Tag: COPYRIGHT

Remember Joel Tenenbaum, the college student who'd been ordered by a federal jury to pay $675,000 in damages to four record companies, all because he illegally downloaded and shared music? When we first caught wind of this story, we were shocked (and more than a little terrified) to realize that P2P file sharing could wind up costing us such a hefty chunk of cash. But now, the same judge who ...

Readers, this is a sad, sad day for those of you who think movie piracy isn't such a bad thing. Yesterday, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, along with officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, disabled nine domains of websites that had been offering pirated films and TV shows. The crackdown spanned New York, New Jersey, Washington, North Carolina and even the ...

Google dodged a major bullet yesterday, after successfully beating back a billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom. But as YouTube's proud parent celebrated the decision, Viacom insisted that this case is far from over. Arguing before a U.S. District Court in New York, Viacom had been seeking to prove that YouTube was guilty of massive copyright infringement and, in more ...

Few things in life are more annoying than spending 20 minutes scouring the Web for some obscure film clip, only to find out that the golden fleece you've been desperately sniffing around for has been blocked, due to copyright infringement. Party off. Well now, the good folks at NEC have just introduced a sparkling new piece of draconian software that can scan thousands of clips in the blink of an ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... It has only taken 12 years, but 'StarCraft II' seems finally set to arrive in the video game marketplace. Activision announced that the follow-up to perhaps the "quintessential realtime strategy (RTS) title of all time" will touch down July 27th. According to Daily Tech, another enormously popular title is now available, as MekTek ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2010/05/03/riaa-can-unmask-anonymous-file-sharers-u-s-court-rules/'; If you've ever been unlucky enough to get caught in the crosshairs of a copyright infringement case, chances are that whoever was pressing charges knew your full name. If you think about it, it's pretty creepy. But, according to a U.S. appeals court, it's completely legal. A recent ...

We're accustomed to overstatement and morally questionable tactics from the MPAA and RIAA. Remember, these are the crews that sued a single mom for $1.9 million over 24 illegally downloaded songs, wanted anti-virus companies to start scanning for pirated media and called file sharers a bunch of drug-dealing Al Qaeda operatives. But nothing they've done before could possibly approach the level of ...

The launch of the iPad may have opened the door to an entirely new world of media consumption, but it's also opened up a whole new set of questions about how enhanced, e-reader consumer behavior will fit into pre-existing legal frameworks. In his New York Times ethics column, Randy Cohen entertains a particularly compelling question from a reader who asks whether downloading a pirated copy of a ...

Video pirates, you now have digital genetics working against you. As if it weren't bothersome enough that Warner Bros. is hiring student interns to spy on their pirating peers, researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology have now begun developing a "video genome" database, which can be used to isolate the origins and subsequent mutations of digital video. Previous kinds of ...

A California district court judge has issued a decision in a case filed by Stephanie Lenz against the Universal Music Group that will pave the way for her to recoup attorney fees and collect damages from the label. In 2007, Lenz posted a 30-second video on YouTube that included her then 18-month-old baby dancing to the barely recognizable strains of Prince's 'Let's Go Crazy.' The song's creator ...

Bossy, cigar-chomping managers? Slimy, money-hungry lawyers? Clearly, Erykah Badu doesn't need either of these to take care of business. The take-charge, if not slightly procrastinating, singer recently got a Paul McCartney sample cleared for her next album, entirely through the power of Twitter. With less than 24 hours to get the ball rolling, Badu managed to clear the sample of Wings' song ...

Here's a tough one for you. Indie artist and illustrator Hidden Eloise has taken the British boutique stationery store Paperchase to task, claiming that the company stole her whimsical creations and printed them on commercial goods like tote bags and notebooks. Feeling frustrated and stymied, Eloise took to her blog, and then Twitter, creating such a hullabaloo that Paperchase was forced to ...

In case you forgot, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is still dropping lawsuits on folks. Some of the easiest and most common targets of these copyright cases are college students. After all, those troublemakers are always trying to get something for nothing, right? Well, one enterprising dumb University of Georgia employee recently decided he'd exploit students' fear of the ...

Everyone and their mama's mama will be tuning in this Sunday for the big game, and to that end, you might be planning a get-together with some buddies involving a few six-packs, snacks and of course, the TV. But is that Super Bowl shindig infringing upon copyright law? That's what one Ars Technica writer wondered aloud after a friend mentioned he couldn't watch the Super Bowl on a TV 55-inches ...

The owner of a pub in the U.K. has been fined £8,000 (roughly $13,183) because a customer used its public Wi-Fi hotspot to illegally download copyrighted content. The pub owner has not come forward, but the existence of the case was confirmed by Graham Cove, managing director of The Cloud -- the provider of the hotspot service. Professor Lilian Edwards, of the University of Sheffield's ...