Even where the court seeks to adjudicate issues between parties, it must have personal jurisdiction over them. Here, Steele, Hansmeier, Duffy, and Van Den Hemel are not parties and have not otherwise participated in this litigation. As such, the public policy behind the need to determine personal jurisdiction is arguably at an elevated level because, as individuals, they effectively have "no dog in this fight."

On March 5, 2013, this court issued an order that eight individuals would have to appear before this court on March 11, 2013. But this court lacks jurisdiction to order those individuals to appear in that they reside outside California, are not parties to this litigation, have not appeared in this action, and do not represent parties to this action.

Moreover, although some of these individuals may have received notice as the court ordered, others did not because those charged with providing notice simply lacked the information necessary to do so. And, even those that were served have not received reasonable notice of the nature of the proceedings they are being ordered to appear in or what is expected of them besides their physical presence.

Further, they have not received a reasonable amount of notice to accommodate cross-country travel or information regarding who will pay for such travel. Based on these factors, the court should withdraw its order for John Steele, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and Angela Van Den Hemel to appear on Monday, March 11, 2013 at 1:30 P.M.

Here, because they are not parties in this action, Steele, Hansmeier, Duffy, and Van Den Hemel can be nothing more than witnesses. California Code of Civil Procedure section 1989 provides that "a witness . . . is not obliged to attend as a witness before any court, judge, justice or any other officer, unless the witness Is a resident within the state at the time of service." None of these individuals named in the court's March 5, 2013 reside in California... Thus, the court lacks jurisdiction to order them to appear.

Although counsel submitting this application has been unable to identify any authority addressing the notice requirements to witnesses ordered to appear at such hearings, logic dictates that such individuals should at least be similarly accommodated with reasonable notice. Here, the court's March 5, 2013 order that notice be provided by March 7, 2013 to attend a March 11, 2013 hearing with no further information is fundamentally unreasonable.

Finally, witnesses are entitled not only to receive payment for their attendance, but also for travel expenses.... But, the court's order not only fails to provide who will compensate Steele, Hansmeier, Duffy, and Van Den Hemel for their time and these expenses, but that they will be compensated at all. Given the considerable expense of traveling such distances (including consideration of the fact that one of the witnesses likely has limited means given her employment as a paralegal), especially on such short notice when many common carriers may not have seats available, this is a significant issue.

John Steele has frequently sent demand letters into the State of California, seeking to pressure Internet users into settling copyright infringement claims. An example of only one such letter (undersigned counsel knows there are many more) accompanies this opposition as Exhibit 1 to the Declaration of Nicholas Ranallo. Further, Mr. Steele has not been shy about conducting media interviews, with California publications, about his California cases. See http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Lawsuit-says-grandma-illegallydownloaded-porn-2354720.php. Accordingly, both general and specific jurisdiction exists over John Steele.

It appears that the Application may have been manually filed in order to create a purposeful lag time (of the motion getting from the filing window to chambers) on what is supposed to otherwise be an emergency motion. It is unclear why undersigned counsel found himself in possession of a copy of the moving papers prior to the Court. Further, the original amount of time was reasonable.

GEMA, the organisation responsible for collecting mechanical copyright fees on behalf of some 65,000 artists in Germany, have announced a price hike which could spell the end for some of Berlin's most revered clubs. If the changes go unchallenged, the legendary Berghain - facing a fee hike of 1,400% - will shut after its NYE party this year; the similarly monolithic Watergate is likely to go the same way, claiming its mechanical copyright fees will be increased from €10,000 per year to €200,000.

In the new scheme, commencing 1st January 2013, the complex existing system of eleven different fee structures is being replaced with just two: monthly charges will be calculated as a percentage of ticket price and relative to the size of the venue. There will, however, be a 50% surcharge if events last longer than five hours, and a similar increase after another three hours. Der Spiegel calculates that, "for an average Berlin club with 410 square meters of space, charging €8 entrance and running two events per week from 10 p.m. until 5. a.m, the price paid to GEMA will rise from the current €14,500 to some €95,000 - an increase of 560%". It seems evident that these plans favour venues (such as bars and gig spaces) with shorter opening times, placing a disproportionate financial burden on clubs. Legendary spots like the Berghain, renowned for the kind of marathon all-weekend sessions largely prohibited in the UK due to stricter licensing, will fare the worst.

"The way I see it, [clubs have] been paying far too little in the past. I see no problem for a club manager if he has to pay €1.20 out of €12".

The Berlin community isn't taking the change lying down: on 25th June, 5,000 gathered to protest outside GEMA's summer party; on the 30th, more than 2,000 clubs across the country stopped the music for five minutes to raise awareness of the new fees... High profile artists including Alec Empire, Blawan, The Black Dog, Mike Paradinas and Steffi have spoken out against GEMA's plans. The German patent office are apparently investigating the legality of the scheme, but they won't reach a decision before the fees come into effect - which may be too late for many of Berlin's clubs.

The saga of unusual collections of the Central Office of Collection and Distribution (ECAD) has added another chapter last week. The boys from the blog Caligraffiti received last Tuesday in an email warning that the collecting society would have to pay royalties for videos from YouTube and Vimeo that appeared on the site.

The saga of unusual collections from the Central Office of Collection and Distribution (ECAD) gained another chapter last week. The boys from the blog Caligraffiti received last Tuesday an email from the collecting society warning that they would have to pay royalties for videos from YouTube and Vimeo embedded on the site.

YouTube Brasil will have to pay 2.5% of its gross revenue per exhibition of songs protected by Ecad (Bureau of Revenue Distribution) in the country. If the amount of the stipulated percentage does not reach BRL 258,000 (US $146,250) in a year, the site must pay the value as "minimum annual fee".

The right of public performance in digital mode is through the concept of transmission exists in law and in this art. 5 of section II of Law 9.610/98, which issue is the transmission or dissemination of sounds or sounds and images through of radio waves, satellite signals, wire, cable or other conductor, optical or other electromagnetic process, so this includes the Internet.

The rights of public performance in digital media happen through the concept of transmission found in the article 5, section II of the law 9.610/98, in wich transmission or emission are the diffusion of sounds or images through radio waves, satellite signals, wire, cable or other conductor, optical or other electromagnetic process, so this includes the Internet.

To blog [as] a nonprofit, the amount charged by Ecad is nothing lightweight: R $ 352.59 (US $204) monthly.

 

Eduardo has also confirmed that ECAD has gone after weddings with DJs for performance royalties (as Ninja pointed out in the comments) and pointed out that the BRL $359 amounts to roughly half a month's wages at minimum wage.

Bills for a typical ­wedding bash will soar from £30 to £380. Pubs which can now pay as little as £8 a night will have to fork out around £10,000 a year up front for a public ­performance licence.

The fee for nightclubs will zoom from £167 to a mind-boggling £6,667 for each event.

The court would like to make CM/ECF filers aware of certain security concerns relating to a software application or .plug-in. called RECAP, which was designed by a group from Princeton University to enable the sharing of court documents on the Internet.

Once a user loads RECAP, documents that he or she subsequently accesses via PACER are automatically sent to a public Internet repository. Other RECAP/PACER users are then able to see whether documents are available from the Internet repository. RECAP captures District and Bankruptcy Court documents, but has not yet incorporated Appellate Court functionality. At this time, RECAP does not appear to provide users with access to restricted or sealed documents. Please be aware that RECAP is "open-source" software, which can be freely obtained by anyone with Internet access and modified for benign or malicious purposes, such as facilitating unauthorized access to restricted or sealed documents. Accordingly, CM/ECF filers are reminded to be diligent about their computer security practices to ensure that documents are not inadvertently shared or compromised.

The court and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will continue to analyze the implications of RECAP or related-software and advise you of any ongoing or further concerns.

The Judicial Conference may, only to the extent necessary, prescribe reasonable fees, pursuant to sections 1913, 1914, 1926, 1930, and 1932 of title 28, United States Code, for collection by the courts under those sections for access to information available through automatic data processing equipment.

One example is a courtroom renovation one judge described at a 2010 conference. He said that as a result of PACER fees, "every juror has their own flatscreen monitors," and there are also monitors for members of the public to see. His courtroom also got the latest audio technology. "We just put in new audio so that people—I'd never heard of this before—but it actually embeds the speakers inside of the benches in the back of the courtroom and inside counsel tables so that the wood benches actually perform as amplifiers," the judge said.

For example, there isn't just one PACER website for the whole country. Instead, there are actually around 200 separate PACER websites, each serving a different judicial district. Consolidating those 200 servers into a single website hosted from a modern data center would improve the user experience and dramatically reduce IT costs.

Indeed, Yu argued that the very concept of charging for copies of public records is misguided. He suggested that instead of jacking up fees in order to fund the development of a more elaborate PACER site, the courts should publish their raw data and allow private parties, from Google to the Internet Archive, to build websites using that data.

"Congress needs to consider funding PACER out of general appropriations," Yu told Ars. "It's really shutting people out from being able to learn the laws that they need to abide by in our society." Of course, if PACER were run in a cost-effective matter, and without a paywall, it would cost a lot less than $100 million.

AT&T imposed new usage caps on broadband users without making sure the meters work. They followed that up by cracking down on unofficial tetherers (imposing a fee for doing nothing while crippling smartphones) and then substantially jacking up the price of SMS service by killing off one of their most popular SMS plans.

A few months back I bought tickets for a concert- which shall remain nameless- only to get manhandled by service charges and by their Newspeak cousins, "convenience fees". The actual price was nearly double the face of the ticket. Half of my money was going to the band I loved, the other half to horse-thieves. Reining in ticket fees has been notoriously difficult, even for artists of great influence. But in a small step, we negotiated to do SOME of the tickets directly through our website. We're going to try this for the Chicago show on 10/16. The first 50 tickets will be available exclusively at my website with zero fees. The amount charged to your credit card will be exactly 10 bucks per ticket. If all goes well we hope to roll out the no-fee ticketing for entire tours.

Are promoters hurting this year?

We're not. It seems that Live Nation is. I don't really pay attention to the side of the business that is arena or amphitheatre driven. People are excited about seeing a lot of our bands. I hope more of them get popular. That would be great.

What's hurting the live business overall?

It's a combination of things. The price (of shows), and the surcharges; I think that's what is souring people the most. They are ridiculous.

Most of your roster works with cheaper ticket prices.

Yeah, I would say that most work in the $15 to $20 range before service charges are applied which are very high.

If a band doesn't land a festival, it can work within a region and explore opportunities.

That's a good way to do it, too. That's kind of an old school way of doing it. We have a lot of bands, especially foreign bands, that will come here and focus on New York for a week. Then, they go home to France or the U.K. and keep playing where they live. Then they come back here, play New York more, add in L.A. and, maybe, add in Toronto. Then they will go back and work in Europe again. The buzz that is generated in Europe will trickle over here pretty much immediately.

1. They leave the videos on YouTube as embeddable, and just hope that companies will pay them anyway.
   
   In this case, many companies would likely embed the videos anyway, not even realizing that CC wanted them to pay up. That leads to confusion and no legal basis for CC's request. After all, it put the video on a video sharing site and allowed embedding. That seems like a pretty clear authorization to embed the video.
   
   
2. They leave the videos on YouTube, but not as embeddable, and make companies pay to embed
   
   As we saw with the band Ok Go, when EMI disabled embedding for the band's videos, traffic plummeted 90%. You don't go viral if you don't allow embeds.
   
   
3. They stop using YouTube altogether, and don't release the videos publicly themselves
   
   It's hard to be viral when the videos aren't anywhere online.

"We just don't think it's fair that customers that don't have solar panels on their homes should subsidize these solar panel customers any further."