Bi-Weekly wrap up, 1-15 August

* Veoh Seeks Court Protection From Universal Music Copyright Suits
San Diego - Video-sharing site Veoh Networks announced on Thursday that it has filed a pre-emptive legal action against Universal Music Group, asking a judge to declare that its service does not violate copyrights.
* NBCU/News Corp. Web Video Venture Gets $100 Million From Equity Firm
San Francisco - The online video distribution joint venture between News Corp. and NBC Universal ("New Site," for now) has received a $100 million investment from private equity firm Providence Equity Partners, in exchange for a 10% stake, The New York Times reported, citing people with knowledge of the deal.
* File-Sharing Firm Lime Wire Debuts Digital Music Store
New York - Lime Wire, the company that distributes the LimeWire peer-to-peer file-sharing application, has announced plans to open a digital music store.
* Video Transcoding Firm RipCode Raises $10.5 Million
Dallas - RipCode, a developer of video transcoding technology, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $10.5 million in its second round of financing, led by ATA Ventures.
* SpiralFrog Debuts Beta of Ad-Supported, Free Music Download Service
New York - SpiralFrog, an ad-supported free music download service, has quietly launched an invite-only beta test of its service, CNET News.com reported.
* German Prosecutors Stop Identifying File Sharers on Behalf of RIAA
Offenburg, Germany - The Local Court (AG) in Offenburg has prohibited a local public prosecutor's office from obtaining the personal data from an ISP that match the IP addresses of alleged P2P network users citing citing "obvious disproportionateness”.
* Japanese Firms Demand YouTube Remove Copyrighted Videos
Tokyo - After a second meeting with executives in Tokyo with YouTube and Google this week, a group of Japanese rights holders again demanded that their copyrighted material be removed from YouTube, the Associated Press reported.
* HandHeld Entertainment Acquires eBaum's World for $17.5 Million
San Francisco - HandHeld Entertainment, a maker of portable media players and operator of entertainment websites, announced on Thursday that it will acquire eBaum's World, an entertainment site that offers user-generated videos, games, jokes, photos and other content, for $17.5 million. The site generated $5.2 million in revenue and $1.6 in net income before taxes in 2006, and has an average of 10 million unique visitors per month. HandHeld had already bought another video site, Putfile.
* Video-Sharing Site GoFish Terminates Acquisition of Bolt Media (details in the previous post)
New York, N.Y. - GoFish, a San Francisco-based video sharing site, on Thursday called off its planned $30 million acquisition of New York-based Bolt Media, after Bolt was unable to finalize a settlement in a copyright infringement lawsuit.
* EMI Shareholders Accept $4.8 Billion Buyout Offer from Terra Firma
London - Major record label EMI Group announced that its shareholders have approved a $4.8 billion buyout offer from private equity group Terra Firma.
* Apple's Wozniak Among Backers of Internet Video Start-up Hotswap
New York - Hotswap.com, an Internet video start-up founded by three former University of California grad students, has raised an undisclosed sum of funding from backers including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Clear Channel co-founder Red McCombs, Reuters reported.

Video: Google finds more MP3s than Limewire

God bless user-generated service journalism. This video, by a 21-year-old student named Jimmy Ruska, explains how to use Google to quickly and efficiently find music files. The video has been viewed over 400,000 times since it was posted in April.

French court slaps poor man's YouTube ; Dailymotion guilty of copyright infringement

France's answer to YouTube has been found guilty of copyright infringement. A French high court has ruled against the Paris-based video-sharing site Dailymotion, holding it liable for a copyrighted film posted by its users. Earlier this summer, after a high-profile suit from a man called The Buttock, the same court laid down a similar ruling against MySpace, but its latest order goes a few steps further.

Last month, the President of the High Court of the First Instance of Paris - whose title reads much better in French - issued a "summary order" that classified MySpace as a publisher, arguing that the so-called social-networker is more than just a hosting service and should be held liable for infringing content posted to its site. Well-known French comedian The Buttock - whose title reads about the same in French - sued MySpace after several of his films turned up on its pages. Issued by a separate arm of the court, the new Dailymotion order carries a little more weight - and poses a greater threat to other sharing services. After a film called Joyeux Noel popped up on the site, Dailymotion was sued by the film's producers, and on July 13, a separate arm of the High Court held the site liable for copyright infringement - without calling it a publisher.

In its "proceeding on the merits" - a ruling backed by more legal rigor than a quick-and-dirty summary order - the court ruled that Dailymotion is liable simply because it was aware that the film was on its server.

As the court noted, Dailymotion did not take the film down even after it received a letter of complaint from the producers. The court ordered the site to pay the film's producers 23,000 euros in damages and fork over a 1500 euro fine for each day the movie stays online - though Dailymotion can appeal.

GoFish will not acquire Bolt - copyright infringements too risky

On August 1, 2007, GoFish Corporation (“GoFish”) terminated the Agreement and Plan of Merger, dated as of February 11, 2007, as amended, by and among GoFish, BM Acquisition Corp. Inc., Bolt, Inc. and John Davis.

As previously disclosed, under the Merger Agreement, a condition to the obligation of GoFish and the Merger Subsidiary to consummate the merger was that Bolt shall have entered into a definitive settlement of the pending copyright infringement lawsuit filed by UMG Recordings, Inc. and definitive settlement agreements covering substantially comparable potential claims, if any, by Sony, BMG Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI Recorded Music and the major publishers that provide for initial cash payments not exceeding an aggregate of $1,000,000 and for additional cash payments to be made no sooner than July 1, 2008 not exceeding an aggregate of $3,000,000 and 2.5 million shares of GoFish common stock, exclusive of any advertising credits or other in kind consideration. The foregoing condition had not been satisfied on or prior to the Termination Date under the Merger Agreement and, as a result, GoFish elected to terminate the Merger Agreement. No termination or other fee was incurred as a result of such termination.

Take a behind-the-scenes tour of BayTSP

Take a behind-the-scenes tour of BayTSP, where employees spend their days watching online videos in search of pirated television shows and movies.

Anti-Piracy Gang Launches their own Video Download Site to Trap People

Media Defender, a notorious anti piracy gang working for the MPAA, RIAA and several independent media production companies, just launched their very own video upload service called “miivi.com”. The sole purpose of the site is to trap people into uploading copyrighted material, and bust them for doing so.

Miivi claims to offer hight speed downloads of blockbuster movies hereby luring people into downloading copyrighted content.

EMI Licenses Snocap

EMI Music has now licensed its catalog DRM-free to Snocap, a move that quickly shuttles the label onto the pages of MySpace. Snocap carries a critical partnership with MySpace that enables artists to position downloads on their profile pages, and offers a revenue between all parties. The latest deal follows an earlier arrangement involving Warner Music Group, though EMI is the first major to lend DRM-free content to the alliance.

The Snocap deal follows an earlier DRM-free deal involving the iTunes Store. Like that arrangement, Snocap MyStores will sell EMI tracks at an elevated price point of $1.30. The tracks will also be encoded as higher-quality files, according to information supplied by the companies. That is part of a larger EMI philosophy that consumers are willing to pay more for higher-quality MP3s, though it remains unclear if the proposition is resonating. After positioning its DRM-free catalog on iTunes in late May, EMI has not offered substantive data on the collaboration.