As you will recall, Judge Kimba Wood ordered LimeWire to shutdown last October after finding the file-sharing service liable for copyright infringement and inducement to commit copyright infringement.  An estimated three billion songs per month were downloaded through LimeWire and the music industry wants the now defunct company to pay upwards of $75 trillion in [...]

  The French government has taken a particularly strong stance against music piracy. Through the adoption of two programs, HADOPI and Cartes Musique, the French government is aiming to reduce the 1.2 million jobs that could be lost in the European creative market due to piracy. HADOPI HADOPI is France’s latest legislative attack on piracy. [...]

By: Darren Shield Music in the public domain is rich with culture and inspiration, with a great deal of modern work knowingly or unknowingly inspired by the past. Many artists have rocked out to Pachebel’s Canon in D, royalty free courtesy of the public domain (Green Day – Basket Case, Akon – Don’t Matter, Rob [...]

  Last December, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) announced the new web-casting rates for 2011-2015. The CRB, which consists of three permanent Copyright Royalty Judges (CRJs) appointed by the U.S. Library of Congress (currently, Stanley Wisniewski, James S. Sledge, and William J. Roberts) increased the fees after finding evidence suggesting growth in the web-casting industry. [...]

And the Grammy goes to. . .Esparanza Spalding. Like twenty-six million of you, I spent this past Sunday watching The GRAMMYS.  Trying in earnest to remember that this was an awards show—even though only 10 out of the 109 awards were handed out on air—I paid close attention to the coveted New Artist category, in [...]

Music subscription services have been the hot talk of the industry for the past few months. Familiar names, such as eMusic and Apple, have come up in the conversation regarding their respective forays into the music subscription services business, as well as new companies such as Spotify. Generally speaking, a music subscription service provides consumers [...]

Two recent cases have called into question whether the fees assessed for copyright infringement damages are excessive. In Harper v. Maverick, sixteen-year-old Whitney Harper was found guilty of copyright infringement after downloading 37 audio files from peer-to-peer service Kazaa. Harper claimed that she did not know her conduct was illegal and therefore, that she was [...]

FortheRechord.com is a blog focused on the intersection of issues that affects the music industry and the law. We provide engaging and informative commentary for both legal practitioners and music aficionados alike. FortheRechord is created and run by students from New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy and provides a forum for [...]