3 Count: Grande Settlement

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1: Ariana Grande Reaches Confidential Settlement with ’70s Funk Star Jimmy Castor’s Estate

First off today, Jim Farber at The New York Daily News is reporting that Ariana Grande has reached a settlement with Minder Music, the company that represents the estate of Jimmy Castor, over allegations that Grande had infringed one of his songs.

Minder filed the lawsuit claiming that Grande’s 2013 song The Way used infringing elements from the 1972 song Troglodyte (Cave Man) by the Jimmy Castor Bunch. The lawsuit actually focused on the spoken word intro that both songs have as Minder claimed it was clear that Grande’s work was based on Troglodyte. The rest of the songs are very different.

Now the two sides have reached a confidential agreement that, according to the announcement, is to both of their satisfaction. No other details are available.

2: Author Ken Cook Loses Copyright Claim Against Amazon

Next up today, the BBC is reporting that self-published author Ken Cook has lost his lawsuit with Amazon over the continued use of his images that were on the cover of his book.

Cook wrote the book Antipodean Antics after a 12,000 mile trip around Australia and New Zealand. He printed and sold 500 copies of the book however, after he had concluded selling the book, Amazon continued to feature it on its site and offer used copies for sale.

Cook sued saying that the use of the book’s cover, which includes two photos he took, was a copyright infringement. However, a judge in the UK has ruled that Cook agreed to allow the cover to be used when he registered with Amazon and that the terms were not outrageous enough to be voided.

3: “Bug” Causes Music Group to Bombard Google with Bogus DMCA Takedowns

Finally today, David Kravets at Ars Technica reports that Total Wipes, a group that represents some 800 labels across the globe, fled a DMCA takedown notice with Google asking for the delisting of pages owned by Ubuntu, Python, Skype and more.

Total Wipes has said that the issue was caused by a bug in their system caused them to seek out and file automated notices for pages that simply contained the word “Download”, regardless of if there was infringing content on the page or not.

The company has apologized for the mistake and has said they are working with Google to resolve the matter. However, they also noted that almost none of the links were actually removed by Google, with the search giant having detected the error before removal.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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