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piracy

Thoughts on the Copyright Alert System

Submitted by New Media Rights on Thu, 07/07/2011 - 09:03

UPDATE: Added mention of the $35 appeal fee in the “Appeals” section below.

Today, major ISPs joined the RIAA and MPAA in announcing a joint program to deal with file-sharing. The document governing this agreement, a “Copyright Alert System,” is hosted here. Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology issued a joint statement on the CAS, available here.

COICA v. 2.0: the PROTECT IP Act

Submitted by New Media Rights on Thu, 05/12/2011 - 07:45

The Senate is gearing up for another go-round on rogue websites legislation, and this time, they've jettisoned the "COICA" label in favor of calling it the "PROTECT IP Act." Like a summer blockbuster sequel, it tightens up some things, adds a few new villains, but in the end reprises the same general plot.

RIAA wins $1.9 million judgment in retrial of alleged filesharer Jammie Thomas

Submitted by art neill on Thu, 06/18/2009 - 16:24

A retrial of Jammie Thomas, who has been unique in her refusal to settle with the RIAA's filesharing gestapo, has ended with an even greater jury verdict against her. This time, instead of $9,250 per song allegedly shared on Kazaa, the jury found her guilty of "willful" infringement at $80,000 per song. As if you weren't already scratching your head at the current state of copyright law (think the failure of the DMCAⁱ to account for fair use, copyright term of 70 years plus life of the author)

The AP is going stop bloggers from pirating content (or quoting in fair use for legitimate reasons)

Submitted by art neill on Tue, 06/02/2009 - 14:00

The AP says it is taking aim at "wholesale theft" with new technology that is aimed at targeting reposting of "entire articles." The new technology is supposed to simply flag questionable articles for lawyers and paralegals to then review.

The question is will the new technology be so limited, or will the AP use the technology to follow the same path it took filing DMCA takedown notices falsely characterizing the law regarding the Drudge retort's postings as follows:

"...the use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be
a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few
sentences only ."

“Piracy?”

While I am confident that a breach of contract has been committed, it’s not clear yet that it’s even a crime. And “piracy?” Amazing how we manipulate language these days: Piracy Puts Film Online a Month Before Theater Opening (pdf)