Slow to start, authorized Internet downloads of individual sound recordings now exceed one million per week. For recording artists, this may mean a return to the heyday of singles sales experienced in the '50s, '60s and the disco era of the '70s, when singles were created to stand and sell on their own, with little or no relation to other tracks contained on an artist's album. A single in that era routinely consisted of a record with an A and B side, the sale of which rarely produced anything more for an artist than promotion for the artist's live performances. However, with increases in royalty rates and CD retail prices during the '80s and '90s, successful major label artists were able to negotiate provisions in their recording agreements allowing for greater advances and royalties from the production and sale of albums in CD form. Over the past few years, major labels, in large part, have discontinued the release of commercial singles in an effort to eliminate the cannibalization of higher-profit margin CD album sales. As a result, recording artists and their representatives are carefully watching the consumer change from purchasing albums in pre-recorded CD form to purchasing individual tracks from the Internet. Undoubtedly, a return to living the singles life could have severe financial ramifications for recording artists who have become accustomed to living the CD album life.

Recent developments in entertainment law.

What constitutes an acceptable book manuscript has been at the heart of numerous disputes between authors and publishers. An acceptance clause in a recent…

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Recent cases in entertainment law.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided that placing a sampling loop of a six-second, three-note segment from a musical composition into a new sound recording wasn't copyright infringement because the use was <i>de minimis</i>. <i>Newton v. Diamond</i>.

Today, at the blink of an eye, documents, images, and communication are transmitted across the country and across the globe via a web of networked computers. A recent study conducted by the University of California Berkley found that in 2002, people around the world created enough new information to fill 500,000 U.S. Libraries of Congress. Plus there was a 30% increase in stored information from 1999, the last time the same study was conducted. The increase of new data per person works out to be the equivalent of a stack of books 30 feet high. All of these electronic transactions are creating "footprints" on hard drives, backup tapes, and other media sources that courts have held are discoverable in civil litigation. The process of collecting, searching, and producing these e-data trails is called electronic discovery. One of the emerging debates in the legal community on the topic of e-discovery is whether electronic documents and e-mail should be converted to a "uniform" format (such as a .tiff) or whether they should be kept in their native format for document review and production. This decision, which often occurs at the beginning of an e-discovery project, can affect almost every aspect of the e-discovery process going forward - preservation, metadata, searchability and cost. For example, if electronic data is not captured and accessed properly, the content of the document or the valuable metadata, behind the scenes data about the data, can be altered or destroyed.

Have you ever had to print out a document just because you had to sign it before faxing it? Or have you ever done a merge mailing, only to have to print out and sign each letter individually? Wouldn't it be better if you could just sign all these documents electronically and send them electronically to their respective recipients? This article will shed some light on what is meant by electronic and digital signatures as well as provide details of how you can digitally sign a document in Word.

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Time Matters Version 5, the latest iteration of the popular law practice management program, was released in May, 2003, and Service Release 1, which added more features, such as linking to HotDocs v. 6, was released in August.