JMS

Via tech.meme (a guilty daily habit):

The shady one-man corporation that’s destroying hip-hop. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

Interesting piece about Bridgeport - an overzealous litigious copyright holder that chases down unsanctioned samples. I was at the Future of Music conference referenced in the piece where Rick Karr interviewed George Clinton about sampling and got to shake the great man’s hand.

There are less ugly ways of making money from copyrights. Last night I met several folks from the Copyright Clearance Center at the PaidContent mixer in Boston and evidently CCC (not to be confused with CC) has record revenue ($137.5M in 2005 from the annual report PDF) from helping over 10,000 publishers license their texts all over the place.

And what about all that text content flying around in RSS feeds and blog posts? CCC’s not handling that yet, but some new folks like Lisensa are trying to create a paid economy for open syndication.