accompanied by a musical arrangement (wait, the "musical arrangement" and Eminen combo doesn't sound right)...but then, if we sang his song in the shower (not that I would), would we be infringing his copyrights too??? Don't think so...I think the fact that his lyrics were used without permission (if so) in a commercial advertisement (to make $$$ for some other company) is the major point. Any lawyers available to clarify this?
Maxiseller
macrumors 6502a
Whoever said Apple was "Sue Happy" is correct. The problem, is that EVERY business, individual or artist is sue happy.
In this case, the advert clearly wasn't depicting the rapper in any sense that could possibly constitute as harming his image, and therefore what damages can he sue for exactly? This commercial albeit hardly ever aired, wasn't going to harm his reputation, decrease record sales (who would want the damn songs anyway) or initiate his demise into the black hole of ex-artists.
Protecting the rights of people is a load of cobblers. I'm a musician myself, and so I know how protecting ideas, songs and recordings is important to a musician - but seriously, this is a released song (ergo, not going to be stolen - i.e. no damages) and it's a rubbish song at that!! But regardless of my feelings toward this particular artsist, Apple, The Music Business and any other organization needs to un-clench. All this suing is ridiculous. It REALLY is.
Apple is foolish to give money.
To me, the whole concept of registering a few western harmonic progressions as your own is ridiculous. I can't sit down at the piano any more and play three particular random notes without infringing copyright. Ooooo, who's gonna sue me? *gestures* C'mon!! Give it!
In this case, the advert clearly wasn't depicting the rapper in any sense that could possibly constitute as harming his image, and therefore what damages can he sue for exactly? This commercial albeit hardly ever aired, wasn't going to harm his reputation, decrease record sales (who would want the damn songs anyway) or initiate his demise into the black hole of ex-artists.
Protecting the rights of people is a load of cobblers. I'm a musician myself, and so I know how protecting ideas, songs and recordings is important to a musician - but seriously, this is a released song (ergo, not going to be stolen - i.e. no damages) and it's a rubbish song at that!! But regardless of my feelings toward this particular artsist, Apple, The Music Business and any other organization needs to un-clench. All this suing is ridiculous. It REALLY is.
Apple is foolish to give money.
To me, the whole concept of registering a few western harmonic progressions as your own is ridiculous. I can't sit down at the piano any more and play three particular random notes without infringing copyright. Ooooo, who's gonna sue me? *gestures* C'mon!! Give it!
It was pobably not a smart move for Eminem, as Apple appears to have the "Oprah Effect" on songs it uses in it's iPod ads: they jump up in sales and are always near the top of the "Top Songs" list.
LethalWolfe
macrumors G3
MontyZ said:
How was it not a smart move? The song was already a hit single (it's not like they used an obscure song by an obscure artist), and Apple already aired the adds for a number of months (Eminem sued because they had already used it, not to prevent them from using it). That's why Apple was up crap creek. Once you use something w/o permission you are hosed 'cause the cat is already out of the bag. And, IIRC, you can get dinged per occurrence (for example, if the "going rate" for a particular song is $10,000 and you used it w/o permission on a commercial that aired 10 times you could owe $100,000. 😱 )
Lethal
You disagree with everything I post. Anyway, it's not worthy of debate, it's just a simple comment. Eminem probably doesn't need the publicity, but, how could it hurt if your song becomes the #1 download on iTunes for several weeks? I don't really care about Eminem anyway.LethalWolfe said:
LethalWolfe
macrumors G3
I guess the obvious solution is to stop posting things I disagree with. 😉MontyZ said:
It wouldn't hurt, but it's not like he needs it. Anyway, the iTunes "Oprah Effect" would have already happened because the commercials had already aired. Again, he didn't sue to stop them from airing he sued because they had aired.
Lethal