Kim Dotcom and his legal team are seizing the moment of a meeting of attorneys general from the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in Auckland to bring more attention to his legal fight with the U.S. government, which wants to extradite Dotcom from New Zealand and try him for copyright violations related to his now-defunct Megaupload venture. Robert Amsterdam, a high-profile lawyer known… → Read More
TorrentFreak is reporting that links to Cory Doctorow’s book, Homeland, are being shut down after a DMCA request by Fox. Why is Cory’s Creative Commons licensed book that is available for free being attacked? It kind of sounds like it could be a copy of Homeland, the TV series, so they shut it down. → Read More
Paul (not his real name) has never seen the movie The Divide. He’s a horror buff and sometimes tries to find odd and decidedly bad flicks to watch with his wife. The Divide would have fit the bill. It made $16,700 at the box office – that amounts to about 2,100 tickets sold – and closed with $130,839 in the bank. It cost $3 million to make. → Read More
According to InsideSocialGames, Zynga and EA have settled their legal dispute over the former’s alleged copying of EA’s popular game “The Sims.” It was clear to many that once Zynga started teasing “The Ville,” it took some major elements from EA’s classic. A source has told TechCrunch that no money has exchanged hands as part of the settlement. At the… → Read More
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking for help in explaining to the federal circuit why copyrighting APIs is such a bad idea.
The EFF’s request comes after a victory earlier this year when U.S.District Court Judge William Alsup ruled in the Oracle v. Google case that an API cannot be copyrighted. → Read More
Another loss for Apple in the courts: a Dutch court in the Hague has ruled Samsung does not infringe an Apple multitouch patent, Reuters is reporting. Apple had argued last month in the court that Samsung infringed its patent on multi-touch function, according to the news agency. “With these products Samsung does not infringe the claims that Apple has made,” the latest court ruling said. → Read More
YouTube today announced that it is making some important changes to its appeals process for users who think their videos were falsely flagged for copyright infringements by YouTube’s Content ID system. Previously, when users filed an appeal and the copyright owner rejected this appeal, the user was generally left without any recourse for certain types of Content ID claims. Starting today… → Read More
Craigslist may have a peace sign as part of its logo, but the war over its data continues. As TechCrunch reported it would yesterday, 3Taps has today filed a countersuit against Craigslist in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, responding point by point to Craigslist’s allegations of copyright infringement and further levelling counter-accusations at Craigslist of… → Read More
The legal fight between mega-listings site Craigslist and third parties that have used its data in their own applications looks like it is taking on a new dimension this week. 3Taps, the company sued by Craigslist in July over 3Taps’ Craigslist data API, is planning to file a countersuit against Craigslist, citing unfair and uncompetitive business practices in violation of federal and state… → Read More
With the launch of iOS 6, Apple finally brought a clock app to the iPad. Now, however, the design of the clocks in the app has become somewhat of a controversy as Swiss Federal Railways (mostly known under its German acronym SBB), has accused the company of ripping off the design of its iconic railway station clock design. Apple’s design is almost an exact copy of the Swiss Railway Station Clock… → Read More
Here’s an example of awesome technology working, but potentially at the wrong time. The Salesforce/Dreamforce keynote was interrupted during its Ustream streaming due to copyright protection. → Read More
Google just announced that, starting next week, its search algorithm will start taking a new signal into account: the number of valid copyright removal notices it receives for a given site. According to Google, “this ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily.” The idea here is obviously to punish pirate sites by pushing links to them down on Google’s… → Read More
A big day today for those who have been opposed to measures like SOPA that are aimed at stronger, government-imposed measures to define and prevent counterfeiting and copyright infringement on the internet: the European Parliament has rejected the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), by a nearly-unanimous margin of 478 votes against to 39 in favor.
The rejection means that the European… → Read More
Pinterest is growing up fast: just days ago the image-based social network rolled out redesigned profile pages, and now it’s following that up with an updated Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy and Privacy Policy that sharpen how the company interfaces on a number of commercial points as it rides its wave of growth as it rapidly reaches and passes 12 million users.
“We think that the… → Read More
Pinterest has had trouble brewing for a while over what some people say are frequent copyright violations that happen when users ‘pin’ photos on the site without permission from the photo’s owner. But as one photographer/lawyer/Pinterest user recently discovered, the copyright problem at Pinterest is even more complicated than that.
Kirsten Kowalski blew the whistle on this conflict in a blog… → Read More
Cyberlocker services are under attack from every direction: not only are their services looking less and less necessary as more personal file-sharing services (like Dropbox) become popular, but the services they do offer are viewed by the media industry as solely used for evil. In the wake of the Megaupload takedown, many cyberlocker sites are voluntarily shutting down, for fear of being sued or… → Read More
Some rather inflammatory news has been making its way around the web today: a user posting on the Pirateweb message board has accused Google of removing copyrighted MP3 music files from a Gmail account — possibly using the scanning services that Google employs to block illegal content on YouTube, possibly using something else.
Shocking if true, so we went to Google to get a response. And the… → Read More
There’s a war brewing against the Internet, and it’s not just SOPA (the bill in Congress that threatens to break the Internet in the name of fighting overseas content piracy). It is, in the words of Cory Doctorow, a “war on general-purpose computing.” (read his post, “Lockdown,” on BoingBoing if you haven’t already).
What he means is that in trying to clamp down on a very specific problem on… → Read More
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is delayed in Congress, but it is definitely not dead. The media company lobbyists and their Congressmen (hello, Lamar Smith!) are simply regrouping. Some of the more controversial aspects of the bill include transferring liability for copyright infringement to sites that host user-generated content and blocking that content via DNS servers.
To highlight the… → Read More
A group of Star Wars fans in New York were organizing a marathon of all six movies at their local bar, but have canceled the event after receiving a cease and desist letter from Lucasfilm. The letter apparently declared the marathon in violation of copyright, and said they’d forbidden public screenings. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’ll be giving Lucasfilm any… → Read More
As ridiculous as the copyright battles are here in the states, it’s a bit surreal when you see them exceeded elsewhere by an order of magnitude or two. According to German internet industry association ECO, ISPs in that country are giving up their subscribers to rightsholders at the mind-boggling rate of around 300,000 per month. To put that in perspective, you remember that big kerfluffle about … → Read More
Limewire has agreed to pay $105 million to record labels, after a protracted court battle in which the record companies famously estimated Limewire’s damages could reach $75 trillion. So in a way, Mark Gorton and the venerable file-sharing company are getting off easy here. Isn’t it a tacit admission of how ridiculous their arguments were that they’re accepting a fraction of a… → Read More
The Advocate General of the European Union Court of Justice, Cruz Villalón, says that national courts there should not have the ability to tell Internet Service Providers to filter their connections in order to prevent copyright infringement because such a move would conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. That was a mouthful, yes. It should be noted that the Advocate General’s opinion… → Read More
So we’re all pretty desensitized by now to the mind-blowing stupidity on display by the record industry in its foolhardy attempts at assigning damages in piracy cases — was anyone surprised when they told one woman, who had shared 24 songs, that she owed nearly two million dollars? Yes, ridiculous. But this — this is beyond ridiculous. This is… sublime.
The record companies suing… → Read More
The wheels are in motion for a much needed update to this country’s copyright rules, but the only problem is that these new rules seem to have been written by the very same people who thrust the DMCA upon us so many years ago. What fun! → Read More
The efforts of media companies to quash online piracy are a bit like someone trying to put out a forest fire with a wet noodle. The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A number of words will no longer be autocompleted or trigger an instant search, among them the interesting and perfectly legal “bittorrent.” → Read More
It’s only fair that after giving the music industry in general a hard time, I should acknowledge when they do something right. Universal Music Group has just donated a huge collection of recordings from the 1930s and 40s to the Library of Congress, where they will be available to be listened to for free. The collection includes iconic, rare, and never-digitized tracks from the jazz and pre-rock… → Read More
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