Intellectual Property (IP) Archives

Swiss Startup: RightClearing Simplifies Right Clearing For Artists INTERVIEW

Most musicians want to do one thing and that is, play music. Some want to play bars and clubs, others want to play in bands and orchestras, and others want to record and sell their music. One of the issues that stands in the way of an artists creativity is clearing their rights to their music. After all they’ve created a song, they want to make sure they get credit for it.

That’s where Zurich Switzerland based startup, RightClearing, comes in. They’ve simplified and democratized the market for music licensing by providing the technological infrastructure for musicians and content users to sell and purchase licenses. The entire process from searching for songs to creating and paying for binding legal licenses has been automated. Independent artists and labels can now earn money with the usage rights to their music. Advertisers, filmmakers or private persons can license songs for their own use with only a few clicks.

When you think about copyrights and music you may not think to the Swiss however RightClearing is planning a global rollout and founder Philippe Perraux is convinced that they have a platform in place that will become a staple in any artists career. When Perraux graduated law school in 2001 he knew he wanted to continue working on copyright law. What he ran into was an old antiquated system that needed innovation. Now, 11 years later he has that system.

We got a chance to find out more about RightClearing in the interview below:

Startups: Dot Registry LLC Has Filed For Four New Top Level Domains

The folks at Dot Registry LLC realize that we’re running out of good .com domain names. The newer .co is taking over as a recognized worldwide domain name, in fact LeWeb founder Loic Lemur recently changed their web presence from a .net to a .co domain name, ahead of their new event in London.

Dot Registry LLC has filed for some domain names that may be real appealing to both startups and small businesses. The extensions that they filed for are .LLC, .INC,.LLP and .CORP these four domain suffixes mean that many of these new startups can register their official company name as their domain name.

“ It is our goal to create increased integrity for business representation online by developing gTLDs that represent specific business entity classifications. Through our corporate gTLD strings we will work to decrease the possibility of identity misrepresentation in a cyber setting and assist small to medium size businesses in legitimizing their services online.” Dot Registry LLC CEO Shaul Jolles said in a statement today.

DOT Registry worked closely with many Secretary of State’s offices to develop their registration
policies, which call for transparency in reporting and annual verification. Additionally, securing
support letters from these Secretary of State’s offices in order to affirm the necessity of
restrictions surrounding the strings LLC, INC, LLP and CORP. DOT Registry was informed by
the position of the National Association of Secretary of States Business Services Committee in
regards to business identity theft in a cyber setting and has taken a position similar to that
described in NASS’s White Paper in regards to the importance of accurately representing
businesses online.

In a March 20, 2012 letter to ICANN the Secretary of State of Delaware, Jeffrey W. Bullock
whom protects the integrity of Delaware’s legal entity registration system, which is home to
nearly one million legal entities and 63% of Fortune 500 companies indicated that, “it is
absolutely critical that if ICANN determines to grant such name extensions (. INC, .LLC, .CORP)
… that it does so in a restricted manner that is intended to protect consumers and the community
of interest that exists among validly registered US companies” he further indicated that “at
minimum, any approval for company ending strings be restricted in such a way that reasonably
assures that the legal entity is, in fact, an active and validly registered legal entity in the United
States, as DOT Registry LLC has proposed within its application.”

Jolles indicates that his, “ team has worked tirelessly to develop guidelines that will be both user
friendly and allow our registrars to appropriately determine if an applicant is in fact a registered
US business. Over the last six months we have created strong partnerships with the leading
corporate registration companies in order to have the most efficient and credible registration
process possible. As a corporate affiliate of the National Organization of Secretary of States
(NASS), we feel an acute sense of responsibility to uphold our company’s mission and guidelines
in order to deliver a strong product and we are excited to participate in this newest evolution of
the Internet.”

Linkage:

For more information on these top level domains visit Dot Registry here

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Microsoft Funds Russian Startup Pirate Pay To Shut Down Bit Torrents

Microsoft has invested in Russian startup Pirate Pay. Pirate Pay was designed to shut down torrent distribution of copyright protected works. This of course has the internet freedom fighters in a tiff, especially because Pirate Pay was able to attract such a significant investor.

According to this report from Torrent Freak, in early tests, Pirate Pay was able to shut down tens of thousands of downloads. Of course in the grand scheme of things, that’s not nearly as many as they would like.

“After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko says.

Bit torrent files are costing the movie and recording industry billions of dollars in revenue, despite the fact that physical cd and music media sales are still topping the download business.

Microsoft invested $100,000 into the company. With Microsoft’s investment Pirate Pay was able to continue working with Direktcya Kino to protect the film “Vysotsky. Thank God I’m Alive”. The film is distributed by Sony Pictures. In the case of this project 44,845 transfers were stopped.

Pirate Pay isn’t the first company that is “protecting” studios from torrent files. MediaDefender was actually the first company to take on the daunting task. MediaDefender has recently re-branded itself as “Peer Media”

Also, it appears that Pirate Pays main tactics aren’t original either. They won’t reveal how their technology actually works but Torrent Freak and many other websites and forums say that Pirate Pay floods the torrent sites with fake versions of the protected media, which discourages the downloading of the actual file. While it cuts back the illegal downloads, actual versions of the films actually make it to the torrent sites and then are easily identifiable as such.

The music industry actually started employing this tactic back in Napster’s heyday. While the folks running companies like Pirate Pay think they are solving the problem, they don’t realize that in most cases if a torrent file can’t be downloaded it doesn’t translate to going out to the store to buy the same title.

Source: TorrentFreak

AOL, TechCrunch, Crunchbase Et Al, Ignore Android Developer’s Intellectual Property

The one time internet giant AOL, which has been declining over the past few years, has been trying desperately to bring readers from other sites to their media properties like TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Patch and other blogs and online content. With some of the more notable websites in the tech community, AOL has always seemed to be very supportive of intellectual property.

In fact, as recent as last week, we published a story about AOL considering licensing patents rather than suing over them. A move to not further clog the arteries of our already busy patent court system.

You would think that AOL, TechCrunch and Crunchbase would be very protective of not just their intellectual property but also the intellectual property of those businesses and members of the community that they serve. You would also think that TechCrunch, Crunchbase and AOL would be protective and supportive of Android developer’s, especially those who have premium apps in the Google Play Store.

More after the break
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