BTTV BLOG

Ever wish you could sneak a peak at real major label record contract? You can, thanks to Benjamin Burnley, frontman of hard rockers Breaking Benjamin. He’s fired the band guitarist and bassist, Aaron Fincke and Mark Klepaski, and filed launched a lawsuit against them. Burnley claims they have making decisions on behalf of the band, like releasing a greatest hits and remixing some tracks, without his authorization. They’ve countersued, but the real winners are the musicians who get to look at this major label contract between the band an Disney’s Hollywood Records.

The entire court filing is available thanks to Tunelab. The actual record contract starts on page 25.

If the external PDF isn’t loading correctly into the viewer below, you can view a version hosted directly by Google Docs.

These Breaking Benjamin court documents are public record. These are the court documents in full, with the exception of sensitive personal information being redacted.

Via Hypebot and Tunelab

All those hours of free music we’ve been enjoying haven’t really been free. Like all services, they come at a cost. Word is that Pandora (and other apps) have been tracking/collecting tons of data on their users and shipping that info off to 3rd party marketers. No surprise here really, it’s been done with our credit card statements for years…but this gets a little more detailed than knowing you just bought a pack of strings at Willie’s Guitars.

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Is Pandora crossing the line with your personal data? That’s the accusation of a recent lawsuit against Apple, Pandora, and a number of other top apps, and there’s more to this than you might expect. The suit, which currently seeks class action status, alleges that various iPhone and iPad apps are slyly collecting and selling a range of stats and personal data to ad networks.

At first blush, this looks like another privacy alarm, though judge for yourself. The filing points to a nefarious role by the Unique Device Identifier UDID on iPhones and iPads, essentially a “supercookie” that can track all sorts of activity on a smartphone. In turn, a lot of that activity is being shuttled to third-party advertising networks – that is, according to the lawsuit.

via Digital Music News

Just an interesting tidbit from Washington on profiteering off the creative community and thoughts on piracy in general. If you want to get your legal mojo on then this post form DMN is for you.

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Don’t you wish you had more control over your creative product? Instead of being obedient to the demands and agendas of ‘hackers and copyright thieves’? Immediately after the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the anti-piracy COICA bill, RIAA chief Mitch Bainwol offered this stark assessment…

“We are proud to lend our voice to the chorus of supporters of this important bipartisan legislation. In a world where are able to take down websites, rip off American consumers and rake in huge profits operating rogue businesses built on the backs of the American creative community, the committee has taken a strong step toward fostering a more safe and secure online experience for consumers…

Read more @ Digital Music News