Verizon wants your content for mobile phones if your a band

USA Group and Stun Mobile Media found this press release:

Calling All Bands: Verizon Wireless and MySpace Want to 'Sign' You to V CAST

    BEDMINSTER, N.J., Feb. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Now one band has the chance of a
lifetime: to be the first unsigned band to launch their career on a wireless
phone.  Leveraging the newest medium for artists to reach their fans, the
"Calling All Bands" contest from Verizon Wireless and MySpace offers one lucky
unsigned band the opportunity to have their song, music video, ring tone and
ring back tone released on Verizon Wireless -- the nation's leading wireless
provider with 51.3 million customers.
   Verizon Wireless will release the "Calling All Bands" winner's song on
V CAST Music -- marking the first time an unsigned band will release its first
single on a wireless phone.  The winner will also work with Verizon Wireless
to produce a music video that will be released on V CAST, plus a ring tone and
ring back tone of the winning song that will be available for purchase by
Verizon Wireless customers.  MySpace, with more than one million registered
bands, helps Verizon Wireless bring authentic bands to the mobile world,
further extending the music experience on customers' communication devices
they use most every day -- their wireless phones.
   Beginning today, any unsigned band on MySpace can submit an original song
for the "Calling All Bands" contest.  From all submissions, 15 semi-finalists
will be selected and the MySpace community of friends and fans can listen and
vote online for their favorite band from the contest page.  The top five
entries to receive the most votes will become finalists; the winner will be
chosen among the finalists by Verizon Wireless and MySpace and will be
announced on MySpace at the end of March.

   Save These Dates:

   * February 15 - March 1: Entrant submission period
   * March 13 - March 22: The 15 semi-finalists, chosen by MySpace Music
     Editors, will be linked to or posted on the contest page where MySpace
     bands, their friends and fans can vote for their favorite band
   * March 24: The five contest finalists are announced on
     http://www.myspace.com/callingallbands
   * March 29: "Calling All Bands" contest winner is selected by Verizon
     Wireless and MySpace and announced online on http://www.myspace.com

   John Harrobin, vice president of marketing for Verizon Wireless, said,
"V CAST, with music that crosses all genres, has quickly become the hottest
medium for artists to reach new and existing fans.  Verizon Wireless V CAST
Music customers love music and many of them are plugged in to the latest music
trends -- the "Calling All Bands" contest is another opportunity to discover
new artists, which makes this the perfect way for lesser-known artists to
showcase their music to an entirely new audience."

   V CAST Music
   V CAST Music from Verizon Wireless lets customers play music on their
wireless phones from well-known and independent artists -- the same device
they have come to rely upon for entertainment, information and mobile
communication.  The V CAST Music Store already boasts a collection of more
than a half-million songs and will contain a million songs by spring and lets
customers browse, preview, download and play high-quality digital music from
their phones or in the Verizon Wireless V CAST Music Online Store.  V CAST
Music songs cost $0.99 if purchased from the PC or $1.99 if purchased and
downloaded over the air onto a V CAST Music phone.
   V CAST Music runs on Verizon Wireless' broadband network, the most robust,
award-winning wireless broadband network in the nation, available to about
150 million people from coast to coast.  Customers need a V CAST-enabled phone
and a subscription to the V CAST VPak, which is $15.00 monthly access, added
to their Verizon Wireless calling plan to access V CAST Music and music videos
on their phones.  For a limited time, customers who sign up for V CAST receive
one month of V CAST service free.  Customers interested in managing their
music from their PCs in the V CAST Music Online Store can do so without a
V CAST VPak.
   V CAST Music is available through Verizon Wireless' 2,000 Communications
Stores and Circuit City locations and online at
http://www.verizonwireless.com.  For more information, visit
http://www.verizonwireless.com/music.

   "Calling All Bands" Contest Rules
   Contest runs from February 15 at 9:00 p.m. PT through March 29 at 11:59
p.m. PT and is open to any unsigned band.  Interested entrants can submit an
original song online by March 1 at http://www.myspace.com/callingallbands that
will be judged on quality, originality and popular appeal of the submission by
MySpace Music Editors.  Bands must be registered on MySpace to participate and
registration is free.  Bands need to upload their digital music file and fill
out an entry form at the site. From all submissions, MySpace Music Editors
will select 15 semi-finalists that will be linked to or posted on the contest
page from March 13 through March 22 where MySpace bands and their community of
friends and fans can listen and vote for their favorite band.  The five
entries to receive the most votes will become finalists and Verizon Wireless
and MySpace will select and announce the "Calling All Bands" contest winner
online on http://www.myspace.com on March 29.  For a complete list of contest
rules, visit http://www.myspace.com/callingallbands.  No purchase necessary.
Void outside the U.S. and where prohibited.

   About Verizon Wireless
   Verizon Wireless owns and operates the nation's most reliable wireless
network, serving 51.3 million voice and data customers. Headquartered in
Bedminster, NJ, Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications
(NYSE: VZ) and Vodafone (NYSE and LSE: VOD). Find more information on the Web
at http://www.verizonwireless.com.  To preview and request broadcast-quality
video footage and high-resolution stills of Verizon Wireless operations, log
on to the Verizon Wireless Multimedia Library at
http://www.verizonwireless.com/multimedia.

Music companies are going after your YouTube Video's

Mom Sues Universal Music For Blocking YouTube Video

SAN FRANCISCO -- A Pennsylvania mother sued Universal Music Publishing Co. in federal court in San Francisco on Wednesday for forcing YouTube to take down her home video of her toddler son dancing to 29 seconds of a Prince song.

Stephanie Lenz's lawsuit accuses Universal Music of sending YouTube an allegedly baseless complaint on June 4 claiming that her video violated the company's copyright to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy."

The complaint resulted in YouTube's removal of the video from its Web site for six weeks until Lenz sent the video-sharing Web site a counter-notice demanding reposting, the lawsuit says.

Lenz said, "I was really surprised and angry when I learned my video was removed. Universal should not be using legal threats to try to prevent people from sharing videos of their kids with family and friends."

The lawsuit contends the brief video is protected by the doctrine of fair use, which allows limited use of copyrighted material for purposes such as commentary and artistic expression.

The 29-second film shows Lenz's 18-month-old son Holden bouncing to the rock star's song and smiling at the camera as he pushes a rolling walker around her kitchen.

Lenz, a writer who lives in the western Pennsylvania town of Gallitzin, recorded the scene with a digital camera in February and posted it on YouTube for her family and friends to see, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks a court order barring Universal from filing future copyright claims over the video as well as unspecified financial compensation for Lenz's loss of free speech and her costs in securing the reposting.

Lenz is represented by attorneys from the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has a project of protecting online free speech.

EFF attorney Jason Schultz said the lawsuit was filed in the federal court for Northern California because YouTube has headquarters in San Bruno and is now owned by Mountain View-based Google.

Schultz said Lenz claims the background recording of the song was fair use because it was brief, noncommercial personal use and was employed in artistic expression.

"The music is playing in her kitchen. She's just recording her child," the attorney said.

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A Mother fights the studio bulldogs to save son from his file sharing crime

Michael Goldstein of Stun Mobile Media and the USA Group have been following the court cases of file sharing of illegal content over the internet, and came across the case of a single mother Tanya Anderson.

Find out more about the Author of this blog about mobile content at his website




Tanya Anderson, the single mother from Oregon previously sued by the RIAA — which dropped the case just before losing a summary judgement — is now
suing the RIAA and their hired snoop Safenet (aka MediaSentry) for malicious prosecution. Read More

The legal savvy single mother Tanya Anderson proved a worthy opponent with some legal successes so far, is asserting claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. (RICO)



A reader at Groklaw has already learned that Tanya Anderson is seeking to have the RIAA forfeit the copyrights in question as part of the settlement (search the page for '18.6-7').

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Will parents pay their kids illegal file sharing ticket or will they be sent to jail?

Michael Goldstein of Stun Mobile media and the USA group reacts to a dilemma of how the parents will respond to an ultimateum by the recording studios to get paid and to prosecute students at the University of Washington.

Find out more about the Author Michael Goldstein of this blog about mobile content and theft, at his website

Several readers let us know that the University of Washington has announced that it will pass on RIAA settlement offer letters to students identified, presumably by IP address, as suspected file sharers. "The notices say offending students have 20 days to settle with the association by paying it about $3,000 to $5,000 or be taken to court without possibility of a settlement." The Vice Provost for Student Life sent an email to all students saying, "The University has been notified by the RIAA that we will be receiving a number of these early settlement letters. After careful consideration, we have decided to forward the letters to the alleged copyright violators."

Find out more about the Author of this blog about mobile content at his website

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/96215.html

Mobile Content can include music or ringtones by Amy Winehouse, Beyonce or movies like Knocked Up

Big entertainment is coming to your small screeen mobile phone.

What teens use their mobile phones for today, will be very different a year from now. While mobile content currently involves ringtones, and text messaging, and downloading your favorite song and mobile video game, the near future will bring live mobile tv, movies on demand, and banking services. The GPS tracking in all phones might be used for advertising when passing the stores signal. amp'd and helio are using the GPS tracking now as a premium service to find your friendds, with all other mobile services like verison, sprint, at&t, t-mobile following. Other countries are the testing grounds of what we can expect in the USA, so you only need to check the internet to find out what the newest technologies and advancements are in mobile phone technology. Stun Mobile media is at the forefront of the emerging and constantly changing mobile phone explosion. Stun mobile media's main interest is in mobile marketing in all media content sources, from mobile video's to music to mobile video games, to text messaging.

Michael Goldstein is COO and chief creative for Los Angeles-based Stun Mobile Media, specializing in the acquisition, creation and distribution of mobile content. He can be reached at mg@stunmobile.com.

Find out more about the Author of this blog about mobile content at his website

Premium content is free on YouTube. Are the studios coming after your kids?

Kids have grown up stealing music, and now they're uploading premium content they don't have permission to use. So now what's going to happen? Are the studio's going to come after your kids and arrest them, or are they going to find ways to use this as a promotion tool.

If You Can't Beat 'Em…

Content owners need to rethink how they deal with online video sites



One of the biggest problems that content owners face today is that kids have grown up stealing music. The music industry fought this fight too long and as a result has lost this generation, which now expects to receive its video content in a similar way. Today's kids don't distinguish between web video and television—to them it's just content. Perhaps the lesson that traditional media companies should take from this example is to find ways to join consumers, not beat them.





What irks the studios is that disruptive companies like YouTube have built strong businesses based on users uploading premium content they don't have permission to use. It's not so much the fact that the content is on the platform. It's more that YouTube is not rewarding the studios as content owners with the advertising dollars it has been able to monetize from their content.







Alan Bell, Paramount Studios' executive vp and first chief technology officer, doesn't dispute that "YouTube is an efficient sharing platform," but he adds, "It's just not being used properly. Logically, it seems that a good idea is to have companies like YouTube simply develop software that serves the needs of the entertainment industry."

That would seem like an easy enough task, but before this happens, the parties need to resolve who owns the content copyright. Who is going to exploit the copyright? Who sells the advertising? And what assets go to what platform at what time?

"You write YouTube a letter and the content gets removed within eight hours," explains Bell. "But the site is so vast that the next day it's up on the platform again, posted by another user. One solution is to write software based on keywords that recognizes what content is up there. If it can recognize it, then it can be monetized.

"The technology of rights management today is not yet perfect," Bell continues. "So what we need to do in the meantime is to distinguish between 'fair use,' 'popular use' and 'reasonable use.' Identify what people want to do with those rights, and then package and market those rights accordingly."

This all makes sense, but I can't help but wonder if the studios are overthinking this a little. They are obsessed with their intellectual properties, and justifiably so. But we're not just dealing with IP piracy, we're dealing with a social lifestyle phenomenon.

"Everyone wants to consume their media the way they want to consume it. You can't control that," acknowledges Stefanie Henning, senior vp, global marketing and new media for Fox Television Studios. "But we do want an environment where consumers can get to our content in the best format possible on a platform that we're able to monetize."

Instead of waiting for YouTube to come up with a viable solution or worse yet, fighting the way consumers have grown accustomed to doing things, perhaps the studios should embrace it.

I'm not saying that the studios stop monitoring content posted on YouTube. Rather, I'm suggesting that content owners like the studios give consumers the same tools they've grown to expect from sites like YouTube.

"Users want to be passionate about what their interests are. The habit of sharing them has become a cultural phenomenon," says Richard Rosenblatt, founder and former chairman of MySpace. "Online Communities like YouTube, MySpace and me.TV are all about embracing self-expression."

Whether studios like it or not, users are going to find ways to rip off clips from favorite television shows like NBC's The Office. So let's give it to them. The TV studios already have the eyeballs and the advertising inventory. They also have branded content that keeps users coming back. Logically, they should be able to sell advertising, no matter where the audience is. The studios need make video clips available on their Web sites—not just what they want people to see, which they are already doing, but what people want to see.

Equally important, they need to provide the video-embed codes so users can share the content on any community pages they want. If users go to the studio's host site only once to get the codes to share on their community pages, it doesn't matter. Because with the right technology, the studio's host site can stream advertising to those feeds as part of the user experience.

Once users discover that some of the coolest clips from their favorite TV shows are posted online via the studio's site immediately after a show airs, the amount of unauthorized uploading of video content on sites like YouTube should diminish.

Better yet, the networks will have engaged thousands of users legitimately to virally market their content all over the Internet—just as they're already doing thanks to sites like YouTube.

To take it one step further, it wouldn't surprise me if the studios find ways to sign users up and reward "power users" for influencing the communities they reach—just like marketing practices in the early days of the Internet.


Stolen from a recent article by Michael Goldstein:
Michael Goldstein is COO and chief creative for Los Angeles-based Stun Mobile Media, specializing in the acquisition, creation and distribution of mobile content. He can be reached at mg@stunmobile.com.


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Find out more about the Author of this blog and see the original article at Mediaweek mediaweek.com