Free Republic

Legal analysts say a federal judge's ruling absolving a Web site of responsibility for the posting of copyrighted video clips without their owner's consent could be a good sign for YouTube and other video sharing services. On Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd tossed out a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by adult video maker Io Group Inc. against Veoh Networks Inc., a Web site that streams ad-supported shows. The pornography company sued Veoh in June 2006 after it said it discovered 10 of its clips posted on the site without permission. Lloyd ruled that Veoh complied with federal law by...

ASPEN, Colo.--Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States. A representative of the recording industry said on Monday that her companies would prefer to enter into voluntary "partnerships" with Internet service providers, but pointedly noted that some governments are mandating such surveillance "if you don't work something out." "Despite our best efforts, we can't do this alone," said Shira Perlmutter, a vice president for global legal policy at the International Federation of the...

A judge's ruling today is a major victory for free speech and fair use on the Internet, and will help protect everyone who creates content for the Web. In Lenz v. Universal (aka the "dancing baby" case), Judge Jeremy Fogel held that content owners must consider fair use before sending takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). Universal Music Corporation ("Universal") had sent a takedown notice targeting a 29-second home movie of a toddler dancing in a kitchen to a Prince song, "Let's Go Crazy," which is heard playing in the background. Because her use of the song...

Louisville Courier-Journal copyright

A federal appeals court has overruled a lower court ruling that, if sustained, would have severely hampered the enforceability of free software licenses. The lower court had found that redistributing software in violation of the terms of a free software license could constitute a breach of contract, but was not copyright infringement. The difference matters because copyright law affords much stronger remedies against infringement than does contract law. If allowed to stand, the decision could have neutered popular copyleft licenses such as the GPL and Creative Commons licenses. The district court decision was overturned on Wednesday by the United States...

A federal judge has dismissed radio host Michael Savage's copyright infringement lawsuit against the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations, which had posted excerpts of one of his programs online. Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco ruled that the clips, totaling four minutes out of the two-hour Savage Nation program that ran on Oct. 29, 2007, constituted a fair use. "Defendants used plaintiff's material in order to criticize and comment on plaintiff's statements and views," Illston wrote in the 21-page ruling. Savage filed suit for copyright infringement and racketeering last December. Among other allegations, Savage asserted that the CAIR took his statements...

Where's the love? Last week, Team McCain posted a montage of media personalities fawning over Democratic nominee Barack Obama on its website and YouTube channel. Called "Obama Love," the fundraising video asked viewers to choose which song--Frank Valli's "My Eyes Adored You" or "Can't Take My Eyes Off You"--served as a more stirring accompaniment for the footage. ... Turns out the music was to blame. As the good folks at Wired magazine report, the McCain campaign failed to license Valli's hits--a pricey but, alas, necessary move--and the Warner Music Group asserted its copyright claim against YouTube, eventuating the takedown. ......

Several newspapers and The Associated Press have settled a copyright infringement lawsuit against the operator of a collection of Web sites, the news organizations announced Friday. The Police News Publishing Co., Breck Porter and six affiliated Web sites had been accused of accessing the news content of the organizations without their authorization and posting it on the Web sites, where advertising appears. The content was then archived; the archiving, publication, distribution and display of the content all violated the news organizations' copyright, according to the suit. Porter, of Galveston, was the editor of the various Web sites. In addition to...

DBKP.com was alerted yesterday to both a good news-bad news situation by Doug Ross, of DougRoss@Journal. The good news was the TimesOnline had used several of our quotes from our interview this week with David Perel, Editor-in-Chief of the National Enquirer, in a story it ran July 26 2008 on John Edwards’ run-in with the Enquirer’s reporters at the Beverly Hilton while visiting his mistress and their love child. The bad news was that the Times reporter, Sarah Baxter, in her story, Sleaze scuppers Democrat golden boy never credited DBKP as her source for the quotes, which were taken word-for-word...

(07-25) 17:42 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge today dismissed a lawsuit by conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage against a Muslim-rights group that reprinted his attacks against Islam and called for an advertising boycott. Savage, who has about 8 million listeners a week on 400 stations for his syndicated "Savage Nation" program, sued the Council on American-Islamic Relations in December for copyright infringement. The organization had posted four minutes of excerpts from an Oct. 29 broadcast in which he called the Quran a "hateful little book" and a "document of slavery." He said Muslims were "screaming for...

In the end, this new copyright law is going to suffer the same fate that many other well intentioned laws have suffered in China; most people will probably never even hear about it. I was just in an Internet cafe yesterday. To my right someone was giggling as they watched Meet the Fockers and to my left someone else was spellbound by an old episode of Prison Break. What did I think? I guess I was happy that they could find some enjoyment in the midst of the harsh reality that probably confronts them every day in this developing country.

Jul 21st, 2008 The RNC agrees to remove the Republican Elephant from CafePress’ Endangered Species List - Grand Old Party Ensues! Some of you may have seen some of the media coverage (maybe here, here, or here) regarding the Republican National Committee’s recent complaints about our shopkeepers’ use of the terms “GOP,” “Grand Old Party,” “Republican National Committee,” “RNC,” and various elephant designs. To sum it up: back in February, the RNC demanded that CafePress “cease and desist from allowing vendors to utilize the federally registered trademarks of the RNC” and threatened legal action. While we’re open to working...

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a "set-back to privacy rights". The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details. While the legal battle between the two firms is being contested in the US, it is thought the ruling will apply to...

Bloggers: Big Media Is Watching As content recognition software gets more sophisticated, expect more copyright-related battles online like the recent AP-blogger flap by Peter Burrows The Associated Press unleashed a firestorm in the blogosphere earlier this month when it demanded that a political site take down AP content it said violated copyrights. Bloggers, including Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com and Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos, cried foul, saying the AP's move threatened the free flow of information over the Web. The furor abated a few days later when the AP tempered its demands. But the dustup between the AP and bloggers...

U.S. District Judge F. Bradford Stillman this morning ruled that the College must turn over the names of 20 students suspected of downloading music illegally to the Recording Industry Association of America. The RIAA plans to sue the students for copyright infringement after they allegedly downloaded music on peer-to-peer music sharing programs such as Limewire. 7 students have already settled independently, paying between $3,000 and $5,000 each. The suit had previously been denied by U.S. District Judge Walter D. Kelley Jr. Kelley recently retired, and the RIAA asked Stillman to overturn his ruling. According to RIAA lawyer Katheryn Coggon, the...

In reading a small slice of the coverage of the AP - Drudge Retort contretemps it struck me that a lot of the more breathless coverage in the blogosphere stems from the rather larger misperception that one day last week, out of the blue, Rogers Cadenhead got slapped with a lawsuit by AP. As one of the few people who has seen all the legal documents in the case and has actually read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act I can see it would be wise for some folks to cool down and acquaint themselves with the rather prosaic facts in...

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) today announced that it has filed two more copyright infringement lawsuits, on behalf of two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The defendants in this new round of lawsuits are Bell Microproducts, Inc. and Super Micro Computer, Inc. BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems and is open source software licensed under GPL version 2. One of the conditions of the GPL is that re-distributors of BusyBox are required to ensure that each downstream recipient is provided access to the...

Bloggers, like me, are voicing their views and commentary on the news (and falsehoods, etc) of the day as is our right under the constitution.  When a corporation tries to tell me I cannot comment, criticize (and more often correct) their lousy product I lose all interest in being reasonable.  There are lines you do not cross because they cannot be uncrossed. The-news-source-that-shall-not-be-named, which went after bloggers for excerpting and linking their biased and error prone ‘news’ articles, crossed that line - in full hypocrisy it seems: 1. The AP is essentially arguing that anyone who excerpts 33 to 79...

This is our Boston tea Party. The Associated Press wants to levy a $12.50 and up license fee (aka extortion fee) on any blogger who quotes more than 4 words from one of their propaganda pieces. This is an outrageous attempt to control the blogosphere and free speech itself. To hell with their license fee and to hell with the AP. Any AP article that gets posted to FR will be jettisoned into the harbor posthaste. Please do not post any AP material to FR excerpted or not.

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright. The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For...

Ruling Affirms Right to Resell Promo CDs San Francisco - A federal judge has shot down bogus copyright infringement allegations from Universal Music Group (UMG), affirming an eBay seller's right to resell promotional CDs that he buys from secondhand stores.Troy Augusto, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and law firm Keker & Van Nest, was sued by UMG last year in the United States District Court for the Central District of California for 26 auction listings involving promo CDs. At issue was whether the "promotional use only, not for sale" labels on those CDs could trump Augusto's right to...

NEW YORK - A $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit over YouTube's ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the Internet, owner Google Inc. said. The company's lawyers made the claim in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan as Google responded to Viacom Inc.'s latest lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to "an explosion of copyright infringement" by YouTube and others. The back-and-forth between the companies has intensified since Viacom brought its lawsuit last year, saying it was owed damages for the...

The US District Court in Seattle on Wednesday ruled in favor of eBay seller Timothy S. Vernor, denying Autodesk’s request for “summary judgment” against Vernor. In doing so the court ruled that Vernor had the right to appeal for relief from Autodesk actions based on the “first sale” doctrine of copyright law. In finding for Vernor, Judge Richard Jones’ ruling dismissed most of Autodesk’s wide-ranging legal arguments as without standing. If allowed to stand, the ruling effectively pulls the heart out of the license agreements that accompany most retail software products on the market today. You can be sure that...

Many readers have complained that Michael Moore, in the conduct of his latest crusade against whatever he is against this month, has illegally used one of my photos on the banner of his website. Mr. Moore is not the first to have done so, and my readers can get pretty upset when it happens. My lawyer has demanded that Mr. Moore take it down. I usually freely grant use of my work to truthful, peaceful, non-commercial, non-political outlets. For instance, a church group wanted to use one of my photos for their congregation. I was honored and gave it to...

When Jammie Thomas was found guilty of infringing the copyrights of 24 songs during a trial in Minnesota last year, a jury fined her $222,000 in statutory damages. Given that the record labels arguably lost about 70¢ per song from her (the amount paid by digital download stores like iTunes), this means that Thomas' fine was 13,214 times the actual loss. So when Ray Beckerman of Recording Industry vs. The People recently unearthed a case from last year in which Universal complained about having to pay a mere 10 times the actual damages in a court case of its own,...

Excerpt - If you like to download the latest episodes of “Heroes” or other NBC shows from BitTorrent, maybe you shouldn’t buy a Microsoft Zune to watch them on. A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it. ~ snip ~

Just received a notice from NewsMax.com. They want us to post brief excerpts and links only from their site from now on. Thanks Jim

John Lennon's sons and widow, Yoko Ono, are suing the filmmakers of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" for using the song "Imagine" in the documentary without permission....

The State of Oregon takes exception to Web sites that republish the state's Revised Statutes in full, claiming that the statutes contain copyrighted information in the republication causes the state to lose money it needs to continue putting out the official version of the statutes. Oregon's Legislative Counsel, Dexter Johnson, has therefore requested that legal information site Justia remove the information or (preferably) take out a paid license from the state. All citizens are legally presumed to know the law, so claiming copyright over it might seem like an odd position for a state to take; wouldn't massive copying be...

April 9, 2008 Logan Craft Chairman Premise Media Corporation Suite K 1850 Old Pecos Trail Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 Re: Copyright infringement in “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” Dear Mr. Craft: This letter will constitute notice to you, as Chairman of Premise Media Corporation, of the copyright infringement by your corporation, and its subsidiary, Rampant Films, of material produced by XVIVO LLC, in which XVIVO holds a copyright. It has come to our intention that Premise Media and Rampant Films has produced a film entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” which is scheduled for commercial release and distribution on April 18,...

Dear Mr. [REDACTED]: This letter will constitute notice to you, as Chairman of Premise Media Corporation, of the copyright infringement by your corporation, and its subsidiary, Rampant Films, of material produced by XVIVO LLC, in which XVIVO holds a copyright. It has come to our intention that Premise Media and Rampant Films has produced a film entitled "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," which is scheduled for commercial release and distribution on April 18, 2008. To our knowledge, this film includes a segment depicting biological cellular activity that was copied by computer-generated means from a video entitled "The Inner Life of a...

A lawyer who sent out hundreds of thousands of threatening letters demanding that alleged file-sharers pay 400 euros, has been banned from operating for 6 months. Elizabeth Martin, who had been working with Swiss anti-piracy outfit, Logistep, was condemned by the Paris Bar Council. For anti-piracy company, Logistep, life is becoming more and more difficult by the day. They have been deemed to be operating illegally in Italy and have been slammed over privacy issues in the home country, Switzerland. Now, according to a report - and to add further insult to this growing pile of misery - a lawyer...

 A Boston judge has just followed up on the previous NY judge ruling that just making files available isn't enough to constitute copyright infringement. According to the EFF, it's the most "extensive analysis yet of the recording industry's 'making available' argument", but doesn't actually make things better for people who are being sued by the RIAA. The same judge ruled that even though the "offer to distribute" won't be enough to decide a case, it is enough to permit a lawsuit to move forward.   On the other hand, another NY judge has ruled in the opposite manner, that making an "offer...

Nearly four years to the day that the final Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line in Lansing, Michigan, comes word that Oldsmobile is back. More startling than the announcement itself is its origin -- not from Lansing, not from Detroit, not from Michigan, not even from anywhere in North America. A statement from Tokyo, of all places, reports that Toyota has secured rights to the Oldsmobile name. Asked for comment, GM is remaining extremely tight-lipped on the issue at the moment while presumably trying to sort out internally what oversight allowed this to happen -- and who to can for...

Last week, Stanford University reported thousands of students for illegally downloading music, many of whom will now have to pay thousands of dollars for violating copyright laws. OK, so actually the university did no such thing - but thousands of students panicked nonetheless. On Monday, the Stanford Chaparral, the university's humor magazine, published in its annual "Fake Daily" an article warning students about a new campus policy on copyright infringements. The accompanying Web site received nearly 24,000 hits from students checking to see if they were in imminent danger of being sued, said co-editor and Stanford senior Anthony Scodary. "Under...

Japan to strip Internet for illegal downloaders: report  TOKYO (AFP) — Japanese companies plan to cut off the Internet connection of anyone who illegally downloads files in one of the world's toughest measures against online piracy, a report said Saturday.Faced with mounting complaints from the music, movie and video-game industries, four associations representing Japan's Internet service providers have agreed to take drastic action, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.The newspaper, quoting unnamed sources, said service providers would send e-mails to people who repeatedly made illegal copies and terminate their connections if they did not stop.The Internet companies will set up a...

The official tax assessor of Kanawha County in West Virginia, Phyllis Gatson, has filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to block Seneca Technologies from publishing tax maps for the entire state of West Virginia on the Internet. Citing a state law which prohibits individuals from copying and redistributing tax maps without the county tax assessor's permission, one that also enables tax assessors to sell paper copies of the maps for approximately $8 each, Gatson asserts that Seneca's actions constitute copyright infringement and have caused her to suffer financial damages.

When is a virus not a virus? When it's sending your personal data to the Recording Industry Association of America, silly. Internet advocacy website Public Knowledge has posted a highlight reel from the State of the Net Conference, where RIAA boss Cary Sherman suggests that internet filtering sorely lacks the personal touch of spyware. While ISP-level filtering dragnets such as those proposed by AT&T have their way of catching the sloppier digital music thieves out there, the technology is more-or-less bypassed by basic file encryption. That's why Sherman recommends finding a way to install filtering software directly onto people's home...

We received a copyright infringement notice today from Forbes.com. They requested that we either remove a thread that contained a full text posting of one of their articles or reduce it to a brief one paragraph excerpt with a link back to their source article. We have complied with their request and have added Forbes.com to the excerpt and link only list. My understanding of fair use is that we can quote small amounts of copyrighted works for critiquing and discussion purposes as long as we're not adversely impacting the publisher's market for his works. Our excerpt and link list...

China Olympics sued for copyright abuse By Mure Dickie in Beijing Published: January 30 2008 22:19 | Last updated: January 30 2008 22:19 Organisers of the Beijing Olympics have been hit by a lawsuit from a city resident who claims they violated his intellectual property rights by failing to give him credit for the event’s official ­slogan, “One World, One Dream”. The case threatens to become a serious embarrassment for the Beijing organising committee (Bocog), which has repeatedly stressed its commitment to protecting intellectual property and has hailed its two-year-old slogan as symbolising the “Olympic spirit of unity”. Fang Shouwei...

Not content with the current (and already massive) statutory damages allowed under copyright law, the RIAA is pushing to expand the provision. The issue is compilations, which now are treated as a single work. In the RIAA's perfect world, each copied track would count as a separate act of infringement, meaning that a copying a ten-song CD even one time could end up costing a defendant $1.5 million if done willfully. Sound fair? Proportional? Necessary? Not really, but that doesn't mean it won't become law. The change to statutory damages is contained in the PRO-IP Act that is currently up...

EU court: downloaders can stay private By AOIFE WHITE, AP Business Writer 50 minutes ago   BRUSSELS, Belgium - Record labels and film studios cannot demand that telecom companies hand over the names and addresses of people suspected of breaking European copyright rules by swapping illegal downloads, the EU's top court ruled Tuesday. But European Union nations could — if they want to — introduce rules to oblige companies to hand over personal data in similar cases, the European Court of Justice said.The court upheld Spanish telecom company Telefonica SA's right to refuse to hand over information that would...

China taking 'right steps' to protect IPR (China Daily/Agencies) Updated: 2008-01-29 07:31 China is taking the right steps to prevent intellectual property rights (IPR) violations, though it needs more time to achieve progress. This is what European Union (EU) Tax and Customs Commissioner Laszlo Kovacs said in Beijing yesterday. It's true that 80 percent of the counterfeit goods seized on EU borders in 2006 came from China. And it's true too that IPR protection is a major issue for EU businesses. But Kovacs said the Chinese government is taking proper legislative steps to stem the flow of counterfeits both at...

From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally   Adam Sherwin, Media Correspondent, in Cannes   After a decade fighting to stop illegal file-sharing, the music industry will give fans today what they have always wanted: an unlimited supply of free and legal songs. With CD sales in free fall and legal downloads yet to fill the gap, the music industry has reluctantly embraced the file-sharing technology that threatened to destroy it. Qtrax, a digital service announced today, promises a catalogue of more than 25 million songs that users can download to keep, free and...

US District Court decision threatens common practice reports Dozier Internet Law.Glen Allen, VA (PRWEB) January 24, 2008 -- The US District Court for the District of Idaho has found that copyright law protects a lawyer demand letter posted online by the recipient (Case No. MS-07-6236-EJL-MHW). The copyright decision, in pertinent part, has been made available by Dozier Internet Law, and is the first known court decision in the US to address the issue directly. The Final Judgment calls into serious question the practice of posting lawyer cease and desist letters online, a common tactic used and touted by First Amendment...

This past November, EU regulators in the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education began looking in earnest at Europe's cultural products and heritage as an engine for economic growth. The idea behind this investigation, which took its original impetus from a 2006 study on "The economy of culture in Europe" and culminated in a draft report submitted by French socialist MEP Guy Bono entitled "On cultural industries in the context of the Lisbon strategy," is to consider ways that EU regulation might give a boost to the so-called "cultural and creative sector." The draft report contained language that the...

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus. The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so. But now the MPAA, which represents the...

NEW YORK/LONDON (Billboard) - It's perfectly legal, but it will still seem to some listeners like the sound of someone making off with England's crown jewels. On rap collective Wu-Tang Clan's new single "The Heart Gently Weeps," a Santana-style rock guitar opening gives way to an almost celestial chorus of something very familiar. There, and throughout the track, is the unmistakable melody of George Harrison's timeless contribution to the Beatles' "White Album" from 1968: "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Now, the track is accompanied by Wu-Tang's trademark, uncompromising language, rapping out a gritty street story, even as Harrison's son Dhani...

BRUSSELS-- The Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda has won the right to waive U.S. copyrights in films, television and music under an unusual ruling by the World Trade Organization. The landmark decision by the Geneva-based trade watchdog means that the tiny islands are able to violate intellectual property protection worth up to $21 million as part of a dispute between the countries over online gambling. The ruling ends a legal battle lasting nearly five years, which ended in the WTO finding that Washington had wrongly blocked online gambling operators on the island from the American market at the same...

Egypt's MPs are expected to pass a law requiring royalties be paid whenever copies are made of museum pieces or ancient monuments such as the pyramids. Zahi Hawass, who chairs Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told the BBC the law would apply in all countries. The money was needed to maintain thousands of pharaonic sites, he said. Correspondents say the law will deal a blow to themed resorts across the world where large-scale copies of Egyptian artefacts are a crowd-puller. Mr Hawass said the law would apply to full-scale replicas of any object in any museum in Egypt. "Commercial use"...