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Git 2.5.0
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News Teknoids Need
It’s been two years since filmmakers making a documentary about the song “Happy Birthday” filed a lawsuit claiming that the song shouldn’t be under copyright. Now, they have filed (PDF) what they say is “proverbial smoking-gun evidence” that should cause the judge to rule in their favor.
The “smoking gun” is a 1927 version of the “Happy Birthday” lyrics, predating Warner/Chappell’s 1935 copyright by eight years. That 1927 songbook, along with other versions located through the plaintiffs’ investigations, “conclusively prove that any copyright that may have existed for the song itself… expired decades ago.”
If the filmmakers’ lawyers are right, it could mean a quick route to victory in a lawsuit that’s been both slow-moving and closely watched by copyright reform advocates. Warner/Chappell has built a licensing empire based on “Happy Birthday,” which in 1996 was pulling in more than $2 million per year.
Plaintiff Jennifer Nelson’s movie is actually called Happy Birthday, and it’s about the song. She had to pay Warner/Chappell $1,500 to use the song in her movie, and that didn’t sit well with the documentarian. She’s seeking to get that money back and also represent a class of plaintiffs who have paid similar licensing fees to Warner/Chappell on a copyright she and her lawyers say is illegitimate.
The 1927 songbook referenced above was found in a batch of 500 documents provided by Warner/Chappell earlier this month. That cache included “approximately 200 pages of documents [Warner/Chappell] claim were ‘mistakenly’ not produced during discovery, which ended on July 11, 2014, more than one year earlier,” Nelson’s lawyers write.
The new filing comes as US District Judge George King was just two days away from holding a hearing about whether or not songwriter Patty Hill abandoned her rights to the lyrics. The plaintiffs say that the newly discovered songbook evidence is so strong that the copyright abandonment issue is moot.
“[T]he documents prove conclusively that the song is in the public domain, thus making it unnecessary for the Court to decide the scope or validity of the disputed copyrights, much less whether Patty Hill abandoned any copyright she may have had to the lyrics,” they write.
Reading the motion is an exercise in understanding the mind-boggling complexity of music copyright.
In 1927, Chicago music publisher The Cable Company produced the 15th edition of the children’s song book called The Everyday Song Book (Graded). It included the “Good Morning” and “Birthday Song,” which featured the melody for “Good Morning To You,” a song dating back to the 19th century, combined with Patty Hill’s lyrics for both “Good Morning” and “Happy Birthday.”
Further investigation showed that the song appeared in editions stretching back to 1922, which in the plaintiffs’ view “proves conclusively” that “Happy Birthday” entered the public domain no later than that year. The song was printed without a copyright notice unlike other songs in the book. Rather, it included a notice that read “Special permission through courtesy of The Clayton F. Summy Co.”
The Summy company is a publisher whom Warner/Chappell has maintained never authorized any pre-1935 publishing of the “Happy Birthday” lyrics.
That important line of text published underneath the song’s lyrics was “blurred almost beyond legibility” in the copy that Warner/Chappell handed over in discovery. Plaintiffs’ lawyers note that it’s “the only line of the entire PDF that is blurred in that manner.”
Plaintiffs acquired their own copies of the songbook, including a first edition published in 1916, which didn’t have the song, and versions published 1922 and later, which include it without a copyright notice.
That’s critical, because under the 1909 Copyright Act which was then in force, a published work had to include the word “Copyright,” the abbreviation “Copr., ” or the “©” symbol, or “the published work was interjected irrevocably into the public domain.”
The plaintiffs argue that the 1922 publication without proper notice forfeited copyright in the work. Even if the judge overseeing the case doesn’t agree with them, however, there’s a secondary argument: the copyright for the whole 1922 songbook expired in 1949.
There’s even a third line of defense: even if the work had been published in 1922 with proper notice, and even if that copyright had been renewed in 1949 (which the plaintiffs say it wasn’t), the song still would have become public domain at midnight on December 31, 1997.
Warner/Chappell hasn’t yet responded to the motion. Since a hearing was scheduled for Wednesday, it’s likely there will be some further developments in the case later this week.
Warner/Chappell “should admit defeat but they won’t because too much money is at stake,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Randall Newman told The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the new motion.
We announced Amazon Aurora last year at AWS re:Invent (see Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon for more info). With storage replicated both within and across three Availability Zones, along with an update model driven by quorum writes, Amazon Aurora is designed to deliver high performance and 99.99% availability while easily and efficiently scaling to up to 64 TB of storage.
In the nine months since that announcement, a host of AWS customers have been putting Amazon Aurora through its paces. As they tested a wide variety of table configurations, access patterns, and queries on Amazon Aurora, they provided us with the feedback that we needed to have in order to fine-tune the service. Along the way, they verified that each Amazon Aurora instance is able to deliver on our performance target of up to 100,000 writes and 500,000 reads per second, along with a price to performance ratio that is 5 times better than previously available.
Now Available
Today I am happy to announce that Amazon Aurora is now available for use by all AWS customers, in three AWS regions. During the testing period we added some important features that will simplify your migration to Amazon Aurora. Since my original blog post provided a good introduction to many of the features and benefits of the core product, I’ll focus on the new features today.
Zero-Downtime Migration
If you are already using Amazon RDS for MySQL and want to migrate to Amazon Aurora, you can do a zero-downtime migration by taking advantage of Amazon Aurora’s new features. I will summarize the process here, but I do advise you to read the reference material below and to do a practice run first! Immediately after you migrate, you will begin to benefit from Amazon Aurora’s high throughput, security, and low cost. You will be in a position to spend less time thinking about the ins and outs of database scaling and administration, and more time to work on your application code.
If the database is active, start by enabling binary logging in the instance’s DB parameter group (see MySQL Database Log Files to learn how to do this). In certain cases, you may want to consider creating an RDS Read Replica and using it as the data source for the migration and replication (check out Replication with Amazon Aurora to learn more).
Open up the RDS Console, select your existing database instance, and choose Migrate Database from the Instance Actions menu:
Fill in the form (in most cases you need do nothing more than choose the DB Instance Class) and click on the Migrate button:
Aurora will create a new DB instance and proceed with the migration:
A little while later (a coffee break might be appropriate, depending on the size of your database), the Amazon Aurora instance will be available:
Now (assuming that the source database was actively changing) while you were creating the Amazon Aurora instance, replicate the changes to the new instance using the mysql.rds_set_external_master command, and then update your application to use the new Aurora endpoint!
Metrics Galore
Each Amazon Aurora instance reports a plethora of metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. You can view these from the Console and you can, as usual, set alarms and take actions as needed:
Easy and Fast Replication
Each Amazon Aurora instance can have up to 15 replicas, each of which adds additional read capacity. You can create a replica with a couple of clicks:
Due to Amazon Aurora’s unique storage architecture, replication lag is extremely low, typically between 10 ms and 20 ms.
5x Performance
When we first announced Amazon Aurora we expected to deliver a service that offered at least 4 times the price-performance of existing solutions. Now that we are ready to ship, I am happy to report that we’ve exceeded this goal, and that Amazon Aurora can deliver 5x the price-performance of a traditional relational database when run on the same class of hardware.
In general, this does not mean that individual queries will run 5x as fast as before (although Amazon Aurora’s fast, SSD-based storage certainly speeds things up). Instead, it means that Amazon Aurora is able to handle far more concurrent queries (both read and write) than other products. Amazon Aurora’s unique, highly parallelized access to storage reduces contention for stored data and allows it to process queries in a highly efficient fashion.
From our Partners
Members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) have been working to test their offerings and to gain operational and architectural experience with Amazon Aurora. Here’s what I know about already:
Ready to Roll
Our customers and partners have put Amazon Aurora to the test and it is now ready for your production workloads. We are launching in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions, and will expand to others over time.
Pricing works like this:
See the Amazon Aurora Pricing page for more information.
Go For It
To learn more, visit the Amazon Aurora page and read the Amazon Aurora Documentation. You can also attend the upcoming Amazon Aurora Webinar to learn more and to see Aurora in action.
— Jeff;
This tutorial will show you how you can set up an SMS server on a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, running Raspbian. We will use playsms and smstools. In my example, I have used a Huawei E3131 3G modem.
Microsoft will break Internet traffic records this week as it begins to distribute Windows 10, a content delivery expert said Monday.
“Windows 10 … will easily be the largest day/week of traffic ever on the Internet,” said Dan Rayburn, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan who also writes on his own StreamingMediaBlog.com, in a piece posted yesterday.
“Unless Windows 10 is a complete flop and people don’t upgrade as quickly as Microsoft expects, Windows 10 is going to create some serious havoc with regards to the user experience,” Rayburn contended. “Expect to see some download times in the days, not hours, especially if any other content owners happen to have larger-than-expected traffic at the same time.
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MojoKid writes: The OnePlus 2 was officially unveiled [Monday] evening and it has been announced that the smartphone will start at an competitively low $329, unlocked and contract free. The entry level price nets you a 5.5″ 1080p display, a cooler-running 1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 v2.1 SoC paired with 3GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, a 13MP rear camera (with OIS, laser focusing and two-tone flash), 5MP selfie camera, and dual nano SIM slots. If you don’t mind handing over an extra $60, you’ll receive 4GB of RAM to back the processor and 64GB of internal storage. Besides beefing up the internal specs, OnePlus has also paid some attention to the exterior of the device, giving it a nice aluminum frame and a textured backplate. There are a number of optional materials that you can choose from including wood and Kevlar.
Reader dkatana links to InformationWeek’s coverage, which puts a bit more emphasis on what the phone doesn’t come with: NFC. Apparently, people just don’t use it as much as anticipated.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
There can be little doubt that law schools are largely proficient in teaching “hard skills” such as knowledge of the law, legal analysis, research, writing, and drafting. But what about “soft skills”—the general set of skills which influence how people interact, such as communication, leadership, critical thinking, confidence, team building, time management, creativity, public speaking, […]
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