Ginny Saville on CARES Act (Coronavirus Relief)

(editor's note - The following was written by Ginny Saville, founder/owner/operator of The Botany Bay stores in Central KY. You can also find The Botany Bay on Facebook and Instagram.)

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I spent my morning outlining my understanding of the important parts of CARES Act for regular people, small business owners and individuals. This is a long post, read if you are interested. It tweaked a lot of rules about retirement plan withdrawals and contributions, charitable contributions, and how businesses can deduct interest and losses, in addition to these things that affect the most of us.

Music Modernization Act now a Law

From The Verge:

President Trump has signed the Music Modernization Act (MMA) into law, officially passing the most sweeping reform to copyright law in decades. The bill, heralded by labels, musicians, and politicians, unanimously passed through both the House and Senate before going to the president.

The bill revamps Section 115 of the U.S. Copyright Act and aims to bring copyright law up to speed for the streaming era. These are the act’s three main pieces of legislation:

The Music Modernization Act, which streamlines the music-licensing process to make it easier for rights holders to get paid when their music is streamed online

The Compensating Legacy Artists for their Songs, Service, & Important Contributions to Society (CLASSICS) Act for pre-1972 recordings

The Allocation for Music Producers (AMP) Act, which improves royalty payouts for producers and engineers from SoundExchange when their recordings are used on satellite and online radio (Notably, this is the first time producers have ever been mentioned in copyright law.)

What does all this mean? 

Read the entire article here.

EFF says "The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared"

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

"Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations...."

Read it here.

Free Music - An interview with Ram Samudrala

- David "Skinny Devil" McLean
originally published at Tinfoil Music
Date: Friday, October 26 2001 @ 16:45:03 BST

Ram Samudrala is author of, among other important works, the "Free Music Philosophy" - which can be accessed via Ram's site (http://www.ram.org) or the EFF's site (http://www.eff.org). In essence, Ram's manifesto offers a unique and radical solution to the problems associated with copyright law and it's current abuse.

I had the opportunity to speak with Ram recently... 

1) Ram, how & when did you first get interested in copyright issues (specifically) and IP issues (in general)?

It probably began in 1990 or so, when I got into Unix, GNU Software, and the growing Linux movement. It came to a head after some exchanges on alt.music.alternative in 1994/1995 about the nature of music (which involved Bill Barbot of the band Jawbox who had just been signed to Atlantic, and later dropped). At this point, I decided to write the Free Music Philosophy.

2) Can you sum up the "Free Music Philosophy" and tell us if it has evolved since your original essay was written?