Copyright Revewals

According to a new study just released in the UK, one of the biggest causes of copyright infringement is a lack of choice. The study further shows that one third of the Brits have downloaded copyright infringing content, or plans to do so in the future.

Supporters of more restrictive copyright law love to draw analogies to traditional property rights and equate file sharing with theft. They might not be so enthusiastic if they knew more about the actual history of American property law.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is coming to the aid of an Arizona couple accused of copyright infringement by the record labels. During a hearing scheduled for Wednesday, the group will argue that making a song available on a P2P network does not constitute copyright infringement as the RIAA claims.

Charlie McCreevy, the EU’s Internal Market Commissioner, wants copyrights for musical performers extended from 50 to 95 years. The UK has already rejected the same idea, twice.

A group of ISPs, Internet companies, retailers, and broadcasters have just told the Canadian government that they don’t want more copyright, they want balanced copyright. How does more fair use, no more copying levy, and reduced penalties for P2P sound?

The administrator of eDonkey link site, ShareReactor has been found guilty of ‘commercial’ copyright infringement. Following police raids in 2004, it’s taken 4 long years for the case to come to a conclusion, and after all that, Christian Riesen, aka Simon Moon, has to pay a token fine of just $4200.

Internet filtering suffers from a fatal flaw: it can’t filter what it can’t understand. If P2P protocols adopt encryption, filtering will lose much of its effectiveness, and the RIAA boss knows it. His solution? Move the filter onto your PC.

Lest there be anyone left who believes the RIAA’s propaganda that its litigation campaign is intended to benefit the ‘creators’ of the music, the RIAA is asking the Copyright Royalty Board to lower songwriter royalties on song file downloads, from the present rate of 9 cents per song — about 13% of the wholesale price — down to 8%

The majority of Swedish children between the ages of 8 and 14, admit that they download copyrighted music and videos on a regular basis.

The Italian parliament has passed a new copyright law that would decriminalize the sharing of "degraded" music on the Internet for educational and scientific purposes. Apparently, lawmakers didn’t realize that 256kbps MP3s are degraded.

Right-wing radio talk show host Michael Savage isn’t happy that an Islamic civil liberties group posted four minutes on his on-air rant on its own web site for the purposes of rebuttal. He filed a copyright infringement lawsuit, but the EFF says it’s just fair use.

Four people involved in the running of file-sharing site The Pirate Bay were indicted in Sweden on Thursday on charges of being accessories to breaking copyright law.

In an few hours from now The Pirate Bay team will probably be charged with aiding or facilitating copyright infringement. If they are found guilty, they could receive sentences of up to 2 years in prison, but the site will remain online, no matter what.

The Copyright Office sponsored a recent roundtable on the PRO-IP Act to talk about its proposed changes to the statutory damages formula. Do copyright owners need even more cash from lawsuits?

Sweden plans this week to charge the people running Pirate Bay, one of the world’s most visited Web sites, with being accessories in breaking copyright law.

OT8 has become known as the "Jesus is a pedophile"-OT. Until recently, CoS was adamant that OT8 was a forgery. Until recently. When Arnaldo Lerma’s house was raided by CoS, they took his computer. Under the writ of seizure, they were allowed only to identify files that were copyrighted bij CoS / RTC… read further for all the dirt.

One P2P defendant is fighting the RIAA’s attempt to amend its boilerplate copyright complaint, arguing that the proposed amended complaint is also inaccurate, and contradicts the testimony of the RIAA’s expert witness.

As Canada braces for a new copyright law, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has issued a warning against granting anticircumvention protection to any DRM that collects personal information. Does her letter mention the infamous Sony BMG rootkit? You betcha.

In March 2007, a court ruled that Rapidshare could be held responsible for copyright violations committed by users who uploaded copyrighted material to their servers. Now, a body that administers many copyrights for the music industry has obtained an injunction against Rapidshare.com and Rapidshare.de.

Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble. Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.

Could 2008 be the Year of the Filter? As major ISPs publicly announced plans to start filtering their networks for copyright violations and a Congressional bill pushes colleges to adopt "technology-based deterrents" to file-swapping, filtering could go mainstream this year. It could also backfire spectacularly.

Can the music labels sue someone for copyright infringement without being able to show that the person actually distributed the music in question to the public? The EFF says no, and it has filed a brief that seeks an end to the labels’ "making available" argument.

The battle over legal filesharing is hotter than ever in Sweden - 13 MPs from the main ruling party have already joined the copyright rebels in Europe’s leading pirate country. "The copyright lobby realized they were under serious attack and mounted every piece of defense they could muster", tells Rick Falkvinge, the leader of the Pirate Party.

Less than a week after it came out Sony BMG was planning to sell music not loaded down with copyright, they’re officially selling DRM-free MP3s through Amazon’s MP3 store later this month, making it the first to carry DRM-free music from all four major labels.

Last week, seven Swedish MPs wrote to a prominent Swedish tabloid newspaper ‘Expressen’ to express their dissatisfaction with proposals for dealing with copyright infringers. Now, that number has increased to 13, and the issue seems to keep growing.

The Japanese government may begin to more heavily scrutinize websites mobile content and file sharing if a series of proposals go through. "Harmful" content could be censored and copyrighted files would be watermarked under two of the proposals.

The WTO has decided that the United States was wrong in preventing Antigua and Barbuda from operating their online gambling sites to the US while also allowing online betting on horse racing–a dual standard. The ruling will allow the two the right to pirate copyrighted US properties up to a value of $21 million in return.

In a potential blow to themed resorts from Vegas to Tokyo, Egypt is to pass a law requiring payment of royalties whenever its ancient monuments, from the pyramids to the sphinx, are reproduced.

It appears that the guy behind the "rixstep" blog has stolen material from Stepwise, a highly-respected news and technical site which has served NeXTSTEP and Cocoa developers for over a decade. On the main page at Stepwise right now, there’s a notice from Scott Anguish stating that Rixstep is violating his copyrights.

It is being reported by the IPFI that Yahoo China’s music search feature violates the law when it deep links users to pirated music. Yahoo China’s music search has been confirmed illegal in a Beijing court ruling which states that under new copyright laws it facilitates mass copyright infringement.

The bubble effect is similar to the Digg Swarm, only more fun. You have to hand it to YouTube, they may slack when it comes to copyright protection, but they are always ahead of their competitors when it comes to providing visual discovery.

The introduction of controversial Canadian copyright reform legislation has been delayed, and protesters hope that a grassroots opposition campaign was responsible.

Christmas is known world-wide as a time for sharing, a time for giving. But for one charity, instead of Santa arriving with gifts, the copyright police turned up demanding money. Why? Because the charity allows children to sing carols on the premises and their kitchen radio is a little loud. You couldn’t make it up.

Verizon becomes the latest company to be tripped up by the GPL. The Software Freedom Law Center has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit over an application used in some of the telecom’s FiOS hardware.

A bipartisan bill introduced in the House yesterday wants to reform copyright… by upping the penalties. Consumer groups are not impressed.

According to a group of lawmakers, 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine is not a severe enough sentence for copyright infringement in the US. So, a new bill is proposed to strengthen civil and criminal intellectual property laws and increase penalties for offenders.

The Nielsen/Digimarc system would be offered as a way to quickly discover unauthorized content on sites. To do that, the system would leverage Nielsen’s existing watermark technology, which is used on more than 95% of TV programming distributed today. The system is expected to be rolled out to YouTube and other sites in Q2 2008.

Pop rocker Pink has been hit with a copyright infringement lawsuit by musician Kyle Jones aka Scratch, who claims he has not been paid for work he did on her most popular 2001 album, Missundazstood

The Department of Justice has filed a brief supporting the RIAA’s position that the $222,000 copyright infringement verdict against Jammie Thomas was not unconstitutionally excessive.

Oh, the irony. The MPAA’s "University Toolkit" (a piece of monitoring software that universities are being asked to install on their networks to spy on students’ communications) has been taken down, due to copyright violations.

A federal judge has rejected a file-sharing defendant’s argument that the record labels have engaged in copyright misuse by collectively litigating their nearly 30,000 file-sharing lawsuits.

Help me fight this wrong law. I’m starting the Referendum against the revision of the Swiss copyright act that would render our copyright law similar to that of America (the dmca). Digg this and show the content industry they cannot play games with the legislation of a democracy!

The Canadian government is about to bring down Canada’s version of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it promises to be the worst copyright law in the developed world.

A federal judge has ordered the RIAA to divulge its expenses it has incurred for each of the 38 songs cited in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Defendant Marie Lindor hopes to convince a judge that the damages sought by the RIAA are unconstitutionally excessive.

The infamous anti-piracy watchdog BREIN infringed our copyright earlier this week as they used a quote from one of our articles without attribution. As a follow up to our previous article, we wrote an open letter to BREIN to educate the public about their lack of res

The Discovery Institute, copied Harvard’s video ‘The Inner Life of the Cell,’ stripped out their copyright notice, credits, and narration, inserted their own creationist-friendly narration, and renamed the video ‘The Cell As an Automated City.’ The new title subtly suggests a cell is designed rather than evolved.

The MPAA created the "University Toolkit", a modified version of Xubuntu Linux for universities. However, they made no effort to rebrand it and the site (http://universitytoolkit.org/) does not provide any link to download the sources. Is the MPAA violating copyright and Canonical’s trademark (http://www.canonical.com/legal)?

The director of a successful Norwegian ‘Kill Bill’ parody movie who admits to downloading TV shows via BitTorrent himself, doesn’t support his distributor as they take legal action against his fans. Fourteen people accused of sharing the movie have been reported to the police by MPA copyright lawyer, Espen Tøndel.

I’ve just been notified by YouTube that 20th Century Fox has just filed a copyright infringement notice with them to have our negative review of the ass awful film “Reno 911: Miami” taken off their site and deleted under the false guise of copyright infringement.

"everal years ago I persuaded my record company to let me begin posting my master recording files on nin.com, in order to see what kind of user-generated content would materialize from my music. I had no agenda… the main reason I did it was because I thought it was cool and something I would have liked to do if it was available to me."