Filesharing/P2P

How To Find Free and Legal BitTorrent Sites

Free, legally distributed books, movies, and music are just waiting to be discovered online, so it’s a shame that fans aren’t aware of all of the Bittorrent tracker sites where this content is freely available. By downloading from the sites on this list, you’ll support artists and avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit from the RIAA.

Legal and How-to Guides for Independent Creators, Internet Users, nonprofits, and small businesses

Our educational guides are organized by category and title below. We also have the Fair Use app and 150+ video guides available.  You can check out our video legal guides by clicking here!  You can also buy our new book Don't Panic, a plain language legal guide that every creator and business should have when starting a project.

New Media Rights Guides are available to browse, read and learn from. They are organized by category and title.

Webtreats Glowing Neon Social Media Icons by Flickr user webtreats used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

Best Practices for Creative Commons attributions - how to attribute works you reuse under a Creative Commons license

Find out how to cite or attribute Creative Commons work. Creative commons licenses allows you to share, remix and reuse the work legally, just make sure to check out the conditions of the license!

The mega-merger of Comcast and NBC: a lethal marriage

Read about the Comcast-NBC merger and what's at stake. Some public interest groups that are calling this the beginning of the media "mega-merger" era warn that consumers will be losing out because this deal will lead to higher prices, fewer choices and less innovation. The deal will certainly alter the media marketplace and merging the country's largest cable company with a large TV broadcast company, giving Comcast control of 20% of American television viewing hours according to the latest Daily Finance reports.

The largest building in Philadelphia

New Media Guides Legal and How-to guides

Welcome to our Legal and How-to resource center.  We hope these guides will help you, the user/creator,  to learn about

  • Rights and laws on the Internet
  • How to use new technologies and social media in your own life

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

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 DMCA to account for fair use, copyright term of 70 years plus life of the author)

French Internet Law: "3 Strikes" and you're out?

Despite President Nicolas Sarkozy's relentless efforts to protect copyright, the highest court in France upheld internet access to be a fundamental right for all French citizens. The President, with great support from music industry executives, had been pushing to further regulate copyright by initiating a "three strike" anti-piracy policy. The "three stike" policy would have permanently cut off internet access to those who violated copyright laws after two warnings. In April this past year, the President created HADOPI (High Authority on Diffusion of Works of Art and the Protection of the Rights on the Internet) to police copyright abusers and manage the internet cut offs. HADOPI is said to be the first internet policing agency in the democratic world. However, the Constitutional Council ruled that cutting off internet access by the HADOPI agency, without recourse to a court of law, contravened three articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, France's fundamental document setting out the rights of French citizens, breaching rights to freedom of expression and the presumption of innocence.

Essential Free and Open Source Software Toolkit

A tool kit full of Free or Open Source software
Open source software has gained popularity because of its effectiveness, flexibility, security, and low cost. By adopting an entirely new philosophical approach to software development and user freedom, open source software empowers you, the downstream user not just to use it to perform a task, but to build upon, adapt, and modify it to fit your needs. In this way thousands of developers and users around the world are able to work to improve the software's effectiveness, flexibility, and security. Join the many people around the world using open source software, a way of life that encourages openness, sharing, community, innovation, and discovery.

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