Michael Carrier, a law professor specializing in intellectual property law, was kind enough to let us know about a paper he recently wrote analyzing the Swedish court’s ruling in The Pirate Bay Case, and seeing how the reasoning set forth might apply to two other services: Grokster and Google.
For years, the big e-voting firms have refused to share their source code, repeatedly insisting all sorts of awful things would happen if the code was revealed.
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).
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.
I have to admit that this story seems so bizarre that I’m not quite sure I believe it. A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that the Nigerian government is apparently so upset by a Sony Playstation commercial that it’s demanding an apology from Sony for allegedly “portraying Nigeria as a home of fraud where its citizens hardly do genuine business.”
I knew this was common years ago, but I honestly had no clue that modern sports leagues were so clueless as to think that it made sense to blackout local TV broadcasting if the attendance at the event wasn’t a sell-out.
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.
It appears that some (certainly not all) in the mainstream press still seems to have problems understanding the value of getting people to talk about what they reported on.
Lots of attention is being paid today to an article in the Guardian about a new study claiming that illegal file sharing has collapsed in the UK and is being replaced by streaming music found on YouTube and through services like Spotify.
The NY Times is running an article about a bunch of illustrators complaining that Google offered to promote their work for free as special skins for its Chrome browser.
by Michael Costanza, Executive Director of Technology, Techdirt
In her recent New York Times op-ed, Maureen Dowd takes aim at Google, blaming it for the sorry state of the newspaper industry. Perhaps in hopes of winning people over to the newspapers’ side in the argument over how much Google should be profiting from their content, Dowd spends a lot of the article attempting to make the reader fear Google, trying to paint the company as anti-privacy and bent on “world domination.”
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