All the 'Happy Birthday' song copyright claims are invalid, federal judge rules

None of the companies that have collected royalties on the "Happy Birthday" song for the past 80 years held a valid copyright claim to one of the most popular songs in history, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled on Tuesday. In a stunning reversal of decades of copyright claims, the judge ruled that Warner/Chappell never had the right to charge for the use of the "Happy Birthday To You" song.
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The Truth About Streaming: It Pays Labels A Lot, They Don’t Pay Musicians

Musicians, it's time to stop hating streaming services, and here's why. Troy Carter, one of the world's most powerful artist managers (John Legend, Meghan..
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Car industry 'buried report revealing US car safety flaws'

The motor industry has been accused of withholding a report that reveals US cars are substantially less safe than European vehicles - for fear that the findings would hamper the drive to harmonise safety standards as part TTIP deal.
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The world's nitrogen fixation, explained

Yale University scientists may have cracked a part of the chemical code for one of the most basic, yet mysterious, processes in the natural world -- nature's ability to transform nitrogen from the air into usable nitrogen compounds.
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How a Concentration Camp Survivor and an American Huckster Created the Magic Crystals of Miracle-Gro

What is Miracle-Gro? For hobbyist gardeners, it's a failsafe, promising an extra boost to homegrown tomatoes and container blossoms. For middle-school botanists, it's doubly heaven-sent, providing visibly larger plants and a very reliable science fair project. For advertisers, it's something else entirely—one of the first examples of how a couple of Americans, buoyed by a slogan, a dream, and a workable product, made a whole lot of something out of almost nothing.
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Volkswagen hires BP oil spill lawyers to defend emissions cases

Volkswagen has hired the US law firm that defended BP after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster to help it deal with a growing collection of investigations and law suits over the emissions scandal that has rocked the car maker and dragged in the German government. The hiring of Kirkland & Ellis emerged as the German government admitted that it already knew about “defeat devices” that can cheat emissions tests.
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Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn quits over diesel emissions scandal

Volkswagen has announced the resignation of its chief executive, Martin Winterkorn, and said the fallout from the diesel emissions test scandal would result in further executive scalps and a likely criminal investigation in Germany. Winterkorn said on Wednesday he took full responsibility for the scandal, in which the company admitted that 11m cars were installed with a defeat device that reduced emissions under test conditions only, but he denied personal wrongdoing.
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