rights

Raise My Rights is a free program that is supposed to give users administrator access to most applications. But thanks to an overall lack of direction, the only thing that this program raised was our level of frustration with its poor performance.

The program has an extremely vague user interface. It requires that you enter the account details for creating a shortcut. We entered our username and domain info, but once we got to the password part, we weren't sure what to enter. The program's Help feature merely gives you copyright information, so it was trial and error … Read more

We live in a world that demands entitlements for just about everything. While the framers of the U.S. Constitution talked about the rights of assembly, speech, and religion, our modern world has crowned new rights. Universal health care is a hot one. But now the European Commission's Viviane Reding has suggested Internet access as a fundamental human right.

Who knew?

The statement comes as the European Commission grapples with proposed three-strikes legislation, an effort sponsored by France to deny file-sharers Internet access after three warnings of copyright infringement. Opponents of the legislation have responded by suggesting that Internet … Read more

There are few, if any, horizontal platforms that offer users the capability to e-mail, create, and edit documents and pictures, and collaborate across all three major desktop computing platforms as well as almost every major smartphone platform. Glide 3.0 has just updated, introducing changes aimed at parental control and creating a child-friendly environment.

The new e-mail filter lets parents intercept all messages sent to a child's in-box. Parents can then approve or deny the e-mails so children can only see preapproved messages, filtering out pornographic spam, phishing attempts, and other junk. Parents need to create a secondary e-mail … Read more

Negotiations between sports-governing bodies and TV channels are often rather beguiling.

While News Corp.'s Fox, for example, built the fourth network with the NFL its most sturdy pillar, other channels seem to fall in and out of favor.

Now Comcast, which owns some channels and controls a seemingly infinite amount of cable, is threatening to remove the NFL Network from every last strand of cable because it feels that the NFL is not quite playing ball.

Comcast has never liked the 70-cents-per-subscriber fee that the NFL charges for the its total football network, which occasionally shows a live game … Read more

With the launch of the Amazon Kindle 2 and its text-to-speech feature, a broader range of reading materials would now be available to the 15 million Americans represented by The Reading Rights Coalition, a group which defends the rights of those who cannot read printed words because of blindness, dyslexia, spinal cord injury, or other disabilities. However, The Authors Guild is looking add a hoop or two for people with print disabilities to jump through .

As previously written by my colleague Greg Sandoval, "the retailer, which makes the popular Kindle electronic-book reader, announced late Friday that the company is modifying systems to allow authors and publishers to decide whether to enable Kindle's text-to-speech function on a per-title basis."

According to The Reading Rights Coalition: "The Guild has told them that in order to read their books with text-to-speech they must either submit to a burdensome special registration system and prove their disabilities--or pay extra. The Guild's position is contrary to the principle of equal opportunity for all and discriminates against millions of people with print disabilities. The Guild's position is outrageous and discriminates against the millions of people with print disabilities who are eager to be their readers and customers."… Read more

A day after YouTube announced the Google-owned video site would no longer stream music videos within the United Kingdom, the Performance Right Society said talks on Tuesday between the group and YouTube were "positive."

PRS collects royalties on behalf of the music industry in the U.K. On Monday, YouTube announced that the Web's largest video site and the collections agency couldn't reach a deal on licensing fees. Talks continue and the parties are scheduled to meet over the next few days, according to a PRS statement.

"We are committed to ensuring our 60,000 … Read more

MySpace may follow YouTube by muffling music in the United Kingdom, according to a published report.

MySpace UK, as well as other music services, are struggling to renegotiate licensing deals with the Performance Rights Society, a royalty-collection group in Great Britain.

U.K. publication The Guardian cited an anonymous source Tuesday who said "the launch of MySpace UK's comprehensive music service later this year could be thrown into jeopardy."

MySpace and YouTube representatives were not immediately available to comment.

Online radio service Pandora pulled out of Great Britain more than a year ago. The Oakland, Calif.-based … Read more

Updated at 1:25 p.m. PDT.

Google-owned video-sharing site YouTube is silencing music videos in the U.K. after negotiations with the country's Performing Right Society (PRS for Music), which collects licensing fees for artists and labels, failed.

"Our previous license from PRS for Music has expired, and we've been unable so far to come to an agreement to renew it on terms that are economically sustainable for us," a statement from YouTube read. "There are two obstacles in these negotiations: prohibitive licensing fees and lack of transparency. We value the creativity of musicians … Read more

Songwriters get paid every time one of their songs is played on the radio; the Performance Rights Act (H.R. 4789) would do the same for the musicians who played on the recording. With income from CDs and download sales on the wane, they could use the money.

Under current law, musicians get a big fat zero when their music is played on AM and FM radio (they do get royalties from satellite radio, cable radio services, and other nonterrestrial broadcasters).

According to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the United States is one of the few industrialized countries (with the exception … Read more