by Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.
The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.
by Loretta Chao, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
In response to the recent uproar over Google’s digital library in China, Google initially gave a boilerplate response about its U.S. book settlement applying only to U.S. books, and that the company will “of course” listen carefully to concerns and work hard to address them.
Via Copycense, we learn that the students who formed the Disney Movie Appreciation Club at Washington University in St. Louis recently had to shut down the club due to threats of IP infringement, because the students were gathering together to watch the legally obtained movies, without getting a proper license for showing it to a larger group of people (rather than just a few people).
The same federal judge who oversaw the Joel Tenenbaum file-sharing trial earlier this year passed out default judgments this week against other file-swappers who never bothered to show up–and they now owe far less than Tenenbaum.
In my last post about Lily Allen’s hypocrisy in uploading tons of songs without authorization, while saying it’s good to cut off internet access for regular uploaders, one of the commenters made a good point: we should use this as a teaching moment, to try to show Ms. Allen why her position is wrong, rather than focusing on calling her a hypocrite.
With a new school year in full swing, Ars takes a look at the RIAA’s newly updated copyright curriculum. Your kids could be learning from it–so what does it say?
A new front has opened in the digital age’s war on copyright infringement. Israeli Internet surfers – used to uploading video clips of local musicians onto YouTube – discovered a few weeks ago that Unicell, a company which represents the digital rights of, among others, Sarit Hadad, Regev Hod, Koby Peretz and Lior Narkis, had closed their user accounts on the site, claiming copyright abuse.
There’s a tremendous amount of opposition to Google’s “settlement” with authors and publishers over its book scanning project. So my main complaint with the “settlement” is why it’s needed at all.
Last year, we talked about some language in a contract being used by a company that was supposedly trying to help copyright holders track down content being shared online, for the purpose of sending out threatening “pre-settlement” letters.
by Doc Searls, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
Allan Gregory (a 3rd year law student and my summer intern at the Berkman Center) and I have spent a lot of time this summer looking at the history of copyright and royalties, mostly in respect to music.
by Jessica E. Vascellaro, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Google spent $950,000 lobbying lawmakers, regulators and the White House on issues ranging from cloud computing to copyright in the second quarter, according to public lobbying disclosures.
The sum tops the $880,000 it spent in the first quarter and represents a 30 percent increase from the second quarter of 2008, when it spent $730,000.
The sale of The Pirate Bay probably ranks as the week’s biggest news for those of us who obsess about copyright issues, followed by the ruling that Usenet.com’s newsgroup-access service infringed on the major record companies’ copyrights and the Supreme Court’s decision not to take Hollywood’s appeal of the Cablevision network DVR ruling
by David Kravets, Contributor, Threat Level, Wired
Thursday’s $1.92 million file-sharing verdict against a Minnesota mother of four could provide copyright reform advocates with a powerful human symbol of the draconian penalties written into the nearly-35 year old Copyright Act. Then again, maybe not.
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