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copyfight
your privacy is an illusion
Google to tell Viacom how many times you watched LonelyGirl15
Two rulings came down in Viacom's copyright infringement suit against Google and its video-sharing site YouTube yesterday. The first: Despite Viacom's wishes, Google will not have to turn over YouTube's source code. It will however, turn over to Viacom "every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses," reports Threat Level. Viacom's lawyers say they need to the information to prove that copyright-infringing content is more popular on the site than legally uploaded videos. We're hoping Viacom will go on to publish the list, just like AOL did with users' search queries back in 2006. Remember how much fun that was?
copyfight
Google, HP and others form League of Extraordinary Patent Holders
Tired of fielding lawsuits from patent trolls and scared of court injunctions like that faced by RIM which nearly shut down the company's BlackBerry service, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Verizon and Ericsson are among the companies rumored to be behind the formation of the Allied Security Trust. Ponying up $250,000 down payments and $5 million in escrow to make purchases, the trust seeks to buy patents before they fall into the hands of patent trolls. (That's the polite name the group's founders use for companies which seek to make money litigating infringers rather than by create products.) But the real bogeyman here is the rise of a possible patent troll to rule all patent trolls, Intellectual Ventures, which has close ties to Microsoft. More »
9:00 AM on Tue Jul 1 2008
By Jackson West
631 views,
3 comments
Latest by macbeach: I think the distinction that needs to be made is over software patents. Originally a patent was of no value until someone actually MADE something based on it. The patent protected the guy with the idea from not only having more »
digital music
Bono agrees with U2 manager's attack on Internet service providers
U2 frontman Bono disagreed with manager Paul McGuinness's judgment on the failure of Radiohead's Web busking for In Rainbows, but like McGuinness, he lays the blame for the death of the music industry's business model at the feet of those greedy Internet service providers in his open letter to New Music Express:More »
copyfight
Louis Vuitton awarded $63 million in suit against eBay
Luxury goods manufacturers have been increasingly protective of brands, and Parisian courts have sided with homegrown companies against eBay twice now with a ruling against the online auction site in the amount of €40 million ($63 million) for its role in facilitating the trade in knockoff Louis Vuitton handbags, luggage and other accessories. Christian Dior, another brand owned by Vuitton parent LVMH, had earlier won a small judgment against eBay in French courts for the unauthorized sale of Dior perfumes — the perfumes were real, but were in breach of exclusivity agreements Dior had signed with other retailers. More »
music
Rhapsody finally jumps on board the magic MP3 music bus
RealNetworks freeing its Rhapsody music store offerings from copy-protection chains is about "going after a larger audience and making a better customer service experience available to people," according to Real VP Neil Smith. It may be too little, too late — I doubt my mom will be shopping at Rhapsody again any time soon, and good luck convincing anyone younger than me to pay for MP3s. [Wired]
Steven Spielberg taking money from digital film pirates?
Steven Spielberg and David Geffen are offering Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA a large stake in their production company Dreamworks in exchange for $600 million. What none of the press has mentioned? That Reliance was accused by Universal of selling pirated DVDs. Universal, though, is a rival of Dreamworks parent company Paramount, which in turn is a division of Viacom — who are busy suing Google for $1 billion in copyright infringement damages. Your move, MPAA. [Current] (Photo by AP/Kevork Djansezian)
copyfight
Michael Arrington drops the banhammer on the Associated Press
A couple of bloggers have gotten their panties in a bunch because the Associated Press, a coop that offers original reporting to its 1,500 member newspapers and syndicates to other outlets, is asking that they go a little easier on the copy-paste. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington is having none of it! More »
copyfight
Did Apple forget to clear Disney rights for music during WWDC keynote?
When CEO Steve Jobs presented the list of countries where the iPhone will be available in the next few months near the close of Tuesday's keynote address at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, the presentation cued music of "It's a Small World After All" — a song long copyrighted by Disney, on which Jobs sits on the board. However, someone at Disney legal must have asked Apple to excise the music from the copy of the video that's archived online. With the original grabbed from Mahalo Daily's one minute version of the address, we've cut together the two versions for comparison. That saddest part? Now you can't hear the jolly chortle of Apple board member Al Gore!
copyfight
A guest post from commenter WagCurious: Lawrence Lessig and I have one thing in common: We both hate Yoko Ono. Not because she broke up the Beatles (debatable) but because she is the latest copyright owner to try to limit the application of U.S. copyright law's fair-use doctrine). Yoko sued Premise Media, Rampant Films and Rocky Mountain Pictures for using 15 seconds of her late husband's song "Imagine" in a film about intelligent design. The film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, insists that the universe was created in six days like the Bible says, but that physics were used to do it. You can imagine how litigious Yoko must have felt when she heard that John's song would be used yet again by the religious right, this time to score points against chemistry and physics. She lost her suit against the filmmakers, but it got me wondering just how many video upload sites have restricted the fair use of content due to the threat of lawsuit. I thought a test case was needed. Thus, Indiana Jones and the Big Alligator was created and submitted to YouTube, MSN Video and Current.com. How did the sites handle the "fair use" of George Lucas' baby? More »
Indiana Jones and the Fair-Use Ruling of Doom
A guest post from commenter WagCurious: Lawrence Lessig and I have one thing in common: We both hate Yoko Ono. Not because she broke up the Beatles (debatable) but because she is the latest copyright owner to try to limit the application of U.S. copyright law's fair-use doctrine). Yoko sued Premise Media, Rampant Films and Rocky Mountain Pictures for using 15 seconds of her late husband's song "Imagine" in a film about intelligent design. The film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, insists that the universe was created in six days like the Bible says, but that physics were used to do it. You can imagine how litigious Yoko must have felt when she heard that John's song would be used yet again by the religious right, this time to score points against chemistry and physics. She lost her suit against the filmmakers, but it got me wondering just how many video upload sites have restricted the fair use of content due to the threat of lawsuit. I thought a test case was needed. Thus, Indiana Jones and the Big Alligator was created and submitted to YouTube, MSN Video and Current.com. How did the sites handle the "fair use" of George Lucas' baby? More »
U2 manager accuses all of you of "shoplifting" music
While the focus of his ire was Internet service providers, U2 manager Paul McGuinness (pictured here at a U.K. copyright term extension fête with frontman Bono) also blasted "device manufacturers" for the "spectacular devaluation of music." Like, you know, when Apple hired U2 for a commercial and packaged a bunch of low-bitrate, DRM-laden MP3s of U2's back catalog for $149 at the iTunes store. [Variety]
copyfight
Google caught selling ads on illegally streamed content
Google won't serve ads on top of some YouTube videos for fear of copyright infringement. Google's advertising partner Mogulus, a live-streaming video site, shares no such concerns. Mogulus overlays Google ads on every live streaming and recorded video uploaded to its site. The partial screenshot above shows a Mogulus user live-streaming an NBA playoff game with Google ads run along the bottom of the frame. (The NBA, like other sports leagues, strictly licenses broadcasts of its games.) Google may not be aware it's making money selling ads against copyrighted content. A tipster tells us Google agreed to to serve ads only against Mogulus's recorded content, not live videos such as the Lakers game above. A full screenshot: More »
Thom Yorke has beef with Prince over "Creep" YouTube takedown
Everyone's favorite former Minnesota state high school basketball champion Prince is demanding fans take down his cover of Radiohead's "Creep" from YouTube. In the byzantine maze of music rights, Thom Yorke has the publishing rights to the song, whereas Prince only had live performance rights, probably under a blanket deal with Coachella and the major song publishers — not necessarily recording or much less video distribution rights from the performance. When asked about the fracas, Yorke replied "Well, tell him to unblock it. It's our ... song." [LA Times]
copyfight
Redlasso hires former CBS CEO to avoid lawsuit
Michael Jordan, former CEO of CBS, has been tapped by Redlasso as an advisor, presumably to glad-hand the TV companies which sent the company a cease and desist letter last week. The startup has cobbled together a fair-use defense; the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Valleywag they're watching the case but declined to weigh in. But if Redlasso were going to fight the networks in court, it would have hired lawyers, not a dealmaker like Jordan. The company has been in talks with the networks for years. So what went wrong? Hulu. More »
copyfight
Revision3 CEO: Antipiracy group attacked our network
Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3, is jumpin' mad. A denial-of-service attack brought down the online-video network over the weekend, and it wasn't the work of a freelance hacker with a distributed network of compromised machines, he writes in the company blog. It was, he says, the deliberate act of MediaDefender, an antipiracy consulting group which works to shut down file-sharing networks. Revision3 uses BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol, to distribute its own content, and runs a "tracker" server to coordinate those downloads. All of this is quite legal. MediaDefender, it turns out, found a security hole in Revision3's server, and planted unknown files, possibly illegal copies on Revision3's servers, for their own purposes. It's not clear why, but whatever the motive, MediaDefender may have broken several laws in doing so. More »
copyfight
Viacom "threatens" freedom of expression, says Google
Google's lawyers suggest that Viacom's strategy in its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube is to subvert the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's protection of websites and Internet service providers and "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression." The argument is set forth in a response to Viacom's amended complaint filed in April, which cited 150,000 examples of infringing content, which together had been viewed 1.5 billion times. More »
copyfight
RedLasso finally owns up to legal issues
RedLasso, a Philadelphia-based startup which serves as kind of a universal TiVo for embeddable clips, was issued a cease and desist letter by multiple networks today. The company, which has been cagey about the obvious copyright issues since I first ran into the startup at PodCamp Philly last year, even managed to pull a fast one on TechCrunch — Reuters ran the report of the legal issues before TechCrunch's post about the company went live this afternoon, prompting a half-hearted update. (C'mon, where's Michael Arrington's temper when it's actually appropriate?) If I were RedLasso, I would have made friendly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation before making nice with the Huffington Post and other publishers (including Gawker Media), which now face scads of dead-embed posts in their archives.
YouTomb, where embedded YouTube videos go to die
The fight for free culture rages on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they've built YouTomb, a site that scans YouTube for metadata on videos pulled because of copyright complaints and posts screenshots and information such as time online before takedown. Sadly, what they don't do is archive the pulled videos so that bloggers with archives full of dead embeds can make their own fair-use stands. [News.com]
