Tag: DMCA

Pandora is living on borrowed time, and they'd like you to sign this petition. A recent change to the structure of royalty payments for streaming audio broadcasts will surely kill online streaming as we know it, unless something changes, and soon. Pandora founder Tim Westergren writes, "Internet radio is hostage to a blatantly discriminatory double standard that was written into the federal ...

Great day in the morning; Content owners who were knocked off-line by Viacom's indiscriminate shotgun approach to using the DMCA have taken a strike in return. When you fire off a DMCA "takedown" notice -- as you might remember from the Michael Crook incident -- you're making a claim that the content you want removed actually belongs to you. The content owners affected by Viacom's less than ...

We've been bemoaning the DMCA a lot around Download Squad lately, but here's a tale with a happy -- if schadenfreude -- ending. Michael Crook has become famous around the blog-o-sphere; As a thorn in the side of some high profile blogs. It all started when Crook landed in the hotseat on the popular Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes for his hoax web campaign to reduce the pay of US Troops. ...

Well, who would have seen that coming? Apparently the Motion Picture Association isn't particularly happy about BackupHDDVD, a tool developed by the hackers over at the doom9 forum that decrypts AACS encryption on HD DVDs. The MPAA sent a notice to SourceForge, asking them to take down all the files related to the program, and SourceForge complied. That's not to say that you can't find the files ...

We recently told you how network giant Viacom sent a flood of DMCA notices demanding thousands of video clips be removed from YouTube. They even went so far as to demand the removal of videos containing no Viacom content at all, and still countless other clips which clearly fall under fair use. Viacom's shotgun approach to removing potentially infringing video from YouTube has not only angered ...

Don't you dare dance the Electric Slide in Second Life or upload those videos of you breaking out a mean 'Lectric Slide in front of your webcam. Aside from making yourself look rather silly (or, in rare cases, highly co-ordinated) you'll be running afoul of copyright law and opening yourself up to some hot Digital Millenium Copyright Act action. Richard Silver, who copyrighted the dance in 2004 ...

Viacom's massive YouTube takedown notice last week sent chills through the spine of the online video world. It also caught hundreds, if not thousands of non-infringing videos in its wake. ZDNet's Steve O'Hear writes, "[Viacom] simply ran a crude keyword search against any Viacom trademarks or brands - which has resulted in, potentially, thousands of User-Generated videos being caught in the ...

Though people have some funny ideas about copyright, they're justified in assuming that if they own a CD, it's fair use for them to rip it to their own computer or iPod, right? Well, not according to the RIAA. Despite the fact that a year or so ago the RIAA's Don Verrilli told the Supreme Court that the RIAA considers this sort of space-shifting "perfectly legal," they've submitted a ...

I saw this earlier today and now I see it's jumped to the top of the digg heap: a how-to on grabbing missed TV shows off Azureus and Bittorrent. The author says "missed" because we all know the law protects time shifting, not copying something you didn't pay for. In fact, the author begins with, "I'll start by saying that I am a paying cable subscriber." Dang skippy! ...

EFF's Fred von Lohmann is reporting on a decision by a Nevada district court ruling that Google Cache, which makes available copies of web pages that might no longer be available from their original provider, does not violate content owners' copyrights. Attorney and writer Blake Field had sued Google for caching writings on his web site, but the court ruled that Google Cache did not violate ...