Free Republic

I received a notice of Copyright Infringement at my office today. It says someone downloaded a file called Let It Snow on 2/22/14 at 7:49GMT and the ip address listed is 173.23.1.91. I am really concerned and don't know what my first step should be in combating this problem. Does anyone have any advice about this, I would greatly appreciate any help with this matter.

A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday ordered Google Inc to remove from its YouTube video-sharing website an anti-Islamic film that had sparked protests across the Muslim world. By a 2-1 vote, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected Google's assertion that the removal of the film "Innocence of Muslims," amounted to a prior restraint of speech that violated the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiff, Cindy Lee Garcia, had objected to the film after learning that it incorporated a clip she had made for a different movie, which had been partially dubbed and in which she...

MADRID: News media companies in Spain will be able to charge search engines such as Google for displaying copyrighted content under a new law proposed by the Spanish government on Friday. The measure echoes similar drives around Europe. Publishers in Portugal, France, Belgium and Germany have pushed for compensation in some form or another for links, snippets, headlines and lead paragraphs that appear in news search engines and aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo! news. The search engines draw revenue from advertising placed near news content and media companies have fought for a share of it. The new rule...

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2014? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1957 The books On the Road, Atlas Shrugged, and The Cat in the Hat, the films The Bridge on the River Kwai, Funny Face, and The Prince and the Showgirl, the play Endgame (“Fin de Partie”), and more. . . Congress Shrugged Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright...

The release of names is a big mistake, say some lawyers, based on the court not knowing the difference between streaming and downloading copyrighted material.Thousands of porn watchers have had their personal details released by a German court. Some 20,000 people who watched porn on a U.S.-based website have had their names and addresses released by a court and could end up paying a fine. Cease and desist letters were sent to people who had accessed the smut site, Redtube. They were traced after a German court released their personal details in a case where people were claiming videos had...

North Korea publicly executed around 80 people earlier this month, many for watching smuggled South Korean TV shows, a South Korean newspaper reported Monday. -excerpt- In the eastern port of Wonsan, the authorities gathered 10,000 people in a sports stadium to watch the execution of eight people by firing squad, the source quoted one eyewitness as saying.

I originally thought it was a hoax when I heard about it this past January. It sure sounded like one. But it’s for real: The World Trade Organization has given the otherwise unexceptional Caribbean nation of Antigua permission to sell US copyrighted content, without any payment to copyright owners.

Google announced Friday that it would begin placing users' activity and photos into advertisements and recommendations seen by the account-holders' Google+ contacts, similar to Facebook's "Sponsored Stories," which led to a class-action lawsuit that cost the Menlo Park company $20 million and forced it to offer members an option to opt out of such uses. "For example, your friends might see that you rated an album 4 stars on the band's Google Play page. And the +1 you gave your favorite local bakery could be included in an ad that the bakery runs through Google," the Mountain View search giant...

<p>Sarah Palin and her political action committee have been named in a copyright infringement lawsuit over the use of an iconic 9/11 photo.</p> <p>The newspaper publisher North Jersey Media Group Inc. is suing the former Alaska governor for posting a copy of the image on Palin’s SarahPAC website and her personal Facebook page without permission.</p>

Harper Lee, the aging author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has reached a settlement in principle on a lawsuit alleging she was scammed into signing over the copyright to her classic novel by an unscrupulous literary agent who took advantage of her failing hearing and eyesight, a lawyer in the case says. Lee had filed suit in May against Samuel Pinkus and others — including disgraced journalist Gerald Posner — to reclaim the copyright. However, dismissal papers were filed in Manhattan federal court today by Lee’s lawyer removing both Posner and Lee Ann Winick, Pinkus’ wife and another defendant, of...

NIKE has pulled a pair of leggings after the design was criticized for being racist. The monochrome print, which features on the label's Pro Tattoo Tech Tights, has caused controversy in Australia and New Zealand for its similarity to the traditional Samoan Pe'a male tattoo.

Why, Mr. Moderator, is this article found to be objectionable by you? Removing legitimate news articles from legitimate sources should not be the rule here on Free Republic. And, incidentally, it's not free as I contribute to the website on a regular basis.

On Friday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME enables content providers to integrate digital rights management (DRM) interfaces into HTML5-based media players. Encrypted Media Extensions is being developed jointly by Google, Microsoft and online streaming-service Netflix. No actual encryption algorithm is part of the draft; that element is designed to be contained in a CDM (Content Decryption Module) that works with EME to decode the content. CDMs may be plugins or built into browsers. The publication of the new draft is a blow for critics of the extensions, led...

"Never had standing to sue, Ninth Circuit confirms." http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/copyright-troll-righthaven-finally-completely-dead/

Watchers of the Prenda Law saga have been waiting for United States District Judge Otis D. Wright II to issue an order in the wake of his apocalyptic hearing on proposed sanctions against Prenda Law, its putative client entities, and its lawyers. During that wait, doubt has set in. Could Judge Wright's order, after all this drama, possibly live up to expectations? Could any dry memorandum capture the jaw-dropping antics that have come before? Yeeeeop. This afternoon Judge Wright issued an annihilating, hull-breaching order against Prenda Law, its principals, and its plaintiff entities. How does a federal judge assure that...

Harper Lee, the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, has sued her literary agent for allegedly duping her into assigning him the copyright on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In the lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan, Lee says Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of Lee's long-time agent, Eugene Winick, took advantage of her failing hearing and eyesight to transfer the rights on the book, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and became an Oscar-winning film. The 87-year-old says she has no memory of agreeing to relinquish her rights or signing the agreement that cements the purported transfer.

Q: Okay, so what is the Christian account of how revelation occurred?As Elmer Fudd might say, “Vewy, vewy swowly.” Divine revelation didn’t happen in a blinding flash—such as God dropping the Summa Theologiae on top of a mountain and waiting for people to invent the Latin language so they could read it. (Though He could have given them magical spectacles that would translate it for them….) It seems that God preferred to slowly unfold His personality and His will for us through the course of tangled, messy human history. We might wonder why, and call up the divine customer service...

Today the Prenda Law enterprise encountered an extinction-level event. Faced with a federal judge's demand that they explain their litigation conduct, Prenda Law's attorney principals — and one paralegal — invoked their right to remain silent under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As a matter of individual prudence, that may have been the right decision. But for the nationwide Prenda Law enterprise, under whatever name or guise or glamour, it spelled doom. -Hail, Hail, The Gang's All Here- The crowd gathered early outside of the courtroom of United States District Judge Otis D. Wright II. As before,...

Link only due to the subject of the article.

Back in November of last year, Republican staffer Derek Khanna faced a dilemma that, unlike the problems faced by many of his peers in the GOP, had nothing to do with the election. Specifically, Khanna had authored a memo on copyright reform for his then-employers, the Republican Study Committee (RSC) that shot down three “myths of copyright” – that is, that “the purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content,” that “copyright is the free market at work,” and that “the current copyright legal regime leads to the greatest innovation and productivity.” Khanna’s memo was meant to...