Thinking about releasing your band's live album? If Clear Channel has anything to say about it, you won't be able to do it without forking out money to them first.
In Clear Channel's quest to own absolutely everything and everyone on the planet, they've filed the following patent (which is being Challenged by our heroic friends at the EFF.
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a challenge Tuesday to an illegitimate patent from Clear Channel Communications. The patent -- for a system and method of creating digital recordings of live performances -- locks musical acts into using Clear Channel technology and blocks innovations by others.
Clear Channel claims that its patent creates a monopoly on all-in-one technologies that produce post-concert live recordings on digital media and has threatened to sue anyone who makes such recordings with a different system. This has forced bands like the Pixies into using Clear Channel's proprietary technology, and it hurts investment and innovation in new systems developed by other companies.
On a scale of horrifying to something even worse than horrifying that there's no word for, this is definitely up there. Clear Channel has already cemented their place as being the owners of the only places for bands to play in many markets, the owners of the only radio stations as well. Independent music has suffered horribly, as smaller bands have a much harder time being able to get on bigger shows, can't conceivably get on the radio, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. But that's not good enough for our friends (and by friends, I mean enemies) at CC - who believe that independent art needs to suffer a little more. You want to make a live album, you gotta go through Clear Channel first. Are my eyes deceiving me? Because I'm sure I'm reading this correctly. Thankfully, we have the EFF helping us fight litigation with litigation:
The request for reexamination filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office shows that a company named Telex had in fact developed similar technology more than a year before Clear Channel filed its patent request. EFF, in conjunction with Theodore C. McCullough of the Lemaire Patent Law Firm and with the help of students at the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic at American University's Washington College of Law, wants the patent office to revoke the patent based on this and other extensive evidence.
Thankfully, the EFF seems to have found CC's claim to be a bogus one. I'm still interested, though, in seeing if this ability to sue would apply across the board to anyone performing in a concert venue, not just soundboard recordings (which would be bad enough.) It just doesn't seem sane or realistic to be that litigious against consumers, to start waving around subpoenas like candy... But, of course, the recent past has shown us in the realm of digital rights, sanity and reality are no barre to the powers that be. Think of all the Deadheads and their DATs!
