Entertainment Law News for 11.17.09

• The operators of The Pirate Bay have announced they are shutting down their BitTorrent tracker — the world’s largest. The founders are calling it the “end of an era” and reportedly are encouraging other BitTorrent site owners to ditch their own torrents. What’s up? Apparently the underground piracy community is switching to new, more secure transfer systems of file-sharing.
• Comcast has met with Justice Department officials in consideration of intervening in a proposed merger between Ticketmaster and Live Nation, Bloomberg reports. Government officials have been reviewing the merger under antitrust concerns that it would result in too much control over ticket prices, and Comcast may salvage the merger by agreeing to purchase spinoffs from the companies.
• A federal judge in Massachusetts has dismissed a lawsuit that accuses “The View” co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck of plagiarizing another author’s work for her own best-seller “The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide.”
• Shazam, the uber-popular iPhone app that lets users identify songs being played anywhere, is the subject of a patent lawsuit. Digimarc has filed a lawsuit against Shazam Entertainment over the iPhone app that claims more than 50 million users in over 150 countries.