Group items tagged

Sony has been sued for patent infringement for its Blu-Ray technology once again, this time by California intellectual property company Orinda IP USA.In May 2007, a company called Target Technology sued Sony, alleging that Blu-ray infringed on patents discussing the reflective materials used on optical discs. The suit from Orinda, filed on August 20, involves the method of reproducing data on "disk-shaped media," namely Blu-ray discs.

CHENNAI: The Cyber Crime Cell of the Chennai Central Crime Branch has registered a case on a complaint filed by a city advocate against Airtel mobile communication service that it was sending obscene messages to his phone without his consent. The police registered the case on a complaint filed by the advocate, V.S.Suresh of George Town here, to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM), Egmore. The CMM, R.Killivalavan, had forwarded the complaint to the City Central Crime Branch for registering an FIR, investigating the matter and filing the final report. The case has been registered against the Chief Executive Officer, Bharati Airtel Limited for offences, including under Sections 292 (Sale, etc., of obscene books) and 294 (Obscene acts and songs) of IPC.

My friend had hundreds of these examples. We could have sat in his living room playing at musical genealogy for hours. Did the examples upset him? Of course not, because he knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence-cribbing, tweaking, transforming-were at the very heart of the creative process. True, copying could go too far. There were times when one artist was simply replicating the work of another, and to let that pass inhibited true creativity. But it was equally dangerous to be overly vigilant in policing creative expression, because if Led Zeppelin hadn't been free to mine the blues for inspiration we wouldn't have got "Whole Lotta Love," and if Kurt Cobain couldn't listen to "More Than a Feeling" and pick out and transform the part he really liked we wouldn't have "Smells Like Teen Spirit"-and, in the evolution of rock, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was a real step forward from "More Than a Feeling." A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, and that distinction, I realized, was what was missing from the discussion of Bryony Lavery's borrowings. Yes, she had copied my work. But no one was asking why she had copied it, or what she had copied, or whether her copying served some larger purpose.