The music industry’s courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack.
Continue Reading “Law professor fires back at song-swapping lawsuits” »

An unreleased, experimental track by The Beatles could be made public 41 years after it was recorded at Abbey Road studios, ex-member Paul McCartney has said.
Continue Reading “McCartney hints at “mythical” Beatles track release” »

Despite opposition from the Israel Prisons Service (IPS), Dror Alperon will be released from custody for the funeral of his father and mob kingpin Yaakov Alperon, who was killed in a Tel Aviv car bombing on Monday, Channel 10 reported.
Continue Reading “‘Dror Alperon can attend dad’s funeral’” »

In wooing federal employee votes on the eve of the election, Barack Obama wrote a series of letters to workers that offer detailed descriptions of how he intends to add muscle to specific government programs, give new power to bureaucrats and roll back some Bush administration policies.
Continue Reading “Obama Wrote Federal Staffers About His Goals” »

Perhaps it was the announcement that NBC News is coming out with a DVD titled “Yes We Can: The Barack Obama Story.” Or that ABC and USA Today are rushing out a book on the election. Or that HBO has snapped up a documentary on Obama’s campaign.
Continue Reading “A Giddy Sense of Boosterism” »

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed insider-trading charges against Mark Cuban, the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, over his sale of shares in Internet company Mamma.com after he learned it was raising money through a private financing.
The SEC alleges Mr. Cuban sold his entire 6% ownership stake on June 28, 2004, immediately after learning that Mamma.com was raising money through a public investment in private entity, or PIPE. The next day, after the markets closed, the company announced the PIPE financing. When the markets opened the morning of June 30, shares of the company dropped by 9%. By selling his stake, Mr. Cuban avoided more than $750,000 in losses, the SEC alleges. (Read the full text of the complaint.)

In a PIPE, shares are issued at a discount. When a PIPE is announced, it’s often followed by a drop in the stock price as shareholders anticipate their stake will be diluted. Investment advisers working for the company often solicit interest from potential investors. Investors usually have to sign confidentiality agreements stating that they won’t trade on the information. However, Mr. Cuban’s lawyers deny that he was told the information was confidential.

Christopher Clark, a lawyer for Mr. Cuban, said, “We’re shocked. We find it incredible that given all the important issues that the SEC has to address with regard to today’s economy they’ve sought to bring a $750,000 case relating to a he-said she-said about one trade against a person whose integrity has never been questioned before with regard to the securities markets.” He also said he was “further shocked because the whole enforcement process was tainted by express bias by enforcement officials and certain other misconduct that we will happily detail to the judge in this case.”
Continue Reading “SEC Charges Mark Cuban With Insider Trading” »

YouTube is in danger of being upstaged commercially by a smaller upstart backed by News Corporation and NBC Universal as the video-sharing site struggles to make its massive global audience appeal to advertisers.

Hulu, a video site showing only professional TV shows and movies, is forecast to draw level with Google’s YouTube in US advertising revenues next year.

The feat suggests traditional media companies can make money online without having to cede control to Google, as the music industry did to Apple, whose iTunes music store dominates the digital music market.

It also shows the difficulties other social networks might have in generating revenues from their amateur content.

YouTube, for which Google paid $1.65bn two years ago, is by some distance the most popular online video destination, with 83m unique viewers in the US in September, compared to Hulu’s 6m, according to market researcher Nielsen.

But Hulu’s advertising revenues are growing more quickly, according to Screen Digest, a digital media research group.

Continue Reading “Rival forecast to catch YouTube” »

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Sunday he is concerned about executive orders from President Bush in his last few months in office and the effect they could have on the incoming administration.

“Bush is signing away consumer and environmental laws. I mean they’re running amok, you know,” Jackson said.

Some Democrats in Congress have criticized several federal regulations enacted in the waning months of the Bush administration and are discussing whether some should be repealed when President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January.

The civil rights leader and former presidential hopeful also criticized the federal bailout of the financial industry and called for the outgoing president to help the ailing automotive industry.

“It’s a huge economic crisis being compounded by this sense of ideology,” Jackson said after delivering a sermon at Bethel AME church in Baltimore.

Jackson, who won several state primaries as a Democrat in the 1984 and 1988 presidential races, said his relationship with Obama is a “great one.”

Continue Reading “Jesse Jackson concerned about Bush’s last days” »

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

Continue Reading “The world has never seen such freezing heat” »