– It’s funny that record companies should have such a strict stance on their customers respecting copyrights… while they themselves seem to flaunt it at will. Ars Technica is reporting about a lawsuit in Canada where Canadian record companies are being sued by their own artists for up to $60 billion! It seems that there was a change to Canadian copyright law in the 1980s which allowed record companies to use tracks from artists pending approval of the license. So if a record company wanted to release a “Best of the 80s” compilation, it no longer had to have a license in hand to use A Flock of Seagulls “I Ran” – it only had to have a application “pending”. But it seems that the record companies never bothered or even intended to follow-up on those applications, and have since released thousands of compilation albums without having the proper licenses. And the best part: the labels don’t even deny that they did this! I think it’s only fair that if Jammie Thomas was forced to pay $80,000 per song in her non-commercial piracy case that the record labels should be forced to pay the same, since they were actually making money off the deal (and yes, I know – Capitol v. Thomas was an American case, and this case is in Canada).
– Speaking of music, every year the BBC makes a list of up and coming artists they think might make it big in the upcoming calendar year (you might remember that I discovered La Roux via the 2009 list). Well, the 2010 list is out, so go and have a listen and stay ahead of the “coolness curve”!
– One last thing about music: if you’re an aspiring pop star and you’re going to be on live television, you might want to sing into the right end of the microphone.
– Smoking, estrogen and family history all contribute to breast cancer… but if studies from the University of Chicago are correct, loneliness might actually triple a woman’s chance to getting breast cancer. Studies so far have only been carried out on animals, but scientists are fairly certain that it would apply to humans as well. And given the jaw-dropping results – lonely rats had 84 times the amount of cancerous tissue their non-lonely but genetically similar counterparts did – you have to wonder.
– Brian Bonsall, who played little Andy Keaton on Family Ties, has been arrested. Again.
– Hines Ward is the NFL’s dirtiest player? Not with Flozell Adams around:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7qye-KxaFc&feature=player_embedded#