Karaoke Forums

I doubt any attorney would touch it without at least a $5,000 retainer which might get you 25 hours worth of work less filing fees etc, if you're lucky. When a Respondant is served papers, they have X number of days (usually 30-45 days to respond). Then the letters start flowing betweens attorneys in the hopes of settling the matter ( could be anywhere from one to a dozen letters, depending on progress). If there is no settlement, then you get ready for discovery (could be anywhere from half a day to several days), then perhaps some more letter writing and finally court. Depending on witnesses, expert witnesses, etc it could take days weeks or even months (and you are paying your lawyer full days). So as you can see it can easily run in the tens of thousands of dollars, win or lose. You may luck out and get court costs but I wouldn't bet the bank on it. A lawyer will cost you from a very cheap (out of law school $100/hr to proabably a mean of $250-300/hr to astronomical). Then again you might find one who will do it in the hopes of publicity but I wouldn't bet on that either. This is a simple chronicilogical order. The length and steps will vary in different jurisdictions.

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You can be strange but not a stranger

Athena, I have no Idea how many hours an attorney would have wrapped up in a case like this. I'm a public defender, so I handle criminal cases, and I don't keep track of hours. Timberlea's estimates seem reasonable.

Thank you Singyoassoff...shot am email off to my IP attny...she said full process would most likely take 10,000 billed hours due to delays discovery ect...yes that is ten thousand hours and a timeline of about 9 years start to finish......anyone else out there with a IP attny see if they agree my curiosity has the better of me on this. And Singyoassoff...if Iamb ever in Sarasota and get arrested for say inserting a hard drive into a pirate...I hope I get you as a public defender...Hahahahaha...

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"Integrity is choosing your thoughts, words and actions based on your principles and values rather than for your personal gain."
Unknown
"if a man has integrity, nothing else matters, If a man has no integrity, nothing else matters."
Lee McGuffey

Our IP guys will have to agree to disagree. It seems mine says that ratio goes the other way, with the mfr. getting the 10% shot. The case depends on the display of the logo. and IF said logos are in fact, not legally attached to many- and possibly all- of the tracks ( No U.S. licensing - the UK licensing means nothing here- and many with no permission ever even requested), Then the logos are not legally visible. No case- and no 10,000 billable hours either. As a matter of fact, they also feel that IF the mfr. takes it to court and loses, said mfr. puts themselves in a VERY bad position regarding a class action suit pointed their way....

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."

Everyone has a right to backup copyrighted material as long as it isn't distributed to the public, or used concurrently in multiple locations.

Everyone has the right to transform copyright material (as long as they don't circumvent copy protection schemes)

Industry changes, and the content providers have to change with it. It's changed everywhere, but US karaoke companies. I can watch movies on netflix, download them from Itunes. Theatre industry has done the same. Cellulose film projectors are non-existent. Theatres now download movies from the studios. It's a bit different since it's a revenue share model, but that's my point.

These other industries adapted business models to fit today. In the US. For professional use. It's high time the US karaoke companies did the same. I'm tired of the misguided rhetoric I hear. Stop pitting your legitimate customers against one another too.

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Living my life as Robert Cortese, 162 E. Jackson St, San Jose CA.

It's like the difference between high and low budget toilet paper, it really doesn't matter in the end. -exweedfarmer

Which is smarter? Just sticking to making/selling karaoke, while people all over the world create software FOR FREE that helps you sell it, or trying to compete with them and keeping it a closed loop while you blow your money into an industry (software) that you(the karaoke manu) knows nothing about?
-me

Bravo, toqer!

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Dave's not here.

Logo, Logo, Logo...

When I play from a disc, the logo appears and is displayed prominently.
When I play from the hard drive the exact same thing happens.
I'm not copying their logo and displaying it in any form other than the form they intended when they placed it on the graphic and sold it to me.

When I play from the hard drive they still get credit for their intelectual property material that they sold to me for exactly the purpose in which it is used (a live show) because I haven't stipped the logo from the graphic.

I think display of their logo is a bogus argument, because it was meant to be displayed with the song. If I stripped it from the graphic (which I could) then they would have a case against me for misuse of and improper editing of their intellectual property. If they base their cases in large part on the showing of their logo, the pirates will just start hiding all the logos.

If this were to ever go all the way through the court system, I think it would become just like the rest of the music and video industry.... going after the distributors and enablers not the end users. At least that's the solution congress and customs has been working toward lately.
Seen the confiscated web domains?

Should format shifting be ruled illegal, as an author and signer of many documents that have been scanned from the paper and put into a pdf, word, or jpg (and with a different font) I could spend the rest of my life suing people.... Not to mention those who have scanned my likeness from a photograph. Suppose I declare that all photos I release must remain bit map.

Really, wasn't format shifting and back-up settled again during the napster case a long time ago.

It's a can of worms that should not be opened. And the cat is out of the bag.

Is my reel-to-reel, cassette recorder, vcr, dvr, scanner, camera, and computer only legally useful for original works by me?
Then I guess it's back to painting on the wall of my cave.

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KNOW THYSELF

Great argument! Now read the laws concerning trademark violations!

Do a search for this it will probably come up!

TITLE 15 - COMMERCE AND TRADE
CHAPTER 22 - SUBCHAPTER III - Sec. 1114 - 1 A and B

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/215/u ... 0_III.html

Virgin, I read it in it's entirety, it mostly deals with how to register a copyright, and what rights you attain once you've gotten a copyright.

You want to look at the section for infringement and remedies, which actually deals with types of infringement in depth.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/ ... _10_5.html

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Living my life as Robert Cortese, 162 E. Jackson St, San Jose CA.

It's like the difference between high and low budget toilet paper, it really doesn't matter in the end. -exweedfarmer

Which is smarter? Just sticking to making/selling karaoke, while people all over the world create software FOR FREE that helps you sell it, or trying to compete with them and keeping it a closed loop while you blow your money into an industry (software) that you(the karaoke manu) knows nothing about?
-me

Yes if you look at the link at the bottom of my post I think you will find it! Of course I put exactly what he should be looking for in the link!

CHAPTER 22 - SUBCHAPTER III - Sec. 1114 - 1 A and B

So I searched the copyright links we both submitted, and found no references to karaoke.

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Living my life as Robert Cortese, 162 E. Jackson St, San Jose CA.

It's like the difference between high and low budget toilet paper, it really doesn't matter in the end. -exweedfarmer

Which is smarter? Just sticking to making/selling karaoke, while people all over the world create software FOR FREE that helps you sell it, or trying to compete with them and keeping it a closed loop while you blow your money into an industry (software) that you(the karaoke manu) knows nothing about?
-me

From said link:

"TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 5 > § 507
Prev | Next § 507. Limitations on actions
How Current is This? (a) Criminal Proceedings.— Except as expressly provided otherwise in this title, no criminal proceeding shall be maintained under the provisions of this title unless it is commenced within 5 years after the cause of action arose.
(b) Civil Actions.— No civil action shall be maintained under the provisions of this title unless it is commenced within three years after the claim accrued. "

Seems to me they need to see this all the way through the courts pretty soon or get sued themselves for harrassment and frivolous lawsuits.

From everything I have read about these cases and the law reguarding these cases, it appears to me SoundChoice and ChartBuster are merely hoping to profit by threatening to sue. They will never stop piracy by merely threatening (especially using weak arguments). They need to follow through all the way on their first cases if they want to put any teeth in the threat. If they don't do that they will just be inadvertantly helping to build a defense for those they try this on later.

There is no copyright law specific to karaoke. The only way you open yourself up to legal consequences is if you illegally distribute material, place their trademark on work that's not theirs, or voluntarily sign your rights away by buying the gem series.

If they were serious about fighting piracy, they would stop extorting legal KJs for money and time without merit and lean hard on those who they can prove are distributing.

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KNOW THYSELF

What does it really matter if the manus state "show your discs, you will not be sued"?
Seems pretty brainless to me - just show your discs and your fine. It's going to be a pretty obscure lawsuit if a publisher or copyright owner come after a karaoke host that bought all their discs to put on computer.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

What discs (see attached pic)?

I love whipping out my discs. It's like whipping out my shlong, anytime, anywhere.

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Living my life as Robert Cortese, 162 E. Jackson St, San Jose CA.

It's like the difference between high and low budget toilet paper, it really doesn't matter in the end. -exweedfarmer

Which is smarter? Just sticking to making/selling karaoke, while people all over the world create software FOR FREE that helps you sell it, or trying to compete with them and keeping it a closed loop while you blow your money into an industry (software) that you(the karaoke manu) knows nothing about?
-me

OK you have me at a total disadvantage here and your legal acumen is truly amazing! After seeing your point I have decided that you must be 100% coorect, and every pirate should tell Sound Choice, Chartbuster and Stellar to go screw themselves, because Sound Choice doesn't have a leg to stand on.

I really hope they all do

What they are doing can simply be ignored because as stated by you and several others here they are simply trying to extort money from honest businessmen and women who are really doing nothing wrong.

In somebody's wet dream

I see it very simple to me now! How can a manufacturer(s) who have had lawsuits filed against them for copyright violations have any legal standing to file against someone for making and displaying "copies" of their trademark.

anybody want to show any desicion by a court in any of those cases

It is really very simple when it is all hung out on the line to dry, the manufactureres are simply doing this to try and suppress all those who have purchased their products and shut down the karaoke entertainment industry.

now if we can just figure out why they are doing this, perhaps you have the answer?

I am in no way on the side of the pirates here.
Piracy is the real problem.

My fear is they are going about this the wrong way with these lawsuits, and in the end it may work out to the pirates' advantage and to the detriment of those of us who follow the rules since they are dropping the suits before seeing it completely through to judgement.

Each case they drop and settle for a sale tells the pirates to continue on until they get caught because their exposure will be limited to purchasing what they should have purchased in the first place. That doesn't discourage piracy.

I am on the side of the manus, I'd just like to see them use better arguments and better methods of proof. If they can get a judgement in their favor and put a real hurt on a couple of pirates that will put teeth into the threats they are making and fear into the hearts of the pirates.

I just wish the manus would band together and take an approach that is more oriented toward ending piracy and less oriented toward making another sale.....that does nothing but prolong the problem.

I absolutely would show my discs and recommend that all legal KJ's comply with the audits if singled out.....it's not that hard to do, but it shouldn't even be neccessary.

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KNOW THYSELF

I think the first thing you have to understand is how a civil action and the civil courts operate.

1. the manus file a suit to recover lost revenue that can come either by settlement or sanction.

2. if you don't believe it is having an effect just look at the sales of Sound Choice and CHartbuster on E-Bay, the pirates are buying disc up as fast as they can before (and some after) they are sued.

3. The three surviving U.S. manus Sound Choice, Chartbuster and Stellar have banded together and they are pursing pitrates on a daily basis through the courts.

4. There are a couple of the pirates who are fighting this into the courts no matter how ignorant it is to do so.

It would be wonderful if they could file against all the pirates in the U.S. at the same time but when you take into consideration that 85 to 90 percent of KJs working right now are pirates that makes a lot of places and filings that would have to be made all over the country and logistically it simply isn't possible. However I do think that once 1 or 2 states are cleaned up that you will see a lot of pirates disappearing from everywhere. Those that are constantly cutting down the efforts of the manus (in the way that the manus are "investigating" the way they are "filing" and constantly saying they don't have a right to sue or that they can't sue because their product isn't legal are really a bigger part of the problem becaUse without the support structure of these very vocal pirate supporters the pirates would be folding up shop a lot faster.

But I guess it takes all kinds to make the world go around and in the end it is going to give the manus a lot more people to collect money from and that is a good thing.

But it also means that we are going to have to live with the piracy for a longer period of time.

The real funny pirates to me are the ones that rushed to eliminate all the Sound Choice songs from their libraries and then they have to turn around and eliminate Chartbuster as well, now it looks like they may have to start doing the same thing with PHM and the other brands that these manus have purchased.

Although some keep saying that Sound Choice doesn't have the rights to the songs and that is debateable, the whole thing is it isn't about the songs it is about the display trademark although the manus do also own the copyright to their "versions" of the songs as well.

But it is fun to watch!

That is all well and good but I didn't post a link to copyright, I posted a link to trademark law (I repost it below) and gave the proper chapter to the information needed, again the lawsuits are not about copyright they are about trademarks. It has nothing to do with karaoke at all, it has to do entirely with the copying/repoduction/displaying of a trademark without premission. There doesn't even have to be a song involved, in fact it is irrelevant to the case what song is used/played/owned etc. etc. etc., it is about if the person being sued has or doesn't have the trademark owners permission to copy and display that owners trademark. If he/she has that permission then they aren't being sued anyway if they don't have it they can ask for it and it is freely given as long as the person asking has the origional as produced by the manus for each copy of the trademark that they have/will/may display!

TITLE 15 - COMMERCE AND TRADE
CHAPTER 22 - SUBCHAPTER III - Sec. 1114 - 1 A and B

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/215/u ... 0_III.html

??? They are doing these suits in order to recoup the monies that were stolen from them when a pirate gets a hard drive loaded with their music on it in which the manus didn't see a dime of. What's hard to see about that?
Shutting down the karaoke industry? Thank the pirates for that as well, since they are the direct reason these suits are being brought up, and why manufacturers are not making as much music as they once had in the past. Why put out new music when it's going to be on every pirated drive or download site the same day?

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

They're also doing it to pay off settlements from the Sync lawsuits.

Sure, losing sales to piracy is a pain, but it doesn't hurt as much as paying off settlements. That alone killed more karaoke companies than the piracy. It certainly cause Priddis to get out. DK and Pioneer said "Sayonara" to the US market, and let's not forget music Maestro and others that had to shutter their doors to avoid losing it all. Which US company had to throw their remaining inventory into a brush shredder as a result of Sync?

I've been thinking about this one a lot lately... More or less poking my own holes into the karaoke companies sudden motivation to perform lawsuits... Sure, they lost sales, but that's not the whole story.

You never hear them say that though.. It's always the fault of the pirates, they had no wrongdoing in this mess they've created.

They threw out the debate of "Public vs Commercial" Back in the late 90's. When karaoke manu's saw people running karaoke shows, they were obligated to tell that isn't allowed. It didn't happen. Sales were super duper. They could have thrown a paragraph or two why that is the case in every CD insert but they didn't. Like water building up behind a dam, the karaoke market grew. I just got into karaoke at that time in 98.

This started the age of "Not for commercial use" being printed on your discs. The water was just tipping over the dam. Piracy was just starting to hit, but neither of these were what cause the storm.

2002. American Idol. Demand for karaoke grew exponentially. Internet was no longer a phenomenon, it was here to stay. Some companies sold out, quit, went away because facing the inevitable tide of lawsuits from license holders would be too much for most companies to bear (again, why they shuttered their doors). The liability created here was huge. Karaoke was no longer in the closet so to speak, everyone wanted it. Every license holder knew what it was, and sent a torrent of lawsuits the karaoke manu's way. The piracy compounded the karaoke manu's problems because now license holders think they should be able to negotiate more, not knowing that the karaoke market they see in the streets is a façade.

I almost see an entire strategy here to pay off those lawsuits. Not so sure anymore if it's really to fight piracy. How much of CDG sales go back into non-litigation based anti piracy? We know 0% is going into producing new tracks. Have they paid off any politicians to lobby, to change laws, to fix things?

The cost of settlement is nothing for them but a postage stamp. The criteria for investigators would mark me as a target. I have no problem showing my discs (in fact, last few weeks I've shown several visiting KJ's that were sent from various karaoke companies my originals) I don't have to flip discs, or tweak sound. I have plenty of time to do that.

It still is unsettling. It's unsettling because I know these people walk into my club with dagger eyes. Part of being an investigator is, you don't ask to see their originals. If you don't talk to the KJ and give them a chance to show you you're clean before you submit your report to the KIAA, they're a target.

That's balogna pure and simple.

There's other things to consider here too. Example, every other sync based property has moved to digital downloads. Movies, Music Videos, you can get them on Itunes anytime. I've approached karaoke companies so many times with offers of tech help, but every time they claim they can't because of sync restrictions..

Wait a second! Didn't I just watch Jurrasic Park on Netflix? Didn't I download a Mariah Carrey video from Itunes? Those have music moving to video.... and downloaded... what the hell?

How am I supposed to just sit here and ignore this? Let's lay down one more fact.

The karaoke companies have sync rights to their own materials. If all the licensee's are in agreement, they can dictate what medium they distribute from. More than that, they can use their own sync rights against us (which is part of what I'm seeing with the entire trademark infringement)

So you're not producing new tracks. You're protecting yourself from your past licensee's by saying, "We only distributed on CDG, we don't know why there's 30m karaoke shows in the US" Crying to the KJ's "It's all your pirating friends fault, especially the ones using PC's!" They fed this entire argument to the scene, and now I watch on these boards as there's a small, holy war going on between computer KJ's and disc based ones. Every disc based, non PC KJ instantly suspects a PC user of piracy.

In essence, they turned all the disc users into their own personal data gathering service. They don't have to waste a lot of resources to get the names and addresses of every karaoke company in the US.

Well played US companies. For a time I was falling for it, but I think I'm done with US karaoke companies. I hate to use terms like "Outsourcing" since I trained my replacement that took my job back to India with him, but it's the only way I can get content for my software (Thanks Tricerasoft/Mr Marcos)

I'll probably get a few disagreements here, but whatever. I've done my due diligence over the years. I was there for the KIAA formation meeting. I've gotten in touch with our local government and law enforcement. I've set up email meetings between various US karaoke manu's using my nepotism based connections into my local government to officials like Our police Chief, Our local Congress (Zoe Lofgren and Mike Honda) (Karaoke manu's dropped the ball each time) I've spoken publicly before our city council on the matter, I've talked ears off every cop and DA that walks into my club, I've argued ad nauseum about it on forums, written 100's of articles on my own websites. I drove around my city trying to recruit IP lawyers, who had no interest at all in working on contingency in an area rich with other IP cases.

They don't want it to change. There's a reason in that somewhere.

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Living my life as Robert Cortese, 162 E. Jackson St, San Jose CA.

It's like the difference between high and low budget toilet paper, it really doesn't matter in the end. -exweedfarmer

Which is smarter? Just sticking to making/selling karaoke, while people all over the world create software FOR FREE that helps you sell it, or trying to compete with them and keeping it a closed loop while you blow your money into an industry (software) that you(the karaoke manu) knows nothing about?
-me