Google announced today that it had reached an agreement with Viacom that will avoid a media debacle over YouTube users privacy:
As we let you know on July 4, YouTube received a court order to produce viewing history data. We are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original demand [...]

The Center for Social Media has released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.
If you have a vlog, video podcast or post videos to sites like YouTube, knowing about fair use could help keep you from getting sued.
Here’s a summary of their recommendations:

YouTube has responded to a federal court order requiring the company, as part of Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit, to give Viacom copies of YouTube’s server log files.
These log files are needed by Viacom to help it determine the extent to which YouTube has been used to distribute copyrighted content without permission.
However, Viacom doesn’t need the [...]

This is one of a series of videos by Frances Pinter and David Percy that look at building businesses based on Creative Commons licenses.
It takes a look at Magnatune, a digital music store built on CC licenses, and the company’s founder, John Buckman.
Creative Commons licenses are a set of free tools designed to let you [...]

The Associated Press, after sending cease and desist letters to the social media site Drudge Retort, plans to release guidelines that explain how much of its articles and media bloggers and Web sites can copy within fair use rights:
The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying [...]

The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York today made public a decision in the proceeding to determine reasonable license fees to be paid to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) by AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo! for their online performance of musical works. Total payments to be made [...]

The Open Rights Group has an in-depth look at Magnatune, a pioneering record label that licenses its releases under Creative Commons licenses.
This means that Magnatune’s music is:

Shareable: Users are invited to share their purchased tracks with up to three friends, can listen to the entire catalogue for free via the website’s 128kbps streams, and can [...]

The Citizen Media Law Project has published a free online legal guide. The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School‚Äôs Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a research center founded to “explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development,” and the Center for Citizen Media, an initiative [...]

Sessions from last fall’s Podcast and New Media Expo (PNME) continue to be released via Gigavox Media’s Podcast Academy site. The latest session is of interest to any podcaster who wants or needs to include music in their episodes. “Music Licensing for Podcasts and New Media” covers a lot of ground in under an [...]

According to a new new NYU research report - Does Chatter Matter? - user-generated content, including blogs and social networking sites, should be considered an important tool for promoting music and predicting sales.
Researchers looked at the usefulness of user-generated content in predicting sales in the music industry. They tracked the changes in online chatter for [...]