RIAA Loses Case Against Launch Media

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's claim that personalized internet radio stations were 'interactive services' was flatly rejected 'as a matter of law' by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Arista Records v. Launch Media. In affirming the jury's verdict in favor of the defendant, Launch Media — acquired during the lawsuit by Yahoo! — the Court said it did not even need to concern itself with possible errors in the jury instructions, since the trial judge should have directed a verdict for defendant 'as a matter of law' on the question of whether the radio stations were 'interactive services.' At pages 23-42 of its 42-page opinion (PDF), the appeals court carefully analyzed how Launch Media's personalized internet radio stations worked, and noted that the users could neither obtain and play on demand a particular song, nor obtain the transmission of a particular program, thus rendering the RIAA's claim of 'interactivity' meritless."

Comments

What Does IBM Even DO Anymore?

[Greyfox]

You don't hear a lot from them in the news anymore. They've got their big iron, I suppose, and were hyping their mainframes as more cost effective to run than clusters of computers. You don't hear about a lot of AIX out there anymore, even though Sun went down the tubes. Seems like every time I see a data center or a CRM application these days it's either Windows or Linux and usually web-based.

You know, I've seen this a couple times before. About a decade ago I was a a Linux con and SGI was there. They were talking about how all their new SGI stuff was going to be Windows NT based and they were getting into storage and stuff. If I were a meaner fellow I'd have asked the guy why I should buy his stuff rather than IBM or Sun, who did exactly the same stuff and who I knew would be around in a couple years. They went bankrupt not much later.

Sun likewise lost their relevance. I actually did some contract work for them a few years back and as far as I could tell most of what went on inside the company involved process black-belts talking about how they worked and engineers scoffing at the design of the Linux kernel. As far as I could tell the corporate philosophy was that they'd build cool stuff and people would buy it because it was cool. Except they hadn't built cool stuff at that point in years.

So now here we are with IBM. They used to have a pretty solid business focus -- some news would come out about a new trend in the market and IBM would be right there almost immediately. Near as I can tell now they just push people around to whatever country happens to be cheapest at the moment and assume that you can replaced experienced employees with cheap guys with no loss of momentum.

Meanwhile Google's right there doing all the cool stuff like Sun used to do and they're got their thumb on the industry kind of like IBM used to do. If I had to place a bet on the industry in a decade, my money would be on Google and Apple as the big winners and IBM as the next company acquired by Oracle.