Nathan Morris, one of Boyz II Men, has stepped in to start a campaign to help raise funds for Charles Gladden, who works in the Dirksen Senate Office but doesn't earn enough to keep a roof over his head.

Morris has chipped in ten thousand dollars and is hoping to raise a similar amount from others.

Which is the right thing to do. The other right thing to do, of course, is get angry that this situation even exists:

Instead of celebrity attention, policymakers need to put their heads together to find long-term solutions to poverty, experts say.

The campaign "might be helpful for Mr. Gladden, and God help anyone who wants to help those in need, but obviously the problem of homelessness is a multi-billion dollar problem," says Ken Stern, author of the book "With Charities For All." "This man is working in the Senate, and the Senate has the power to help millions of people. Those are the sustainable solutions that we need. There are thousands of people out there who need this type of help.”

The Christian Science Monitor there, although it's not just "experts" who say that a situation where you're relying on one of Boyz II Men to subsidise keeping your government offices clean you're kind of screwed. You don't really need any kind of expertise to see that you've got a organisation here which is fundamentally flawed. Tellingly, the senate isn't hoping that Blackstreet's Mark Middleton will organise food parcels for their security detail.

In Europe, Universal are pleading with the EU like a dumped boyfriend trying to respark a relationship ("How about if I stop with the Parlophoning? Babes, I'll get rid of Virgin if you want me to...").

Now the EMI takeover is running into trouble in the US, with the Senate starting to wonder if it's good news. MediaGuardian reports on the meddling:

Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate antitrust subcommittee respectively, have written a six-page letter to FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz urging him to closely scrutinise the deal to see if it will substantially injure competition in violation of anti-trust laws.

The letter raises several concerns, including that the new combined company could threaten the development of new digital music services and that CD prices could rise.

"We believe this proposed acquisition presents significant competition issues significant competition issues that merit careful FTC review to ensure that the transaction is not likely to cause substantial harm to competition in the affected markets," the letter says.

Universal could always play the "hey, we already act like a monopoly - that's what the RIAA is for" card. But that might not help.

The US Senate is currently grinding through a decision on whether it should smile upon the merger of Universal and EMI. Yesterday senators held a hearing to allow themselves to be better informed before (meeting shadowy lobbyists, accepting small envelopes and) delivering their verdict.

As MusicAlly reports, much of the focus was on the digital music market. Warner's Edgar Bronfman Junior fretted that the 50% of biggest-selling artists held by the new Universal would allow it to decide which digital services thrived, and which wilted:

”At 50% of the hits, Universal can say no to anything”

Universal were shocked, shocked, at the suggestion they might use their new superpowers for anything but good:

UMG boss Lucian Grainge disagreed.

“The thought that we would constrict our artists who we’ve invested in, and construct the investment we make in EMI to dissolve the market would be commercial suicide,” he told the hearing. “We would be insane not to license, develop, make our music available through as many platforms, through as many retailers as possible.”

Yes, the idea of a major label trying to use its catalogue to strangle upstart, disruptive businesses and technologies - where would anyone get an idea like that, eh?

You suspect, though, that Bronfman is less worried about the idea of record companies taking on digital companies than he is about the new company's greater heft within the RIAA, the majors' preferred choice of digital closedown.

Widespread Panic are celebrating 25 years in showbusiness, and so their home state of Georgia invited them in to play a couple of songs to a session of Senate.

If ever there was a time to filibuster, surely that was it?

It might look like the senators were just amusing themselves when they should have been working, but this wasn't a jolly. Oh, no. It was rewarding Widespread Panic for their "public service". Although, strictly speaking, what they do is more a profit-maximising business, isn't it?

At first, I thought the news alert said Byrne was suing Christ, but on closer inspection it was Crist - someone with a God complex, but not the family connections. Billboard reports:

The suit (Case Number 8:10-CV1187-T26 (MAP)) was filed early Monday afternoon in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa.

Byrne tells Billboard.com that he became aware of the Crist ad from a friend in New York, where the Talking Heads co-founder resides. "I was pretty upset by that," says Byrne, who had Warner Bros. Records contact the Crist campaign, which subsequently stopped using the ad. But, Byrne contends, "in my opinion the damage had already been done by it being out there. People that I knew had seen (the ad), so it had gotten around. The suit, he adds, "is not about politics...It's about copyright and about the fact that it does imply that I would have licensed it and endorsed him and whatever he stands for."

Crist is running as an independent for Senator; the Florida governor had used Road To Nowhere in an attack ad on a rival for the Republican nomination.

Byrne is asking for a million dollars. But it's not about the money, of course. It never is.

The 2010 Senate election is now heating up in America, with Republican senate hopeful Charles DeVore getting the first major lawsuit of the campaign, as Don Henley sues him for using two songs on a YouTube video:

Mike Campbell, Henley's producer, is also named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

"Don Henley and Mike Campbell brought this action to protect their song, 'The Boys of Summer,' which was taken and used without their permission," Henley's spokesman said. "The infringers have vowed to continue exploiting this and other copyrighted works, as it suits them, to further their own ambitions and agenda. It was necessary to file a lawsuit to stop them."

I'll bet DeVore is cursing the party who danced attendance on music industry guys, tightening up copyright law to the point where even parents posting videos of dancing babies get take down notices, right?

"We're responding with a counter-claim, asserting our First Amendment right to political free speech," the site said. "While the legal issues play out, it's time to up the ante on Mr. Henley's liberal goon tactics. By popular request, I have penned the words to our new parody song."

Oh, yes - it's not just slapping The Boys Of Summer on the top of some videos, Grove is also enjoying himself writing skits based on his opponent's alleged desire to tax.

To be fair to Grove, his sixth-form parodies are probably better protected by US law than simply claiming using a song as a video soundtrack is "political free speech". After all, if that's a defence, couldn't all peer-to-peer users claim they were making a political statement?

I'm curious to know when "using copyright law to request an unauthorised file be removed" moved from being a vital bulwark in protecting the creative industries into "liberal goon tactics".

Senator Kevin Murray chaired the US Senate Select Committe on the Entertainment Industry, and his report makes heavy, if fun, reading.

says Kevin, pinpointing a sunny day in 1987 when the record companies stopped working with the artists, and started to work against them.

Kevin's plain wrong in places, mind - he says "artists and record companies need each other", but while a record label with no talent would have serious problems (although S manages to get along), an artist without a record company could probably do quite well in the modern market, although Murray describes direct relationships as "a fantasy." Maybe, but there's nothing to stop an artist just buying in the skills he needs to do the mediation work - pluggers can be hired and press releases faxed just as well by an artist's manager as some coke-addled twerp taking a break from posting to Popbitch.

On the whole, though, this report gives a lot of questions for the RIAA and its members to answer, and hopefully will stop them being quite so quick to clamber on the moral high ground now they've been described as being like

We tried running a search on Kevin Murray on the RIAA website. It crashed.

[They'd have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for rocktober telling us.]