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.

Among the honorees are National Public Radio, which tried to get an All Things Considered segment removed from YouTube because it appeared in an anti-same-sex-marriage ad. Others include NBC, for yanking an Obama campaign video that used archival footage of Tom Brokaw, and the National Organization for Marriage, which pulled YouTube footage of Rachel Maddow criticizing the audition tapes of one of its ads opposing gay marriage.

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In response to the recent uproar over Google’s (GOOG) 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.

Thursday, journalists received an updated statement from the company saying the Chinese books in its library are available only in snippets, unless use of the full texts is approved by rights holders. Yet somehow, state-run newspaper China Daily seems to have taken this to mean Google plans to make a new settlement with Chinese authors. Today’s headline read, “Oodles of woe for Google,” and the lead paragraph says the company “may draw up a new statement to put out its copyright fire in China, according to a statement.”

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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).

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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.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum captured the nation’s attention when they were defendants in the RIAA’s first two trials against accused online infringers. But here’s the mind-warping reality: both defendants would have been far better off monetarily if they had simply ignored the complaint altogether and failed to show up in court.

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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. And, indeed, that would be great, but it seems like a difficult lesson for some–including Ms. Allen–to grasp.

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Copyright filtering technology is a form of copyright infringement, according to a lawsuit against document service Scribd.

The lawsuit, lodged in a Texas federal court Friday, broaches a novel legal theory in which the U.S. courts have never squarely decided.

The suit maintains that the copying and insertion of a copyrighted work into a filtering system without compensating the copyright holder, or obtaining their consent, is a violation of the Copyright Act. The case comes as copyright filtering technology is quickly becoming a behind-the-scenes feature on university sites, user-generated content sites and online social networking venues.

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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?

School kids in America could certainly stand to learn about copyright in the classroom–it’s a fascinating topic that increasingly impacts the life of every “digital native” and intersects with law, history, art, and technology. But should they be exposed to industry-funded materials meant to teach kids:

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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.

This story is just one example of legal wranglings over the ambiguities surrounding music copyright on the Internet. The gap between performers and their fans is widening and deepening in the digital age: private users, who do not make commercial use of the content they upload, many times violate copyright law without even knowing it.

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There’s a tremendous amount of opposition to Google’s (GOOG) “settlement” with authors and publishers over its book scanning project. I’m on the record as being very much against the settlement, but for very different reasons than most people. Frankly, I think Google’s book scanning project is an incredibly useful and culturally valuable project, that will help expand culture and knowledge sharing. So my main complaint with the “settlement” is why it’s needed at all.

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Librarians call it the 20th-century black hole. The overwhelming force is not gravity but copyright law, sucking our collective culture into a vortex from which it can never escape.

That culture includes millions of books Google wants to make available online. But many are concerned. The European Commission will hold hearings on Monday, while a US judge has extended the deadline for objections to a proposed US legal settlement.

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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. The contract appeared to indicate that the copyright holders were giving the tracking company permission to put their works on file sharing programs, for the sake of “catching” people downloading the content:

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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. What I’ve noticed in the course of this work is how much commercial interests of one kind or another (and in some cases we’re talking about a single party with a legitimate beef who had been screwed over one too many times–Victor Herbert, for example) push law and enforcement across new lines that quickly harden.

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Google (GOOG) 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.

So what’s Google worried about? Most issues are pretty predictable, like potential regulation related to online advertising, expanding internet access and increasing the adoption of cloud-computing technologies. (It talked to the Department of Defense about the latter).

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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 (CVC) network DVR ruling. But two other developments in U.S. courts seem more important to the average music fan because of the potential they have for disrupting digital services.

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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.

A Minnesota federal jury stung Jammie Thomas-Rasset with the enormous fine after concluding she infringed copyrights on 24 music tracks by sharing them on the Kazaa peer-to-peer network. It was the defendant’s second trial: The first ended in a $222,000 verdict for the same songs, but was nullified after the judge presiding over the case said he provided faulty jury instructions that favored the recording industry.

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