•
106-Broadband
loses to Music
Union ••••
Pandora Media Inc lost a major
legal fight over how musicians and music
copyright owners are paid for their
work
••••
A federal district court in New
York ruled in favor of BMI (Broadcast
Music Inc.) which has a huge
representation of popular songwriters. The
group had asked the court to raise
Pandora's payments to 2.5% of its revenue
from 1.75%.
••••
More or less half
of Pandora's revenue, ($921 million in
2014), is paid to rights holders that
include record labels and music
publishers.
••••
Pandora, has 79
million active users, and has had a series
of recent victories regarding royalty
payments. Performing rights organizations
BMI and its competitor ASCAP, collect
royalties from the use of their members'
songs and compositions on radio,
television and Internet services. However,
the organizations do not represent
performers or record labels.
••••
BMI hailed the
decision as an enormous victory for its
more than 650,000 songwriters, composers
and publishers.
••••The
ruling follows two recent legal victories
for Pandora. A federal appeals court last
week ruled against ASCAP to keep Pandora's
rate at 1.85%, agreeing with a lower
court.
••••The
Federal Communications Commission, in a
separate dispute, recently cleared the way
for Pandora to buy a South Dakota
terrestrial radio station. Pandora hopes
that move will help it argue that it
should quality for the lower royalties
paid to BMI and ASCAP by traditional
broadcast radio
companies.••••
•••
Pandora pledged to
appeal the court's May 14th ruling.
••••The
ongoing fight over music royalties is
taking place on multiple fronts. The
Justice department, last year has opened a
review of its consent decrees governing
BMI and ASCAP, which had asked for changes
to the rules. As part of its review, the
Justice Department invited comment from
songwriters, composers, publishers,
licensees, and service providers.
••••
On another front a
coalition of artists, labels and other
industry players are supporting the Fair
Play, Fair Pay Act introduced in Congress
this year. Among other things, the
legislation would end broadcast radio's
long practice of not paying labels
performance royalties. Also it would seek
to ensure that satellite and Internet
radio companies pay labels for pre-1972
recordings. •Click
More
tviStory
106-s90-106-Broadband
loses to Music Union
///
•33RD
FILMFEST MÜNCHEN - June 25 To July
4th, 2015 -The
Open Air will set the Gasteig
swinging ••••
This year's Open Air at FILMFEST
MÜNCHEN is dedicated to Swing music,
with music and dance films reaching back
eight decades. Catchy rhythms and
choreographies will swing the Gasteig
Piazza -- and leave the audience tapping
toes and humming along!
••••
The unmatched classic among Swing
films is still HELLZAPOPPIN' from 1941,
which brought Lindy Hop pioneer Frankie
Manning and the Whitey Lindy Hoppers from
Harlem's legendary Savoy Ballroom to
Hollywood for some of the most spectacular
dance routines and moves in movie history,
which even the best modern break dancers
can learn a thing or two from.
••••Director
Tim Whelan's SWING FEVER (1943) open the
Hollywood doors to "Cotton Club" star Lena
Horne, who supplemented an overwhelmingly
white cast. It was one of the rare movie
roles for the Civil
Rights advocate
Horne, who was later blacklisted by
McCarthy and unable to work in
Hollywood.
•••••Jimmy
Stewart in THE GLENN MILLER STORY
After WWII, the glory days of Big Band
music came to an end with the ascendancy
of Rock'n'Roll, Elvis Presley and Buddy
Holly. Director Anthony Mann's THE GLENN
MILLER STORY (1954) looks back on the life
story of the great American band leader,
played by Jimmy Stewart -- his first
non-Western for Mann.
••••
Richard Gere
and Diane Lane in COTTON
CLUB
•••• Swing was
out of fashion for 30 years, until Francis
Ford Coppola chimed in its renaissance
with COTTON CLUB (1984) &endash; starring
Richard Gere as a trumpet player who falls
for a mobster's girl (Diane Lane, later
paired with Gere in UNFAITHFUL), along
with dance legend Gregory Hines and early
performances by Lawrence Fishburne
(MATRIX) and Coppola's nephew Nicolas
Cage.
••••
Dermot Mulroney and Harry Belafonte
in KANSAS CITY
By the 1990s, the Swing Renaissance was in
full swing: In 1996, Robert Altman
returned to his hometown in KANSAS CITY to
weave a web of intrigue, crime, love,
opium and jazz around Jennifer Jason
Leigh, Dermot Mulroney, Steve Buscemi and
Harry Belafonte. In SWEET AND LOWDOWN
(1999), Woody Allen let Sean Penn,
"second-best Jazz guitarist ever" and
hopeless egomaniac, vie for the hand of
mute laundress Hattie (Samantha
Morton).
••••
The SWING KIDS (directed by Thomas
Carter, 1993) were youthful Jazz fans in
1930s Hamburg, who rebelled against the
Nazis und Hitler Youth though modern
"negro" dance and music -- starring Robert
Sean Leonard (DEAD POET'S SOCIETY),
Christian Bale and Kenneth Branangh. And
2003 saw director Martin Guigui's steamy
romance SWING, in which a young musician
(Innis Casey) falls for a mysterious older
woman (Jacquline Bisset) in a jazz club.
Open Air 2015 •
Click For More
Munich
Filmfest ///
In Life's current Bicentennial issue,
radio checks in, at #86 on the hot "100
Events That Shaped America," 19 buttons
behind Bell's telephone. Erroneously, Life
lists Guglielmo Marcon's dots and dashes
as the first wireless broadcast, a fable
echoed by the World Almanac and
Encyclopedia Britannica. It's a forgivable
mumpsimus, since the evidence offered on
the following pages has not, until now,
appeared in any national publication.
••••
The birth of broadcasting is a bizarre
soap opera saga, a lacrymal legend of
mystery, machination, ephemeral
enshrinement, decline, disillusionment and
disaster. It's denouncement dissolves six
miles north of Murray, Kentucky, in a
two-room shanty constructed of pine and
cornstalks, where radio's uncelebrated
architect is discovered 48 hours after his
death, his records scattered, his
equipment destroyed, his brain partly
eaten by rats. Even local radio fails to
mention his demise. He is Nathan Bernard
Stubblefield, the man history over-heard
and then overlooked.
Stubblefield's
supporters maintain that telegraphy is far
different from telephony; that they are, I
fact, diverse discoveries. Wireless
telephone is hip-to-shore radio, the
walkie-talkie, the citizen band and
portable radio, the mobile phone, the
audio arm of television, rheostats,
rectifying tubes, filaments, dials,
microphones, AM and FM radio and every
broadcasting booth on earth--not Marconi's
Code signals.
••
Click
for Full Story
Published
in Warner Bros.
Circular •••"Hello,
Rainey," according to Dr. Rainey T. Wells,
founder of Murray State College, was the
world's first radio message. Testifying
before an FCC commission in 1947, Rainey
explained that he had personally heard
Stubblefield demonstrate his wireless
telephone as early as 1892.
•••"He
had a shack about four feet square near
his house from which he took an ordinary
telephone receiver, but entirely without
wires. Handing me these, he asked me to
walk some distance away and listen. I had
hardly reached my post, which happened to
be an apple orchard, when I heard 'Hello,
Rainey' come booming out of the receiver.
I jumped a foot and said to myself, 'This
fellow is fooling me. He as wires
somewhere.' So I moved to the side some 20
feet but all the while he kept talking to
me. I talked back and he answered me as
plainly as you please. I asked him to
patent the thing but he refused, saying he
wanted to continue his research and
perfect it."
•••Dr.
William Mason, Stubblefield's family
physician, described a day during that
same year when Stubblefield "handed me a
device in what appeared to be a keg with a
handle on it. I started walking down the
lane . . . from it I could distinctly hear
his voice and a harmonica which he was
broadcasting to me several years before
Marconi made his announcement about
wireless telegraphy."
••••••••••
"I have been
working on this, the wireless telephone,
for 10 or 12 years," he told a St. Louis
Post-Dispatch correspondent in January,
1902. "This solution is not the result of
an inspiration or the work of a minute. It
is the climax of years. The system can be
developed until messages by voice can be
sent and heard all over the country, even
to Europe. The world is it limits."
••
Click
for Full Story
Published
in Warner Bros.
Circular ••"I
heard as clearly as if the speaker were
only across a 12-foot room" wrote the
newsman.
•••When
the article appeared on January 10, 1902,
Stubblefield was besieged by capitalists,
financiers, stock-jugglers, hucksters and
hawkers. Dr. Mason recalled seeing a
$40,000 check for a part interest in the
invention, as titans of industry "wearing
diamonds as large as your thumb" scuttled
up industry dirt roads to Stubblefield's
flinty farm.
•••He
refused all propositions, including one
for half a million dollars. "It is north
twice that," he insisted, entrusting only
his son, Bernard, with the secret of his
mysterious keg. On occasion he repelled
over-inquisitive visitors with a
shotgun.
•••Invited
by leading scientist, he traveled with his
trunk of mystery to Washington, D.C.,
where he demonstrated the practicability
of his contrivance from the steamship
Bartholdy on the Potomac to crowds along
the river bank. On Decoration Day, 1902,
he broadcast words and music form the
Belmont Mansion and Fairmont Park in
Philadelphia to hundreds of statesmen,
investors and newsmen. He obtained patents
in England, the U.S. and Canada.
••••••
In 1930 a memorial to "the first man to
transmit and receive the human voice
without wires" was dedicated at Murray
State Teachers College campus, less than
100 feet from the charred ruins of the
world's first broadcasting station.
••••
In 1962 his tragic life was dramatized in
an epicedial folk opera, The Stubblefield
Story, composed by Murray State professor
Paul Shahan and Mrs. Lillian Lowry and
performed in the campus auditorium. •
Click
for Full
Story
Published in Warner Bros.
Circular
•
Troy
Cory was among the first international
entertainers and the first American
entertainer to perform in the People's
Republic of China, beginning in
1988. In
itself a notable culture-historical feat,
in view of China's closed door policies of
the late 70s and well into the 80s. The
PRC's administrative climate in comparison
is much less restrictive now and China's
open door policy enables many entertainers
to introduce themselves to the populace
Chinese audiences• •
• • Back in the 80s, as a
goodwill ambassador representing the
U.S.A., Troy Cory and his back-up dancers
and singers, "The Brooke Sisters," were
the first entertainers from the United
States to appear in a full staged program
in the People's Republic of China during
the Shanghai TV Festival, and televised on
China's National Television (CCTV), viewed
by over 300 million people.
•
•
It was there
Cory met Jiang Zemin, then mayor of
Shanghai, and who later became the 5th
President of the People's Republic of
China.• •
• •
• The
'88 Shanghai Concert was the beginnings of
Troy's concert tours in China for the next
two decades. The concerts, just to name a
few, included the following cities:
Shanghai, Beijing, Anshan, Harbin, Fuzhou
and and Tsingtao (Qingdao) •
Click
More
For TC
in China
•
More •
101-
Martin Sheen and Mischa Barton to appear
at kick-off event of seventh annual Kat
Kramer's Films that Change the World
The event will be held, April 10,
2015, at the Canon USA, Inc. Screening
Room, adjacent to the Stanley Kramer
Screening Room, located on the
Sunset-Gower Studios' lot, where Stanley
Kramer once filmed 15 of his 35 movies
when the studio was known as Columbia
Pictures.
•Click
More
tviStory
101-s90-Martin
Sheen and Mischa Barton to attend kick-off
event ///
106-
Net Neutrality rules formally published;
first legal challenge
filed WASHINGTON
-- Tough new net neutrality regulations
were published in the Federal Register on
April 13, 2015, that started a 60-day
clock on its effective date of June 12 and
triggering the first formal legal
challenge to the controversial online
traffic rules.
••••
US Telecom, a
trade group whose members include AT&T
Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc.,
filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia
Circuit to stop the rules, arguing the
rules are "arbitrary and capricious" and
violate federal law. •Click
More
tviStory
106-s90-Net
Neutrality Rules Published in Federal
Register
///
•106-
The Electric Car- Emobility in
Germany "The
government is taking a snooze" Kurt
Sigl, president of Bundesverband
eMobilität pushes from the outside
in. Politics fail in promoting emobility
and the German manufacturers talk down the
electric car. View
More ///
•106-
Is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act a
Safe
Harbor? Court
denies Grooveshark DMCA protection for
songs like "Johnny B. Goode" In April 2013, a New York state
appellate court made a curious decision in
a matter being litigated between
Grooveshark parent company Escape Media
Group, Inc. and UMG Recordings, Inc. The
court ruled that due to an peculiarity in
copyright law, the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act does not apply to songs that
were licensed under state law before
February 15, 1972. As such, for these
recordings, Grooveshark is not eligible
for what is known as safe harbor -- an
immunity to liability if users upload
copyrighted works without the website's
knowledge. •
Click
More
tviStory
106-s90- Is the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act a Safe
Harbor? /// •
106-
Did FCC's New Internet Rules Put the FCC
in Charge of the
Internet? ••••
March
10, 2015- It's been two weeks since the
Federal Communications Commission voted
3-2 to overhaul the way broadband Internet
service is regulated,
changing it
from a Title I information service to a
Title II telecommunications service - by
expanding the definition of conventional
phone service to include Internet address
as well as phone numbers, according to the
order
••••And only now is
the 400-page order, not released prior to
the vote, that was drawn up by FCC
Chairman Tom Wheeler and supported by the
commission's two Democratic members,
available for public viewing. This was
perhaps the most significant and
far-reaching shift in Internet policy in
nearly two decades, and put in place
without full public access.
to confirm that the rules will mean
whatever the agency wants them to
mean. •Click
More
tviStory
106-s90-Did
FCC's New Internet Rules Put the FCC in
Charge of the
Internet?
••••••••••••••<
•
•
• tviCloseUpHeadlines
• Footer
•
•
•
>
<
on
