If an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978 (Section 304), they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. If the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978 (Section 203), they can terminate that grant after 35 years.

Sony Music filed a new copyright for the remastered version of Ben Folds Five's Whatever and Ever Amen album, and when Omega Record Group remastered a 1991 Christmas recording, the basis of its new copyright claim was "New Matter: sound recording remixed and remastered to fully utilize the sonic potential of the compact disc medium."

This might sound familiar, because BlueBeat.com employed similar logic in creating new copyrights to Beatles songs - right before it was sued by EMI and a judge barred them from continuing to sell the songs.

Businesses have decided to turn off tunes licensed by the record companies and play the music of artists that are not signed to major labels.

The fee changes would have resulted in businesses such as the Bendigo Club, which staff said yesterday had a bistro capacity of about 50, paying $3075.80 instead of the usual $62.04.

As part of the new scheme, local musicians will be given the opportunity to sell their music in clubs, while money earned from the sale of background music CDs will be used to establish a fund for talented Australian musicians.

Google said it was disappointed by the move. The firm says it is convinced that Swiss View is legal in Switzerland and will "vigorously contest" the case.

Mr Thuer is especially concerned about people shown in sensitive locations such as hospitals, prisons or schools.

He also said that the height of the camera was problematic because it allowed a view over fences, hedges and walls, meaning that more could be seen from Street View than by a normal passer-by.

A lax security policy in Adobe Flash puts visitors to user-generated content sites at risk, says a researcher who has found a technique exploiting the way browsers handle Flash files.

For example, someone could upload what appears to be a picture to a social-networking site but which is actually a Flash file designed to execute malicious code in the browser when the file is opened.

Meanwhile, users should disable Flash completely or use NoScript, a browser plug-in that blocks Flash and Java from untrusted sites, he said.

For example, on the WSJ's tech news page if you scroll down, you'll find a bunch of headlines and links to other sources -- without permission.

Okay, how about Fox News itself? Yup. It's got an aggregator as well. Here's its Politics Buzztracker that aggregates and links to stories from a variety of different publications, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others.

The folks at AlarmClock remind us that Murdoch's News Corp. owns IGN, which has a variety of properties, including the ever popular RottenTomatoes movie review aggregation site.

Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go.

"We found some of those problems to be frustrating and decided that the only way to address them was linguistically," said Rob Pike, a principal software engineer working on Go. "We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better."

The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google's search indexes, including Google News.

"There's a doctrine called 'fair use', which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," Mr Murdoch told the TV channel.

Mr Murdoch announced earlier this year that the websites of his news websites would begin charging for access.

Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley.

Presently it appears that the worm does nothing more malicious than spread and change the infected user's lock screen wallpaper. However, that doesn't mean that attacks like this can be considered harmless.

A hoaxer pretending to be Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was interviewed by Portuguese-language radio stations before being found out.

BBC regional analyst Leonardo Rocha says the impersonator convincingly imitated President Lula's husky voice and informal style.

The Australian station has demanded the authorities open an investigation into the prank.

A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut.

Lamont, briefing reporters at the control room yesterday, told the Reg that machinery on the surface - the LHC accelerator circuit itself is buried deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border outside Geneva - had suffered a fault caused by "a bit of baguette on the busbars", thought perhaps to have been dropped by a bird.