Tag: COPYRIGHT

Often lauded as the 'CCTV state' and 'the most surveilled country in the world', the UK may soon deliver a killing blow to the Internet as we know it. Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing is reporting some leaked legislation from the UK government that would remove any kind of freedom or privacy that the Internet grants its users. The proposed amendments to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act would ...

You may have heard of Psystar, an infamous manufacturer of Mac clone "open computers." They're best known for frequently getting into legal hot water with Apple over everything from trademarks to copyrights to selling Apple's OS X operating on non-Apple computers. Apple just took Psystar to school on that last issue, winning summary judgment in a California court on copyright violations and ...

Rapidshare is a service that makes it easy for users to upload and share files with a large number of people. It can come in handy whether you want to send a large file to a friend who has an email service with file attachment size limits or you want to share files with visitors to your website without paying a hefty web hosting bill. But Rapidshare has never gained the respect that sites like ...

YouTube has been removing videos that violate copyright for a while. But now it looks like Google is taking a new approach toward some videos by removing only the audio tracks. I guess the idea is that some people upload fan-made videos featuring copyrighted music tracks. The company can leave the videos online while removing the music that was uploaded without the content owner's permission. ...

For the last few years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has taken a rather aggressive stance on copyright protection by suing individuals who shared songs over the internet using file sharing software. The Wall Street Journal reports that's all about to change. Well, somewhat anyway. After filing suits against 35,000 individuals the RIAA plans to give up on mass lawsuits. That ...

Every now and again an idea comes along that's so brilliant and simple that you wonder why you didn't think of it first. And then there's bopaboo. The idea behind the site is that it's perfectly legal to buy a CD and then turn around and sell it on eBay or in a used record shop. So why not do the same thing with unencrypted MP3 files? The answer, of course, is that there's little to prevent you ...

Mygazines made a splash a few months ago by launching a service that lets you read your favorite magazines online - without paying. The plan might have worked if the company had, I don't know, partnered with magazine publishers to make free ad-supported versions of the magazine available. But that's not what happened. Instead, Mygazines encouraged users to scan their own magazines and upload ...

As DownloadSquad gears up for "Download Like a Pirate Day" this Friday, it appears as though our friends from the MPAA and the boys on Capitol Hill are also hard at work. The U.S. Senate appears ready to give Bill S. 3325 - the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Act of 2008 - the green light as early as today. A quick look at this article by Alex Curtis and this open letter from twelve ...

The age-old battle of copyright and artist freedom keeps clanging away in the distance, and are we any better off than we were when DAT machines were castrated in the 80's? I read a report this morning about a UK band called "Show of Hands" who claims they are dependent upon so-called pirates who download their music and share it with friends. This isn't much different than Trent Reznor making his ...

There's good news today for user generated video sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, and MetaCafe. A federal court in California has ruled that Veoh did not violate the copyright of a pornography company by automatically transcoding video uploaded by a user. Let's back up a second here. If you upload copyrighted material to an online video site to share with others without the copyright holder's ...

Over the past few years, we've seen a number of artists, software developers and others release their work under non-traditional copyright licenses. Historically, copyright laws have been used to prevent others from redistributing your work. But Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License allow content makers to distribute their work for free -- while insisting upon certain conditions. ...

Google is known for its quick reactions to copyright claims, taking down videos from YouTube and Google video at the request of original copyright holders -- especially big players like TV networks. Recently, Paulo Ordoveza found one of his videos was the victim of one of these claims, and it was taken down from Google Video. The strange thing is that he had recorded his piece -- a time-lapse of ...

Any time a copyright holder asks Google to remove a YouTube video, a funny thing happens: Google complies. But the company also adds a bit of metadata to let you know why the video has been pulled down. YouTomb is a site that scans YouTube for that metadata and shows you a list of recently removed videos. You can't actually watch any videos on YouTomb. But you can find out who asked for them ...

YouTube has been linking copyrighted videos uploaded by third parties to their respective content owners. This occurred with a Modest Mouse video, which YouTube linked to the official Modest Mouse page. The link says "Contains Content From: Sony BMG," and it may be YouTube's way of preventing content owners from removing videos uploaded by fans. Up until now, YouTube has said it shouldn't be ...

BitTorrent tracker TorrentSpy may have shut down last month, but that wasn't enough to prevent a federal judge from slapping the site with a $111 million fine yesterday. While BitTorrent didn't host any copyrighted materials on their own servers, the service did make it easy for users to illegally trade files. And the judge ruled that TorrentSpy's operators should pay $30,000 for each of the ...