Dec
27
After 10 years (gasp) on Adelaide Street West in Toronto’s Entertainment District, we are moving – a block and a half east – to the corner of Adelaide Street West & University Avenue. The new address is 181 University Avenue, Suite 2200, Toronto, ON M5H 3M7. The telephone and fax number will be the same. The move is effective December 31, 2011. See you at the new location!
Nov
12
Date: Thursday, December 8, 2011 | 7:45 am
Location: The Conference Centre at the Ontario Bar Association, 20 Toronto Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto
Agenda: 7:45 am – 8:00 am Registration and Light Breakfast
8:00 am – 9:15 am Program followed by Q & A
What are the ethical issues typically seen in an entertainment-related negotiation? How do you maintain professionalism and act as the voice of reason when your client is prepared to risk it all for a shot at fame and fortune? What is the best strategy for dealing with other counsel to get the best deal without stepping offside?
Who are your clients in the entertainment deal, and who are the phantom ones? How can you spot hidden agendas? Tips on dealing with parties and lawyers from outside the jurisdiction.
Join us as we share strategies on how to keep it clean and smooth in the big-bad world of entertainment-related negotiations.
Co-Presenters:
William Genereux, Genereux Law Professional Corporation, Toronto
Jason Meloche, Benson Percival Brown LLP, Toronto
This program has been accredited by the Law Society for 1 Professionalism Hour(s).
This program has been accredited by the Law Society for 1 New Member CPD Hour(s).
Jan
23
Fingers pointed in all directions, the music industry has been assessing its shortcomings again this week. Chart numbers are setting all time lows and the rise in digital sales is cooling.
The music industry remains in denial, citing threats to its channels-of-distribution. Frances Moore, the chief executive of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry states in its Digital Music Report 2011,
“As we enter 2011, digital piracy, the lack of adequate tools to fight it, remains the biggest threat to the future of creative industries.”
Really? How about lack of a good product? The industry has been experiencing a fundamental change over the last 10 years: the culture of “hit” music that the industry created has resulted in a lot of crap that people don’t want to buy. They want to listen to it, then delete it when the next hit comes along (there are lots of exceptions of course – we’re talking overall trends here).
And how about letting people subscribe to music on demand, rather than making them buy a copy of something that has a lock on it? How about massive, widespread licensing of music so that everyone can access everything, exploding the myth of ownership of music. By making all music available to everyone for a small amount of money each, collected at a choke point like a mobile phone company or an ISP, the revenue base can be huge.
This brings us to The Album.
Billboard reports this week that Cake scored the lowest-selling No. 1 album since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991. Cake’s debut sold 44,000 albums. Cake? Albums? Cake was written off as a one-hit wonder back in the 1990′s when rock was still Modern. Maybe this is a great album from the Cake guys, but the problem is, it’s an album. We don’t buy albums any more, apparently. We buy singles.
People have been buying singles because they can. iTunes lets you select the hit song from an album for 99 cents. You don’t need to buy the whole album. This results in revenue decreases to the record companies and the music publishers. But wait! The music industry has adapted quickly! Artist releases tend to be pushed out as singles projects. They’re “hit” driven, but what is a hit? It’s a song that’s popular with a lot of people. Yes, as a strategy, to go out and create a song to be popular with a lot of people, requires a kind of deliberate dumbing-down of the content. Smoothing off the rough edges. Playing by the rules. This is what we have created. Industry and consumers are both to blame. People don’t even talk about selling-out anymore. It’s already happened, and it’s the elephant in the room.
Dec
14
As we know, all Internet Service Providers can read email sent and received using POP addresses on their networks (e.g. Rogers, Bell, etc.), and domain administrators can read email sent and received on their domains (e.g. Cundari.com, Genereuxlaw.com) although hopefully they have better things to do, and anyone with truly sensitive information should encrypt it before sending.
Google candidly admits that it scans every email for relevant content words, as a method of delivering targeted ads when a person views their Gmail on Google’s web platform. As noted by computer expert Leo Notenboom, “the software that selects the ads reads the contents of the page looking for relevant keywords to get a sense of what the page is about, and then tries to display ads that are targeted at or near that same topic.” This is similar to a web browser (e.g. Safari, Internet Explorer) collaborating with Google in real time to deliver targeted ads while you are viewing a website. For example, as we’ve all experienced, if you are looking at an automobile site, the Google ads on it likely will magically show automobile tires for sale. If the Gmail is sent to you directly by POP then there is no automatic content scanning, because there is no open web browser to scan.
This type of scanning is used not only by Google and web browsers generally, but also by sites like Facebook where it will scan what you’re doing to see how it can better target you for ads. Thus the ads are more effective, meaning that advertisers will spend more money, which in turn generates more revenue, to better allow these free services to have more features. Email already is inspected by packet sniffers along the way to your ISP’s servers, and by spam filters too. If you don’t like the additional inspection by Google on its Gmail platform you can always not use it, or refrain from opening it in a web browser to be on the safe side. But, what to do about that pimply faced IT kid at the office over in cubicle 37 who has access to everyone’s email, included boss’s?
Dec
10
Social media is unstoppable. I have been doing some thinking about where it is taking us, and it is clear to me that we are headed into the realm of the mega personality.
This is something beyond mere fame. A person in the news may be known to millions, but often, what do we really know about that person? Fame alone does not say much. A person with a million Facebook friends can still live behind a mask. Of course, it is the way that information is shared that is the key. Social media enables a person’s every move, and thought, to come out into the public domain. As more and more details pour out, their personalities becomes outsized.
Through the ages there always have been well-known people. The pharaohs of Egypt, the kings and queens of England, and more recently movie stars and starlets, are all examples of mere fame. What we are seeing now is an unprecedented expansion of the publication of the daily details of other people’s lives. But wait, people are not getting more interesting. In fact the reverse is probably true where a lot of what we do is quite mundane, and imitation is so prevalent and made so easy by the global networks of information that we use that it is really hard to be unique. Putting aside those quality issues, the fact is, that people simply have a lot more public “stuff” wrapped around them. Some might call it baggage. I see it, for better or worse, as their public personality.
The mega personality is something to be cultivated and managed like a personal brand, but the sheer size and reach of that brand is worth considering. Though privacy issues, and tensions between free speech and defamation, we already can see that the ubiquitousness of the mega personality is causing unprecedented social head butting. Not everyone will be famous at the same time, too many egos in the room leads to headaches for everyone. Social media is said to be a conversation, but to keep it from becoming a shouting match or an argument, as a society we need to stay on top of adapting existing forms of etiquette and developing new ones. We owe it to ourselves to publish, teach, and govern ourselves by, civility in the social media sphere.
William Genereux B.A., J.D.
__________________________
Genereux Law Professional Corporation is a boutique law firm, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Legal services are provided in the areas of entertainment, technology, intellectual property, business ventures & litigation.
__________________________
Terms of Use - The information on this site is general in nature and should not be taken as legal advice for specific situations. You should not act or fail to act on anything based on any of the material contained on this website without first consulting with a qualified lawyer. We strive to ensure the value of all the information shown on this site but cannot guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any such information. The contents of this site are protected by all applicable laws.
__________________________
__________________________
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
