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If you live in California and listen to oldies
radio, don’t be surprised if your favorite station suddenly decides
to change its format. Thanks to a court decision that came down
this week, it might become a lot costlier for stations in that
state to play music made before 1972.

The plaintiffs in the case are the Turtles, a
’60s band best known for the song “Happy Together.”
(More precisely, the plaintiffs are Flo & Eddie, a
successor act with a litigious
history. They own the rights to the Turtles’ name and
recordings.) The defendant is the satellite-radio megalith SiriusXM.
In a nutshell, Flo & Eddie
argue that the broadcaster violated their rights each time it
transmitted a Turtles record without their consent.

This is where things get complicated. There is a difference
between owning the rights to a song and owning the rights
to a recording. (Bob Dylan owns the song “It Ain’t Me
Babe”; Flo & Eddie own the Turtles’ recording of it.) If you
own a song, you’re entitled to a fee when it is played on the air.
If you own a recording, the situation is more complex. You don’t
get royalties when the record is played on AM or FM radio. You
do get royalties when it’s played on Internet radio, for
reasons
related to fears of piracy. Because of the way the law defines
“digital transmission,” satellite stations have to pay those
digital fees too.

But federal copyright protection didn’t apply to sound
recordings before February 15, 1972. SiriusXM takes the position
that this means it doesn’t have to pay when it airs music recorded
before then. (That covers pretty much everything by the Turtles.)
But the Copyright Act of 1976 says the states can still
set the rules for those pre-1972 rights. And under California law,
copyright holders have “exclusive ownership” to those recordings
until 2047. Flo & Eddie argued that this gives them
considerable control over what could be done with those old Turtles
records. In this week’s
decision, U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez agreed.

“Exclusive ownership,” Gutierrez reasoned, means “the right to
use and possess the recording to the exclusion of others.”
California’s law, unlike the federal law, puts only one limit on
this control: The rightsholder may not prevent someone from
recording a remake of the record. Since this is the only exception
specified, the judge concluded that no other exemptions were
intended. He therefore issued a summary judgment for Flo &
Eddie on the parts of its suit related to SiriusXM’s broadcasts.
(Some other aspects of the case are still to be decided.) The
ruling did not determine the damages, but SiriusXM may owe millions
now not just to Flo & Eddie but to countless other owners of
pre-’72 copyrights.

SiriusXM is likely to appeal the ruling. In the meantime, Flo
& Eddie have filed similar suits in New York and Florida. Other
copyright holders, including the major record labels, have launched
lawsuits of their own.

Most media coverage of Gutierrez’s decision has stressed
the impact it will have on SiriusXM and on Internet services such
as Pandora. But the case could conceivably threaten any ordinary AM
oldies outlet that operates in California. The decision doesn’t
explicitly say AM and FM stations have to pay these fees, and you
can expect broadcasters’ lawyers to claim that this means they’re
off the hook. But the judge’s whole argument is based on the idea
that there are no exceptions to the copyright holder’s
rights save the single item spelled out in the state’s statute.
That suggests that radio stations—and, for that matter, restaurants
and bars that play recorded music—will have to either start paying
steep fees to play pre-’72 music or just take the easy road and
play something recorded more recently. (I asked Dennis Wharton, a
VP at the National Association of Broadcasters, if his group had
any comment on the decision. He replied that they were still
reviewing it.)

For years, the record industry has been trying
to get Congress to make analog broadcasters cough up the extra
fees that digital broadcasters have to pay. It may have just gotten
what it wanted through the back door, but only for records that are
more than 42 years old, and only in California. Watch for some
bizarre distortions in the radio marketplace.

It’s not enough to do the court-ordered time for the crime of
giving money to your friends for motives the state has decided are
felony crimes when that motive is to support a political
candidate–this is the land of the free where political
participation is near-sacred, and one can participate in the
electoral process only with a narrow set of state-approved methods,
and don’t you forget it, and don’t you disagree with it either.

The punishment imposed in the case of conservative pundit and
anti-Obama filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza show you must also agree
that it is good you were convicted, apparently.

From Reuters:

D’Souza, 53, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman
in Manhattan to live in a center, which would allow him to leave
during non-residential hours for employment, for the first eight
months of a five-year probationary period.

Berman also ordered D’Souza to perform one day of community
service a week during probation, undergo weekly therapy and pay a
$30,000 fine.

D’Souza, a frequent critic of U.S. President Barack
Obama, admitted in May to illegally reimbursing two “straw
donors” who donated $10,000 each to the unsuccessful 2012 U.S.
Senate campaign in New York of Wendy Long, a Republican he had
known since attending Dartmouth College in the early 1980s….

Prosecutors had sought a 10-to 16-month prison sentence,
rejecting defense arguments that D’Souza was “ashamed and contrite”
about his crime and deserved probation with community service.

They cited statements D’Souza made in media interviews after his
guilty plea, where he discussed being “selectively” targeted for
prosecution….

“I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it,” Berman said before
announcing the sentence. “And it is still hard for me to discern
any personal acceptance of responsibility in this case.”

Daily Beast refers to the
legally imposed therapy in quotes from the court as
“therapeutic counseling.” Forced therapy for enemies of the regime:
it’s not just for our sinister enemies abroad anymore in this
better, more peaceful post-Cold War world.

Have you ever maxed out on your legal contributions to a
political candidate? Have you ever given or loaned money to a
friend? Better make sure that friend hasn’t also given money to
that candidate, or you could be opening yourself to federal
investigations into your motives in the giving or knowledge of
their giving.

This may require a fairly officious level of investigation into
your life and papers, but hey, you might have broken the law and
this is a nation of laws, lots and lots of laws that you might have
broken. And if you broke them, you better understand that you broke
them and accept responsibility. It’s the American way.

I blogged a few months back about how
D’Souza’s admission of “guilt” didn’t amend my belief that the
charges were a miscarriage of true justice.

It’s not enough to do the court-ordered time for the crime of
giving money to your friends for motives the state has decided are
felony crimes when that motive is to support a political
candidate–this is the land of the free where political
participation is near-sacred, and one can participate in the
electoral process only with a narrow set of state-approved methods,
and don’t you forget it, and don’t you disagree with it either.

The punishment imposed in the case of conservative pundit and
anti-Obama filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza show you must also agree
that it is good you were convicted, apparently.

From Reuters:

D’Souza, 53, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman
in Manhattan to live in a center, which would allow him to leave
during non-residential hours for employment, for the first eight
months of a five-year probationary period.

Berman also ordered D’Souza to perform one day of community
service a week during probation, undergo weekly therapy and pay a
$30,000 fine.

D’Souza, a frequent critic of U.S. President Barack
Obama, admitted in May to illegally reimbursing two “straw
donors” who donated $10,000 each to the unsuccessful 2012 U.S.
Senate campaign in New York of Wendy Long, a Republican he had
known since attending Dartmouth College in the early 1980s….

Prosecutors had sought a 10-to 16-month prison sentence,
rejecting defense arguments that D’Souza was “ashamed and contrite”
about his crime and deserved probation with community service.

They cited statements D’Souza made in media interviews after his
guilty plea, where he discussed being “selectively” targeted for
prosecution….

“I’m not sure, Mr. D’Souza, that you get it,” Berman said before
announcing the sentence. “And it is still hard for me to discern
any personal acceptance of responsibility in this case.”

Daily Beast refers to the
legally imposed therapy in quotes from the court as
“therapeutic counseling.” Forced therapy for enemies of the regime:
it’s not just for our sinister enemies abroad anymore in this
better, more peaceful post-Cold War world.

Have you ever maxed out on your legal contributions to a
political candidate? Have you ever given or loaned money to a
friend? Better make sure that friend hasn’t also given money to
that candidate, or you could be opening yourself to federal
investigations into your motives in the giving or knowledge of
their giving.

This may require a fairly officious level of investigation into
your life and papers, but hey, you might have broken the law and
this is a nation of laws, lots and lots of laws that you might have
broken. And if you broke them, you better understand that you broke
them and accept responsibility. It’s the American way.

I blogged a few months back about how
D’Souza’s admission of “guilt” didn’t amend my belief that the
charges were a miscarriage of true justice.

• Rebel groups claim that U.S.
  airstrikes against ISIS targets in
  Syria also hit civilians. The Pentagon, meanwhile, says
  airstrikes didn’t just target ISIS but also the
  Khorasan group, reportedly an Al-Qaeda offshoot interested in
  orchestrating the next 9/11.
• People with nothing better to mess themselves over are upset at
  the way
  President Obama held a coffee cop while saluting a Marine.
• According to his wife,
  Mitt Romney could run for president again, especially if Jeb
  Bush doesn’t.
• The mayor of
  Boston will appoint a chief of arts and culture.
• The U.S. condemned a life sentence imposed by
  China on an ethnic Uighur scholar and human rights
  activist.
• India’s first probe to
  Mars, the Mars Orbiter Mission or MOM, is arriving at the red
  planet.

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In a world of
constant war, endless “economic recoveries,” and only two years
left of Joe Biden gaffes, it’s hard to be upbeat about the
future. I mean, what kind of joyless world are we leaving for our
children?

So thank Xenu—or Richard Dawkins—for South Park,
which starts its 18th incredible season tonight at 10 p.m.
eastern time on Comedy Central. What’s more, original episodes
of the show will continue through at least 2016, meaning the next
presidential election will be covered the way it should be: with
scabrous humor….

South Park is that rarest of birds: an envelope-pushing
commercial success. In a
new Daily Beast column, I argue that Trey Parker and
Matt Stone’s creation is qualitatively different that past TV
standouts:

Classic TV shows such
as I Love Lucy, The Beverly
Hillbillies, Cheers, and even the
path-breaking Seinfeld all provoked laughs that
made the world disappear for a half-hour. South
Park is not just funnier than any of those shows—it
refuses to let us escape the god-forsaken world in which we live.
Indeed, episode after episode (glorious,
full list here) rubs our noses in the ugliness of our world,
whether it be caused by terrorists, legally elected politicians,
insufferable atheists, ultra-pious and delusional businessmen,
idiot celebrities, or our own love of fast food and video
games.

Even better, South Park not only allows us to
laugh at the darkness rising all around us—it also teaches us to
navigate the endless slurry of bullshit firehosed at our faces in
the so-called Information Age. God help us all, but South
Park is more educational than all the endless hours
of Sesame Street or Between the
Lions that ever aired or will ever air on PBS. It teaches
us all real media literacy, how to identify and spot phony
philosophizing, moral panics, and self-interested crusades a mile
way.

Read the whole thing.