Business News: Start Small Business & Business News // Current

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1 hour ago

The Evolution of Data Encryption Regulations

Massachusetts is taking data encryption regulation to the next level by actually defining what is meant by... more

Paisano1
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Food guru’s Chambers Kitchen shuts down

Minnesota Daily (mndaily.com) reporter Rebecca Lang contributes this story about the recent announcement of the closure of... more

kinolina
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Breakthroughs in the Battle Against Spam

We’ve been developing a way of detecting and blocking spam that analyses not just content and IP address, but by applying... more

Paisano1
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China's Wandering Millions: The Migrant Population

China has a large population that is known as its floating population. These migrant millions are playing out America's mass... more

TheOxenGroup
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Market Facing Small Setback or Data Volatility

Trying to forecast where the market is tough, however, it is also easy. We know in the long run the market will most likely move... more

TheOxenGroup
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Retailers Get No Help from Consumers

Retailers are really not getting help from consumers. The market got a large drop in June because of lower sales driven by higher... more

TheOxenGroup
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YouTube wins key ruling in class action case

Google and its YouTube video-sharing site won dismissal of some claims for money damages in a proposed class-action copyright infringement lawsuit by England's Football Association Premier League.

In a July 3 ruling by U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in Manhattan, the group's claim for punitive damages under U.S. copyright law was dismissed, and a claim for statutory damages was mostly dismissed, with an exception for live broadcasts.

"There is no circumstance in which punitive damages are available under the Copyright Act of 1976," Stanton said in the ruling. Statutory damages were dismissed with respect to most "foreign" works that weren't registered in the U.S.

YouTube, bought by Mountain View-based Google for $1.65 billion, was sued in May 2007 for allegedly permitting rampant postings of copyrighted material without permission. A separate lawsuit by Viacom, owner of MTV Networks and Comedy Central, also is pending in the same court.

"The punitive and statutory damages claims dismissed by the court were baseless from the start," Adam Barea, an in-house lawyer for Google, said in an e-mail. "We are very pleased with the court's decision and will continue to vigorously defend against the remaining baseless claims in the case."

YouTube and Google have said their actions are permitted under U.S. copyright law, which allows "fair use" of protected material. They also have argued that the Premier League hasn't done enough on its own to limit illegal postings.

"I don't think this is going to limit our case," said plaintiffs' lawyer Louis Solomon of Proskauer Rose in New York. "It's going to shape how we go about proving damages. We still have all of the other statutory remedies, such as compensatory damages and disgorgement of profit."

Proposed class members can still seek actual damages, and statutory damages will remain available to plaintiffs whose copyrights for live broadcasts were allegedly violated, such as the Premier League, the Scottish Football League and a French tennis association, Solomon said.

"There's a group of our class members for whom statutory damages are very important, because they have live broadcasts, and it's particularly hard for them to capture damages for those," Solomon said. "They still have the right to get statutory damages."Google and its YouTube video-sharing site won dismissal of some claims for money damages in a proposed class-action copyright... more

Apocalipstick
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Tivo strikes deal with Best Buy

Best Buy will ramp up its promotion of TiVo's DVR and services under a new agreement announced late Wednesday. As part of... more

Apocalipstick
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New information on 1031 reverse exchanges

The financial and operational efficiency benefits of a 1031 exchange are well established. But what if your business isn’t... more

hoosierdaddy
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14 hours ago

Murdoch on Twitter: "Be careful of investing here"

Seems like self-serving advice, Murdoch saying "no on Twitter, yes on MySpace." Not surprisingly, he even takes a jab... more

vistapoint
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18 hours ago

The Secret Plan for Citigroup

Why won’t the government put Citi out of its misery and let it fail? Sources tell Charlie Gasparino the feds have a new... more

atomiclegion
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19 hours ago

Recession leads to less rush hour congestion

Drivers are spending less time stuck in rush-hour traffic for a second straight year, the first-ever two-year decline in... more

ebindelglass
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7 responses

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21 hours ago

100 Business Execs You Can Learn from on Twitter

There are CEOs, executives, and more users that have plenty of knowledge to offer you. Read on, and you’ll learn about 100... more

sunnyspeaks
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1 day ago

Parents (Financially) Support Tween Phenomenon at the Box Office

"In Hollywood the recent news that Miley Cyrus is to star in a remake of The Bodyguard and that Zac Efron will headline a new version of Saturday Night Fever seems particularly poignant. For it represents a passing of sorts, an axis shift between generations. It is the tacit acknowledgement that a movie industry once built upon the solid efforts of John Travolta dramas and Kevin Costner thrillers is now utterly in thrall to the glamour and the power of the new tween superstars.

Selling the dream of ordinary kids in ordinary high schools doing extraordinary things (putting on musicals, becoming handsome vampires), these inviolably wholesome and family-friendly entertainers are fuelling merchandising bonanzas and breaking box-office records. Ticket sales, for instance, for the three recent movies from Cyrus, Efron and Pattinson have already reached $750 million (£456 million) on exceedingly modest budgets — the High School Musical movie cost only $11 million to produce. In the current cash-strapped climate, says Ali Jaafar, international editor of Variety, this is regarded as the pre-eminent business model. “These guys are being offered everything right now,” he says. “They are seen as the next generation of stars, and producers want them attached to their projects because they know the studios will immediately say ‘Yes!”

And yet, tween success is not simply the result of giant corporations such as Disney cynically exploiting gullible children, says Barry Rosenbush, producer of the three-part High School Musical series. “The interesting thing about the tween audience is that they’re still connected to their parents,” he says. “Parents still need to give their permission to buy things, to download off iTunes, to buy DVDs. So an interesting dynamic develops between the parents and the children, where the parents want the children to go to High School Musical because it’s empowering, and to Twilight because it’s about romanticism. All good clean family entertainment that makes parents feel safe.

Indeed it is the parents of tween consumers who are the silent drivers of this boom, says Greg Livingston, co-author of The Great Tween Buying Machine: Marketing to Today’s Tweens, and the chief development officer at WonderGroup, a tween marketing agency in the US whose clients include Disney and Hasbro. “The former Generation X and Y kids who are parents now have this entirely inclusive family philosophy — they include their children in all decisions, from what food they’re going to eat to what car they’re going to buy,” he points out. “The dynamic between parents and young children really changed [in the past decade] and they became what we call a superconsumer: a mom and a kid together.”""In Hollywood the recent news that Miley Cyrus is to star in a remake of The Bodyguard and that Zac Efron will headline a new... more