AHN Media has agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the Associated Press to settle a lawsuit in which the AP accused AHN of rewriting AP stories and putting AHN's name on them, the companies announced on Monday.
In the settlement, AHN admitted to improperly using AP content in many instances, according to a joint news release published on the AP Web site.
AHN, which stands for All Headline News, also acknowledges that "the tort of 'hot news misappropriation' has been upheld by other courts and was ruled applicable in this case by U.S. District Court Judge P. Kevin Castel," the companies said.
AHN could not be reached late on Monday and the AP declined to comment further. The case was dismissed June 15, according to Paid Content.
In an effort to protect its intellectual property rights as the journalism industry transitions from the traditional paper-based model to the digital realm where copying and redistributing content is as easy as cut and paste, AP has sent take-down notices to blog sites and sued VeriSign's Moreover news aggregation service. That case was settled.
In the AHN lawsuit, the AP had cited the principle of "hot news," in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1918 that there is a quasi-property right in breaking news and found AP competitor International News Service guilty of unfair competition. The judge in the AHN case earlier in the year had said there could be a valid hot news claim in the case.
The fact that AHN agreed to acknowledge the hot news principle won't necessarily affect other cases, said Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who specializes in intellectual property.
The case "does send a message that the AP is serious about this hot news theory," he said. "Most intellectual property experts view hot news as a very narrow doctrine and the AP is going to have a very hard time protecting all its assets with hot news."
The proliferation of blog sites will make it particularly difficult, von Lohmann said. "The AP needs to be careful lest they end up in the same shoes as the recording industry with tens of millions of targets with no effective way to enforce" the doctrine, he said.
Hasbro is apparently content to call its contest with the makers of Scrabulous a draw.
The toy maker on Friday withdrew its copyright and trademark lawsuit filed against the creators of the ad-supported online application, according to court documents cited in an Associated Press report.
A game of Scrabulous on Facebook.
(Credit: Scrabulous)The game, which rose to fame when its creators turned it into an embeddable Facebook application, was a word game that resembled the classic board game Scrabble. The game boasted an astonishing half-million daily users on Facebook, but was removed from the social-networking site not long after the lawsuit was filed in July.
The game manufacturer, which owns the rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada, filed the suit against India-based brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, and their company, RJ Softwares. The suit had asked Facebook to pull the game, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and asked the Agarwallas to close their Scrabulous.com site.
The brothers subsequently modified Scrabulous' design and points system, and relaunched it as Wordscraper in the United States and Canada within days of its initial demise. The Scrabulous Web site relaunched as Lexulous.com in September.
The Scrabulous site launched in 2005 and the game was added to Facebook in 2007. But a Hasbro representative told CNET News in July that the company waited, "in deference to the fans," to file its lawsuit until it launched its official Scrabble Facebook app earlier in July. That version was created by Electronic Arts and is used by a mere 8,900 daily users.
Hasbro did not immediately return a message left seeking comment.
There's more rumbling in Europe about Apple's iTunes Store, and this time, it comes from Norway, where, according to Reuters, a consumer agency has announced plans for legal action against Apple and what it says is unfair copyright restriction.
"I want (Apple) to make their services interoperable so that you can play music bought on iTunes on other devices, including mobile phones," Norwegian consumer ombudsman Bjørn Erik Thon told Reuters on Tuesday. Consumer agencies in Norway have been making this complaint for .
Songs purchased from the iTunes Store, except for a limited "iTunes Plus" selection, can be played only on handheld devices from Apple, in addition to Macs and PCs. Other music-enabled cell phones and music players, like Microsoft's Zune, are incompatible.
Early last year, the Norwegian government declared iTunes illegal for the same reason, and provided an October 1, 2007 deadline--a year to the day later, the threatened shutdown hasn't taken place.
Numerous other European government groups have taken action against iTunes, a phenomenon that has been virtually invisible in the United States until this point--though that's changing, as this week, there has been a stateside showdown between Apple and the Copyright Royalty Board.
A French attempt to behead iTunes' digital rights management, or DRM, failed in 2006. Similar efforts from countries such as Sweden and Denmark also made little headway.
With Congress due to adjourn Friday, lawmakers worked late Thursday evening to resolve a couple of high profile digital-entertainment issues.
A "Webcasting" bill was introduced in Congress on Thursday that would allow SoundExchange, the body that collects royalties on behalf of the music industry, to reach a settlement on royalty rates with the Digital Media Association (DiMA) after Congress adjourns.
SoundExchange and DiMA, which represents Web radio stations such as Pandora, have been at odds over the fees charged to stream music. Sources close to the talks say the introduction of the bill signals the two sides are close to cutting a deal. "They wouldn't be seeking the government's blessing unless they were close," said one person with knowledge of the talks.
The two sides need the government's OK to reach an agreement because they're after a statutory license. Such a license gives Web radio stations the right to stream any copyright songs they want, but also requires them to pay a negotiated rate.
The bill would give the two sides until mid-December to cut a deal. Pandora and other Webcasters fiercely object to a decision by the Copyright Royalty Board--a three-judge panel that sets rates for copyright statutory licenses--to double the current $.0008 price per stream by 2010.
The board also set a $500-a-year fee for each channel a Webcaster broadcasts.
Earlier this week, DiMA and the recording industry agreed to a deal that called for interactive music and limited download sites to pay 10.5 percent of annual revenue as a royalty rate. Interactive music sites are those that enable users to choose the music they want to listen to (such as iMeem). Limited downloads sites are those that deliver music to users as long as they continue to pay a fee. Music subscription services such as Napster and Rhapsody offer limited downloads.
Another tech-related issue Congress acted on Thursday was the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights Act, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in a 14-4 vote earlier this month.
President George Bush indicated he might veto the proposed legislation on Tuesday. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, the Bush administration said it would oppose authorizing the U.S. Department of Justice to bring civil suits against file sharers. Since then, that part of the bill has been removed and it is once again working its way through the Senate.
Music insiders say they are confident the bill will pass the Senate by early Friday and return to the House where it already passed once by a wide margin.
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