HHR New Media, Entertainment and Technology Group

We had recently written about how a dispute over the ownership of certain IP threatened to derail eBay’s proposed sale of Skype.  Reports last week have revealed that Skype and parent eBay Inc. have reached a definitive settlement agreement with Skype’s founders that resolves litigation over the critical GI technology necessary to run Skype and removes the major obstacle that threatened  the $1.9 billion cash deal for Skype.  Under the terms of the settlement, Zennstrom and Friis will join the investor group and in exchange for contributing Joltid’s GI technology, they will receive a 14 percent stake in Skype, effectively regaining part ownership of their creation.  The other investors will hold 56 percent of Skype with eBay to retain the remaining 30 percent.  The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009.

In a decision applauded by webcasters and lamented by the recording industry, the Second Circuit ruled last week that individualized radio stations–such as those offered by LAUNCHcast and Pandora–are not “interactive services” under the DMCA, freeing the webcasters from the potentially massive financial burden of having to pay licensing fees to record labels for the transmission of sound recordings as part of their services.  The decision was the first by a federal court of appeals to examine the hotly-debated issue.

The suit, originally filed in 2001 by several labels owned by Sony BMG, including Arista, Bad Boy and Zomba, alleged that LAUNCHcast, a webcasting service run by Yahoo’s Launch Media unit, which enables users to create “stations” that play songs within a particular genre or similar to a particular artist or song, violated provisions of the DMCA that required payment of licensing fees for the use of sound recordings in an “interactive” service.”  Continue Reading »

What’s new in digital media?   Subscribe to digitalhhr.com to receive today’s news:

•  Yahoo is getting out of the stand-alone Internet radio business.  It has reached an agreement with CBS Radio for the operation and ad-sales operations for LAUNCHcast radio channel.  Yahoo employees will continue to handle programming.  According to this report in the WSJ, the decision was driven, in part, by rising royalty rates for streaming music.
• Here’s an interesting piece from Advertising Age discussing the use of widgets in advertising and marketing campaigns.  The upshot:  the surface is only beginning to be scratched.
• A piece in the New York Times Bits blog discusses how YouTube’s slogan “Broadcast Yourself” can also, inadvertently, mean “Broadcast Your Taste in Videos.”   Apparently by suscribing to a YouTube channel, your user name and picture are posted on the channel page, for all the world to see.  And there is no wasy to keep your subscription private.  We will have a longer post on these type of privacy issues soon.  Stay tuned.

What’s new in digital media?   Subscribe to digitalhhr.com to receive today’s news:

• Some good news for Yahoo for a change as its stock jumps 7% on a report that Jonathan Miller, former CEO of AOL, is talking with private and sovereign equity funds about funding a buy-out of the company.  More details here.
• Maybe some good news for the economy??  E-commerce sales jumped 15% on Cyber Monday, according to a report by comScore.
• MySpace is rolling out a new service to enable members to look at video clips embedded on their home pages via their mobile phones.  The service will be free to users, with MySpace bundling the video clips with ads.  More information here.
• Goldman Sachs is looking into launching an online bank.  The move appears to be one of the initiatives that GS is undertaking to expand its asset base now that it is a bank holding company.  Here’s the report from the Wall Street Journal detailing the news.