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    Ringtone Flea Market
    March 18th, 2007 by Seth Shapiro

    Posted by Seth Shapiro

    Speaking of which, analysts have speculated for some time on why profitable ringtones are more profitable than full songs. This weekend we took a stroll through the highest Google-ranked free ringtone sites. Guess what? It was cool, and slighty addictive. Mainly they were crap, civilians loading the system with UGC only their best friends would care about. But then just around the corner would be an occaisonal gem, a great Trane riff that looped just right, Beavis as Cornholio, The Munsters. Stuff that made the room say Ho!

    Reminding us of what? Of a flea market, or a garage sale, or a 12 year old DJ rooting through his parents’ record collection looking for something funky to cut with.

    The true spirit of hip hop is alive and well in the free ringtone cutout bin. Go see for yourself.



    Posted: March 18th, 2007 under » Editorial, » Media.
    Comments: none

    Viacom sues YouTube/Google for $1B
    March 13th, 2007 by Seth Shapiro

    Posted by: Seth Shapiro

    The suit that stalked Sequoia’s $1.65B deal has been filed in SDNY. Thrust of the case is the intuitively compelling point that if a site can screen effectively for porn (which YouTube does), it should be able to apply the same methodology to screening for copyrighted material (YouTube does not).

    The doc is plain-spoken.  Excerpts:

    YouTube’s website purports to be a forum for users to share their own original, user generated, video content. In reality, however, a vast amount of that content consists of infringing copies of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works… Plaintiffs have identified more than 150,000 unauthorized clips of their copyrighted programming on YouTube that had been viewed an astounding 1.5 billion times… YouTube does not simply
    enable massive infringement by its users. It is YouTube that knowingly reproduces and
    publicly performs the copyrighted works uploaded to its site.



    Posted: March 13th, 2007 under » Finance, » Media.
    Comments: 1