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Music

Birthday Song's Copyright Leads To a Lawsuit For the Ages 440

Posted by Soulskill
from the and-many-more dept.
New submitter chriscappuccio sends this excerpt from the NY Times: "The song 'Happy Birthday to You' is widely credited for being the most performed song in the world. But one of its latest venues may be the federal courthouse in Manhattan, where the only parties may be the litigants to a new legal battle. The dispute stems from a lawsuit filed on Thursday by a filmmaker in New York who is seeking to have the court declare the popular ditty to be in the public domain, and to block a music company from claiming it owns the copyright to the song and charging licensing fees for its use. The filmmaker, Jennifer Nelson, was producing a documentary movie, tentatively titled 'Happy Birthday,' about the song, the lawsuit said. In one proposed scene, the song was to be performed."

Comment: EvaPharmacy has been doing this for years... (Score 5, Interesting) 91

by AdamD1 (#43941061) Attached to: New In-Memory Rootkit Discovered By German Hoster

This has actually been around since at least 2006.

Russian spam operation EvaPharamacy have been using this approach to turn public servers they don't own into free hosting for all of their rogue pharmacy sites.

You can read a pretty detailed description of this here:

http://pharmalert.zoomshare.com/1.html

The people who run EvaPharmacy (criminals, in my opinion, but also in others' opinion) do a lot of destructive things to your server while installing their proxy hosting / DNS software on your server, and they leave no trace of any files at all.

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Comment: I feel old. (Score 1) 623

by AdamD1 (#43850841) Attached to: How Did You Learn How To Program?

I first learned *about* programming when I was 10 (1977) by reading a small paperback book about the Basic language. I wrote on paper with pencil to learn some very rudimentary programming. I didn't learn on a real computer until 1979 or 1980 - at my junior high school - and that was originally using an Atari 400 or 800. We also learned on an IBM card reader connected to a university unix server using only a wide-carriage printer as the output, no screen at all. I also learned on a Tandy TRS-80 and an Apple IIe. The first language I learned: Basic, on an Atari computer. The 2nd: Turbo Pascal on an Apple IIe. I remember being taught some very preliminary machine language / assembly at that time as well but that was from fellow students. It never stuck with me.

I didn't own a computer for most of the time I was most interested in programming one. When I was really eager to learn programming the most (say 1981 - 1984), my parents couldn't afford one and they felt it was a frivolous purchase. It wasn't until 1994 that I dove into programming seriously. That ended up being Perl and Oracle PL/SQL that I learned and used extensively at that time.

Comment: Re:A Better Idea (Score 1) 750

by SolitaryMan (#43799055) Attached to: House Bill Would Mandate Smart Gun Tech By U.S. Manufacturers

In this case it *is* an aspect of a nanny state.

You want others to help you with the problem *you* brought upon *yourself*.

I'm sorry, I don't give a flying fuck about people and their kids shooting themselves in the face, because they don't know how to handle a gun. You bought a gun, you deal with it. I'm not paying for your hobbies. Period.

My only concern if bullets flying *outside* of your private property.

Comment: Re:A Better Idea (Score 1) 750

by SolitaryMan (#43795487) Attached to: House Bill Would Mandate Smart Gun Tech By U.S. Manufacturers

Its a non issue till A) its your child

Your child is your problem. My child does not have access to firearms and I'm not paying for your child to be taught some bullshit about guns. If you want to teach your kid, go ahead and do it yourself.

, or B) someone cries "Won't someone please think of the children" and we all lose our rights.

And teaching kids about guns is supposed to prevent this... how, exactly?

Comment: Re:Yeah... (Score 1) 1105

The thing is that one person (heck, even one country) can't make enough impact, because, as I mentioned, there is no single major polluter.

To make enough impact, everybody has to be onboard, which I don't believe will ever happen. Especially given the fact that there is a (financial in most cases) initiative not to do that in the first place and if I do this and you don't, my business is at disadvantage.

"Everyone is entitled to an *informed* opinion." -- Harlan Ellison

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