Dave's Top Eight

1. Jerry Reed...Revisited by Darrell Toney (reviewed 6/07) (5 Stars)
2. Sounds Like Sunday by Janet Paschal (reviewed 5/07) (5 Stars)
3. True To The Call by Kingdom Heirs (reviewed 3/07) (4 1/2 Stars)
4. Revival by Gold City (reviewed 10/06) (4 1/2 Stars)
5. Get Away Jordan by Ernie Haase & Signature Sound (reviewed 2/07) (4 1/2 Stars)
6. Breakin' Chains by Three Bridges (reviewed 5/07) (4 1/2 Stars)
7. Big Sky by The Isaacs (reviewed 4/07)
8. Skywriting by Mercy's Well (reviewed 7/07)

Click title to purchase at CBD.com...click artist name to read Dave's Review. A CD will automatically fall out of the Top Eight after twelve months if no CD surpasses it before then.

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October 27, 2004

Singing News threatens legal action against AMGS posters

In a post to the Usenet group alt.music.gospel.southern today, Kenneth Kirksey of The Singing News strongly urged participants to cease copying and posting copyrighted news stories from the SN website and email newsletters and implied legal action would result if his warnings were ignored. Kirksey stated, "Our attorneys will be monitoring this newsgroup for further copyright violations. A letter has already been sent to the ISP of one member of this newsgroup who was warned on two occasions to cease and desist posting copyrighted material on this newsgroup."

I looked back and found two such postings that had occured in the last three days. One was the story where David Sutton told the Singing News that Integrity's new name would be Triumphant. The other was a prayer request for Roger Bennett. All these posters had to do to remain legal was re-word the information, but people are lazy. Kirksey suggests linking to the stories on the SN site, but what about times when the story vanishes? That's what happened with the Sutton/Integrity news story.

On one hand, it seems to be terribly nit-picky to protect a copyright on a brief news article. It's not like feature articles are being reprinted without permission. Still, I believe the Singing News is well within their legal rights to do so. Another angle on this to consider . . . often the copyright is protecting what is actually a Press Release that the Singing News didn't even write. I know this, because other news sites get the exact same press release and I often get them direct from the artist too. Unfortunately, some AMGS posters are so lazy they don't even snip the SN copyright notice from the article. How can they stamp their own copyright on something that was given to them as a press release? The original press release isn't copyrighted. Copyrighting would defeat the whole point of having a press release in the first place.

In the final analysis, though, Kirksey is well within his technical rights if he chooses to pursue this. It's not like the readers aren't informed. There's a notice right there in black and white which clearly says, "No part of this message may be reproduced, stored in a retreival system, or transmitted in any form by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or any other-without expressed written permission from the publisher of Singing News."

What they don't say is that fair use copyright laws provide for quoting part of a copyrighted work for the purposes of commentary, but these posters are just copying and pasting the entire articles without comment. That's clearly a violation of copyright law.

It should be fun to watch things unfold if they actually go so far as to prosecute one of the AMGS regulars.

posted by David Bruce Murray @ 5:07:00 PM


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