Harry Fox Agency OKs AOL Music Files

AOL reaches agreement with music publisher over online music. Also: Board games for dummies.... Acclaim licenses South Park for videogames.

America Online announced Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with Harry Fox Agency Inc., a unit of the National Music Publishers' Association, that gives AOL managers and members the right to use copyrighted songs in musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) format.

A popular use of MIDI files on AOL includes the uploading and downloading of songs to and from the site's forum libraries.

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Empire of Dummies: Furthering IDG Books' signature series, Pressman Toy Corp. has developed a new line of board games based on the For Dummies book series, which started as computer guides but has since expanded into other areas, such as classical music.

Beginning this spring, Pressman will introduce three new board games - Trivia for Dummies Game, Crosswords for Dummies Game, and Charades for Dummies Game.

"Games lose their appeal when they are too difficult," Jim Pressman, the company's president, said. The new series of games "puts the focus on fun."

In Crosswords for Dummies, for instance, each player gets a word strip with a selection of prespelled words, which must be placed on the board to overlap an existing word or create a new one.(17.Mar.98)

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South Park licensed for videogames: Acclaim Entertainment Inc. today announced that the company will develop PC and videogame titles based on the gutter-mouthed and absurdly violent animated series South Park. A line of videogames for PCs and console machines is scheduled to be released in 1999.(17.Mar.98)