Friday, July 26, 2013

50 Shades of Gray in Space!!!



 
Grab my debut novel

NASTRAGULL: Pirates
Price: $4.49 Purchase at amazon.com
 
B00UXK9W6K cover

An epic space adventure that holds danger at every turn... The human cadets on the interstellar transport, Bright Star, are heading home after eight long years of military training...but things don't go according to plan. After a bloody battle with a group of space pirates, the Bright Star and its survivors are taken prisoner with the intent of selling them into slavery...or worse. Cadet Alec Horn, along with the captain of the Bright Star escape, taking an emperor's ransom in loot with them. Together they set out on a dangerous adventure to rescue their friends and comrades. But can they succeed without bringing forth a war that will bring death and destruction across the universe? 
 
 

Here is another great review from the amazon:

5 stars 50 Shades of Gray in Space!!!, July 25, 2013

Amazon Verified Purchase


WOW - this one came as a shock! A new author that knows how to write a really great sci-fi story! As a sci-fi fan I have a tendency to compare anything I read with the best: Star Wars and Star Trek. What was missing in these epic stories you will not miss in this awesome story. It has everything any reader could want. Even though at times there are some very detailed described acts of violence and some sex the story itself overwhelms all that. What we have here is a new great author. A very fast read, cover to cover and the best part; you don't even have to be a sci-fi fan! Overall I think most people will fall for this epic story. Watch out Star Wars and Star Trek a new star has risen!
 

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Aimee Mann Files Huge Copyright Lawsuit Over Digital Music


The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter suggests that many online streaming services might be relying on the wrong company to properly license her work.

 


In the past week, there's been quite a bit of chatter about Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke's decision to pull his music from Spotify, a popular streaming service. In a comment that had many in the industry discussing the economics of digital music, Yorke's longtime producer Nigel Godrich complained that "new artists get paid f--- all with this model."

Now comes a lawsuit from another acclaimed songwriter, Aimee Mann, who presents the argument that artists like her are being systematically robbed of digital royalties. According to Mann's lawyer, Maryann Marzano of Gradstein & Marzano, "Not only does this case seek redress for Aimee Mann against one of the world's largest but least known providers of online music, it also serves as a call to other artists to follow the lead set by Radiohead and Pink Floyd to put an end to the unlicensed, uncompensated use of their music by online services."

In the cross-hairs of the lawsuit is a company called MediaNet, which might be somewhat obscure but plays an important role. The company was founded in 1999 as a venture backed by EMI, AOL, BMG and RealNetworks before being sold to a private equity firm in 2005. Today it is essentially a white label that serves up more than 22 million songs to over 40 music services, including Yahoo Music, Playlist.com, eBay and various online radio services.

But according to Mann's lawsuit, not all of the music being provided by MediaNet is properly licensed. Mann is demanding statutory damages for willful copyright infringement of some 120 songs, which could amount to damages as high as $18 million.

The laws that govern the distribution of music are complicated and have grown more complex over time. Every song starts out as a composition, which is protected by its own copyright. When that composition becomes a sound recording, there is a separate copyright that protects it as well. The owner of the sound recording pays a mechanical licensing fee to the owner of the composition.

Starting in the 1990s, music began to be distributed digitally, and Congress amended U.S. copyright laws to extend compulsory licensing to the delivery of phonorecords in digital form. However, the statute didn't apply to certain services that offered on-demand streams and limited downloads. That was confirmed by a New York judge in 2001.


To address this absence, representatives from the Recording Industry of America and the National Music Publishers Association began negotiating with each other and reached an agreement whereby RIAA members were able to make payments through the Harry Fox Agency. Later, an entity called the Copyright Royalty Board emerged that set rates and allowed some digital services like Pandora to pay compulsory licensing fees. Other services, such as Spotify, have made direct deals with record labels.

MediaNet falls somewhere in the middle of all of this. The company appears to have had an interesting, legally contentious journey toward becoming some form of back-office aggregator of music for dozens of online music services.

After being sold to private equity firm Baker Capital, MediaNet continued to distribute works, which led to a class action lawsuit filed in 2008 by the Harry Fox Agency. That matter was settled in 2008, but another lawsuit came from various song publishers in 2011.

According to a declaration that was filed in the case by Stephen Grauberger, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, MediaNet attempted about a decade ago to seek compulsory licenses. But the lawyer said that notices sent by the company "were facially defective" for various reasons, including the failure to reference other entities who would utilize the music.

Also in Grauberger's declaration (read it here) was the astounding claim that sworn testimony had revealed that by 2012, "23 percent of MediaNet's catalog remains unlicensed."

The lawsuit was then confidentially settled.

Enter Aimee Mann, who hit it big in the mid-1980s with her band 'Til Tuesday and the single "Voices Carry," earned Academy Award and Grammy Award nominations for her song "Save Me" from Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, and has been producing critically celebrated music ever since.
 
According to her complaint (which can be read here), filed on Monday in California federal court, Mann entered into a license agreement in 2003 with MediaNet (then known as MusicNet). The term of the license agreement was scheduled to end in 2006 but had automatic two-year extensions unless terminated by either party.
 
Mann's representative is said to have sent a termination notice in 2005, but nevertheless, "MediaNet continued after the Termination Date to transmit, perform, reproduce and distribute the Compositions as part of MediaNet's service, despite having no right or license to do so."

Besides suing for direct infringement, Mann is also claiming that MediaNet induced its business partners to commit copyright infringement. Mann also says she has not been paid any royalties by the company since Sept. 30, 2005, with the exception of a $20 advance this past March that was returned.

MediaNet hasn't yet responded to a request for comment.
 

Thursday, July 18, 2013

On the Road (2012)


Director: Walter Salles
Writers: Jack Kerouac (book), Jose Rivera (screenplay)

Storyline
Young writer Sal Paradise has his life shaken by the arrival of free-spirited Dean Moriarty and his girl, Marylou. As they travel across the country, they encounter a mix of people who each impact their journey indelibly.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Cenizas eternas


Director: Margarita Cadenas

Storyline
"Cenizas Eternas" ("Eternal Ashes") tells the story of a mother, Ana and her daughter, Elena. Although they are separated, in the space and time they remain united forever.

The people and the millenarian culture of Yanomami are the framework of this story about the unbreakable bonds of filiations.

After an accident in the furious flow of the mythical Orinoco River, in the fifties, Ana was considered dead. Elena as an adult and facing the negligible possibility that her mother is alive decides to leave to the Amazon to search her.

"Eternal Ashes" is a story of filiations, poetry, wisdom and especially of humanity.
 

Friday, July 12, 2013

E-Book Ruling Gives Amazon an Advantage


Reed Saxon/Associated Press

By DAVID STREITFELD, Published: July 10, 2013
Jeff Bezos, chief of Amazon, introducing new models of the company’s Kindle e-readers in 2012.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, loves disrupting markets. In that regard, he must be having a delightful summer. The book business, once so mired in the past it seemed part of the antiques trade, is up for grabs.

A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that Apple had illegally conspired with five of the six biggest publishers to try to raise prices in the budding e-books market.

The decision came two days after Barnes & Noble lost its chief executive and said it would not appoint another, signaling that the biggest chain of physical bookstores could be immediately broken up.

The verdict in the Apple case might have been a foregone conclusion, telegraphed by the judge herself, but it emphatically underlined how the traditional players in the book business have been upended. Only Amazon, led by Mr. Bezos, seems to have a plan. He is executing it with a skill that infuriates his competitors and rewards his stockholders.

“We’re at a moment when cultural power is passing to new gatekeepers,” said Joe Esposito, a publishing consultant. “Heaven forbid that we should have the government telling our entrepreneurs what to do, but there is a social policy issue here. We don’t want the companies to become a black hole that absorbs all light except their own.”

The Apple case, which was brought by the Justice Department, will have little immediate impact on the selling of books. The publishers settled long ago, protesting they had done nothing wrong but saying they could not afford to fight the government. But it might be a long time before they try to take charge of their fate again in such a bold fashion. Drawing the attention of the government once was bad enough; twice could be a disaster.

“The Department of Justice has unwittingly caused further consolidation in the industry at a time when consolidation is not necessarily a good thing,” said Mark Coker, the chief executive of Smashwords, an e-book distributor. “If you want a vibrant ecosystem of multiple publishers, multiple publishing methods and multiple successful retailers in 5, 20 or 50 years, we took a step backwards this week.”

Some in publishing suspected that Amazon had prompted the government to file its suit. The retailer has denied it, but it still emerged the big winner. While Apple will be punished — damages are yet to be decided — and the publishers were chastened, Amazon is left free to exert its dominance over e-books — even as it gains market share with physical books. The retailer declined to comment on Wednesday.

“Amazon is not in most of the headlines, but all of the big events in the book world are about Amazon,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. “If the publishers colluded, it was to blunt Amazon’s dominance. Barnes & Noble’s troubles may stem from a misstep with its Nook tablets, just as Borders’ bankruptcy might have been hastened by management mistakes, but its precarious position is that of any rent-paying retailer facing a deep-pocketed virtual competitor.”

Last week, Penguin and Random House officially merged, creating a publishing behemoth that might be able to determine its future rather than suffer the fate of Barnes & Noble, a once-swaggering entity that now seems adrift. Random House was not a target of the Justice Department; Penguin was.

Penguin and Random House were innovators who made paperbacks into a disruptive force in the 1940s and ’50s. They were the Amazons of their era, making the traditional book business deeply uneasy. No less an authority than George Orwell thought paperbacks were of so much better value than hardbacks that they spelled the ruination of publishing and bookselling. “The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”

Orwell was wrong, but the same arguments are being made against Amazon and e-books today. Amazon executives are not much for public debate, but they argue that all this disruption will ultimately give more money to more authors and make more books more widely available to more people at cheaper prices, and who could argue with any of that?

This was not a prospect that many on Wednesday were putting much faith in.

Amazon, its detractors argue, is not a nonprofit or public trust but a hard-nosed company whose investors hope will make lots of money someday soon. It shares closed Wednesday at $292.33, a record.

“The Justice Department’s guns seem pointed in the wrong direction,” Mr. Aiken said.

But the more pressing concern for the industry is the fate of Barnes & Noble. When Borders collapsed two years ago, analysts said there was an unexpected consequence to the loss of 400 stores: the e-book growth rate began to taper off, as readers could no longer examine new titles before ordering them from Amazon.

E-books, in other words, were not a magical technology that could shed all the existing infrastructure of publishing. They needed the existing ecosystem.

“If all of those corporate outlets vanish, there is suddenly a hell of a lot less space devoted to showcasing a large number of titles,” said J. B. Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. “We’ll probably see a continuing shrinking in print runs, maybe fewer titles published, fewer authors published and the New York houses retreating into the known best-sellers. Which means more novice and midlist authors scrambling to find a way to stay in print and more authors self-publishing their print books — or more likely releasing their works as e-files.”

All of that sounds dire. Perhaps the only consolation for those who fear the power of Amazon is the knowledge that all companies eventually peak, no matter how unlikely that seems when they are in the ascendance.

Mr. Esposito, the consultant, remembered that 30 years ago there was a book called “The Media Monopoly,” which worried about the excessive power of the Gannett chain of newspapers as well as the three major television networks.

“The book reads almost quaint now,” Mr. Esposito said.
A version of this article appeared in print on July 11, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: E-Book Ruling Gives Amazon An Advantage.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

House at the End of the Street

 


Director: Mark Tonderai
Writers: David Loucka (screenplay), Jonathan Mostow (story)
 
Storyline
Newly divorced Sarah and her daughter Elissa find the house of their dreams in a small, upscale, rural town. But when startling and unexplainable events begin to happen, Sarah and Elissa learn the town is in the shadows of a chilling secret.