Tag archive: dmca

The Electronic Frontier Foundation scored a big victory last year when it successfully petitioned the U.S. Copyright Office to protect smartphone jailbreakers and video remixers with exemptions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now the EFF is looking to expand the scope of those exemptions with some new requests that protect (or further protect) the “jailbreaking” of smartphones, tablets and gaming consoles, allowing them… Read More

Regulating the Internet is turning out to be much more difficult than the federal government anticipated. The E-PARASITE legislation, a bill proposed by Congress that was formerly known as the Senate-backed PROTECT IP Act, has been making the rounds and will attempt to punish copyright infringement–as well as toy with its definitions to a harrowing degree. As one law blog put it, “It’s as though George Lucas came out with the director’s… Read More

In 2009, Hotfile provided Warner Brothers with a tool that allowed the studio to expedite the Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown procedure by allowing removal of any offending file immediately. Rather than hire a team of people to police video uploaded to Hotfile, Warner Brothers used automated crawlers to submit takedown notices based off keywords. For instance, if the program was searching for “Sherlock Holmes” to remove… Read More

Facebook’s protocol for handling copyright infringement is being criticized after many tech blogs have had their Facebook pages abruptly taken down. Ars Technica, RedmondPie and Neowin are some of the sites that are saying they are victims of DMCA abuse. The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is a piece of legislation  that cracks down and heightens penalties on Internet copyright infringement. The fact that Facebook responds to claims… Read More

Embattled Playstation 3 hacker George “Geohot” Hotz is coming to terms with the reality of being sued by a major multinational corporation: the plantiff typically has a lot more lawyers and a lot more cash than the defendant does. “Put it this way, Sony has 5 lawyers, I have 2. I'd like to level the playing field, and really get some hard hitters in there,” Hotz wrote on his website. To help make up the difference,… Read More

The Internet ain't the pirate-friendly place it used to be. Today, on its blog, Google announced four new anti-piracy measures it will be taking in the coming months, likely in an attempt to appease network TV channels that are currently blocking its Google TV service. The new changes affect autocomplete, Ad Sense, copyright infringement requests, and how authorized content is promoted on the search engine. Changes to copyright policy:… Read More

Back in 2007, media giant Viacom filed a $1 billion copyright infringment suit against YouTube and parent company Google, claiming more than 160,000 clips of copyrighted content from Viacom properties—things like The Daily Show—were distributed without permission via YouTube, and those clips were viewed over 1.5 billion times, all the while generating revenue for Google and YouTube. Now, previously confidential filings in the case… Read More

U.S. District Judge John F. Walker has issued a preliminary injunction barring online music sites BlueBeat and BaseBeat from streaming or selling any tracks from EMI artists—and that includes the Beatles, along with popular acts like Coldplay. Record label EMI had filed suit against BlueBeat and its owner Hank Risan for streaming and selling tunes by the Beatles and other EMI artists without the labels' permission. While the vast majority… Read More

U.S. District Judge Howard Matz on Friday dismissed the 2007 suit in which Universal accused Veoh of supporting and inducing copyright infringement. Matz ruled that Veoh was taking reasonable steps to prevent and take down infringing videos uploaded by its users and that gave it protection from copyright suits in federal law. Veoh CEO Dmitry Shapiro called the decision “a great victory.” The company noted that with the ruling, it… Read More

From 321 Studios' press release: 321 Studios has filed appeals and emergency stay requests to both the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In both cases, 321 Studios makes the following arguments, among others: DMCA is unconstitutional If, as both Courts ruled, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) allows consumers to copy DVDs based on fair use grounds… Read More