Free Republic

The Internet is a vast universe. And U.S. copyright law says it's the responsibility of the creator to police their material. So, while your Internet service provider might not really care if you're illegally viewing "Watchmen," employees are obligated to share your information if Warner Bros. comes knocking with a subpoena. For any MTCO customer who is caught pirating, network administrator Jerry Wolfe will probably be the first person you hear from. It works like this: Wolfe will get a notice from a national company, a studio like HBO or a group like the Entertainment Software Association, which hunts down...

A court case in British Columbia has the potential to drastically change the Canadian Internet landscape by making search engines such as Google and Yahoo illegal. A case brought against the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) by a small search engine for BitTorrent files, called ISOHunt Web Technologies Inc., is raising questions about whether search engines are liable for the sharing of copyright-protected content online. The question before the British Columbia Supreme Court is, if a site like ISOHunt allows people to find a pirated copy of Watchmen or The Dark Knight, is it breaching Canadian copyright law? “It’s a...

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights. Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958." The 1995 Executive Order 12958 allows material to be classified only if disclosure would do "damage to the national security and the...

Yesterday Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) re-introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.  This year it's H.R. 801 (last year it was H.R. 6845), and co-sponsored by Steve Cohen (D-TN), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Robert Wexler (D-FL).  The language has not changed.  The Fair Copyright Act is to fair copyright what the Patriot Act was to patriotism.  It would repeal the OA policy at the NIH and prevent similar OA policies at any federal agency.  The bill has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where Conyers is Chairman, and where he has consolidated his power...

What do you do if you're a street artist turned marketing phenom who uses other people's images when someone uses one of your designs? If you're Shepard Fairey, apparently, you call your lawyers. Fairey, of Obama HOPE poster fame, is defending himself against charges he infringed on an Associated Press copyrighted photo in making the poster. He's also been criticized by artists for using others' work without attribution. His lawyers claim in the AP case that he is protected by fair use provisions of the copyright law. It turns out, however, that the activist art appropriator is a wee bit...

In a pre-emptive strike, the street artist Shepard Fairey filed a lawsuit on Monday against The Associated Press, asking a federal judge to declare that he is protected from copyright infringement claims in his use of a news photograph as the basis for a now ubiquitous campaign poster image of President Obama. The suit was filed in federal court in Manhattan after The Associated Press said it had determined that it owned the image, which Mr. Fairey used for posters and stickers distributed grass-roots style last year during the election campaign. The photo, showing Mr. Obama at the National Press...

RIAA-fan Biden's influence in the Obama administration may be larger than anticipated, at least when it comes to file sharing: His good pals with RIAA and BSA connections keep getting Department of Justice's seats. According to CNET, "President Obama is continuing to fill the senior ranks of the U.S. Department of Justice with the copyright industry's favorite lawyers" with the selection of Donald Verrilli, from the Verrilli Family, el Señor Presidente's latest acquisition.

NEW YORK – On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year's presidential campaign: A pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.

AP suing Shepard Fairey over altered image. See article.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign for empty-suit Obama image and advertising was everything; remember the hour-long infomercials he saturated the TV airwaves with? However, since he became President, Obama realized capitalism is bad and advertising must have government imposed limits. Read on

"Yes we can,'' the Obama campaign proclaimed. "No you can't,'' says the Obama White House of the varied attempts to cash in on the brand Obama built. Or maybe they can, or can't. The lawyers are looking into it, Bloomberg News reports" ### President-elect Barack Obama has created his own brand - represented both by the iconic images of the candidate who campaigned for "change'' and by the "Yes we can'' and "Change We Can Believe in" slogans generated by that campaign. Now the Obama White House, mindful of the "worldwide fascination'' about his election, First Amendment free-speech rights and...

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama won applause from legal adversaries of the recording industry. Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, the doyen of the "free culture" movement, endorsed the Illinois senator, as did Google CEO Eric Schmidt and even the Pirate Party. That was then. As president-elect, one of Obama's first tech-related decisions has been to select the Recording Industry Association of America's favorite lawyer to be the third in command at the Justice Department. And Obama's pick as deputy attorney general, the second most senior position, is the lawyer who oversaw the defense of the Copyright Term Extension Act--the...

Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago, scholars and others with specialized interests have been able to tap a trove of information that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores. According to Dan Clancy, the engineering director for Google book search, every month users view at least 10 pages of more than half of the one million out-of-copyright books that Google has scanned into its servers. For readers who might want to buy digital access to an individual scanned book, Mr....

CONTROVERSY: GOOGLE tries converting every book ever written to digital... Developing...

An attorney for 20th Century Fox says the studio will continue to seek an order delaying the release of 'Watchmen.' U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess last week agreed with Fox that Warner Bros. had infringed its copyright by developing and shooting the superhero flick, scheduled for release March 6. Feess said Monday he plans to hold a trial Jan. 20 to decide remaining issues. Fox claims it never fully relinquished story rights from its deal made in the late 1980s, and sued Warner Bros. in February. Warner Bros. contended Fox isn't entitled to distribution. Fox is owned by News...

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.(edit)Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers(edit)If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.

A video message on behalf of 38,000 UK musicians has been sent... many of whom have worked with major artists, say they risk losing their income under current laws. Performers' copyright runs out after 50 years but for composers and authors it extends for 70 years after their death. The European Commission is backing an extension to 95 years from release, but the UK government is not supportive. Under current copyright laws, royalties will soon dry up for session musicians who played on classic tracks released in the 1960s, campaigners say... Phil Pickett, a musician who played with '80s band...

Will Obama's copyright czar help save the music? From Bruce Springsteen to Stevie Wonder, plenty of musicians supported President-elect Barack Obama. Now music executives are wondering what kind of support they'll see from the Obama administration. Soon after an inauguration that Washington, D.C., insiders are speculating could be one of the musical events of the year, Obama will officially name a copyright czar -- one of the most important decisions he'll make, as far as the music business is concerned.

Motoring giant Toyota is normally ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. The company is known for innovations like the Synergy Drive in the Prius, as well as long term reliability. However, if you take pride in your Toyota, and have it as a wallpaper on your system, Toyota doesn’t want you sharing. Toyota, one of the biggest car companies in the world, is often a name synonymous with quality. There is even a philosophy of doing business, called “The Toyota Way”, which emphasizes that the right result will come from the right process, and that solving the...

A Harvard law professor has opened a new front in the battle between the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and alleged music pirates by challenging the constitutionality of a statute being used by the industry group to bring lawsuits against alleged copyright violators. The case involves an individual named Joel Tenenbaum who was sued by the RIAA for allegedly illegally copying and distributing copyrighted songs belonging to several music labels. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston in August 2007 after what the music labels claimed was more than two years of effort trying to get...

John McCain's presidential campaign has discovered the remix-unfriendly aspects of American copyright law, after several of the candidate's campaign videos were pulled from YouTube. McCain has now discovered the rights holder friendly nature of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forces remixers to fight an uphill battle to prove that their work is a "fair use." However, instead of calling for an overhaul of the much hated law, McCain is calling for VIP treatment for the remixes made by political campaigns.... The only way we will get an effective overhaul of copyright laws will be by forcing politicians to suffer...

Syndicated talk host Michael Savage is being sued by a filmmaker over his demand that YouTube remove a video by the filmmaker criticizing Savage using excerpts from his show. Brave New Films alleges in the suit filed on Friday (10-10) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that use of the excerpts containing anti-Muslim rhetoric falls under "fair use." Robert Greenwald, a documentary filmmaker, uploaded to YouTube a short video titled "Michael Savage Hates Muslims," criticizing comments Savage made on a broadcast in October, 2007. The video contains about a minute of audio excerpts in which...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush signed into law on Monday a controversial bill that would stiffen penalties for movie and music piracy at the federal level. The law creates an intellectual property czar who will report directly to the president on how to better protect copyrights both domestically and internationally. The Justice Department had argued that the creation of this position would undermine its authority. The law also toughens criminal laws against piracy and counterfeiting. The Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America backed the bill, as did the U.S. Chamber of Commerce....

President Bush on Monday signed into law an intellectual-property enforcement bill that would consolidate federal efforts to combat copyright infringement under a new White House cabinet position. The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act establishes within the executive branch the position of intellectual property enforcement coordinator, who will be appointed by the president. The law also steepens penalties for intellectual-property infringement, and increases resources for the Department of Justice to coordinate for federal and state efforts against counterfeiting and piracy. The so-called Pro-IP Act passed unanimously in the Senate last month and received strong bipartisan support in the...

I have a legal question for some FReepers that may be able to help. Here's the situation. I paid for and legally downloaded an ebook. I then put that book on my personal web space for backup and for a place to access the book.After some time of the book being on my servers Google decides to index the PDF file. I never requested the index from Google.Google provides a link to the book where it can be downloaded for free from my server.Author of the book calls me to ask why I'm offering his book for free. I explain...

The New York Times reported that six major movie studios sued RealNetworks, over its new $30 software program that allows people to make digital copies of their DVDs. As the opening warning on every DVD indicates, Hollywood has bitterly opposed such copying. The studios have argued that it threatens their emerging business of digital downloads and can motivate buyers to rent, copy and return DVDs instead of buying them. Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, Warner Brothers, Columbia Pictures, The Walt Disney Company and Sony Corporation are suing RealNetworks in United States District Court in Los Angeles, seeking an...

The $222,000 verdict against Jammy Thomas for copyright infringement by P2P is no more. U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis dismissed the verdict (PDF), saying it was based on the faulty “making available� theory of distribution. Thomas will face a new trial, in which the RIAA will have to prove actual distribution. The decision means the RIAA now has zero wins at trial, Wired notes. RIAA’s “making available� theory would hold that someone has distributed copyright material merely by creating the potential for distribution. Under the RIAA’s theory, it need not show actual distribution. The judge soundly denied this legal...

16-Sep-08 Eddie Van Halen Reaches Out To Sammy Hagar Over The GOP's Use Of Their Song "Right Now" Rolling Stone magazine reports that days before Heart served the GOP campaign with a cease-and-desist letter for playing their 1977 hit "Barracuda" to introduce VP pick Sarah Palin (high school alias: “Sarah Barracuda”) at the August 31st Republican convention, Van Halen sounded off against McCain and Co. for blasting their tune "Right Now" at a rally in Dayton, Ohio. “Permission was not sought or granted nor would it have been given [to use the song]," Alex and Eddie Van Halen said in...

In recent years, scientific publishing has changed profoundly as the Internet simplified access to the scientific journals that once required a trip to a university library. That ease of access has caused many to question why commercial publishers are able to dictate the terms by which publicly funded research is made available to the public that paid for it. Open access proponents won a big victory when Congress voted to compel the National Institutes of Health to set a policy of hosting copies of the text of all publications produced by research it funds, a policy that has taken effect...

A John McCain campaign Web ad that used a clip of CBS News anchor Katie Couric to chastise Democratic candidate Barack Obama has been pulled by YouTube, because of CBS' copyright complaints. Campaign officials did not immediately return a request for comment, but the YouTube page that had contained the ad now has a message saying, "The video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by CBS Interactive."...

California's building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws can be found online. But if you want to download and save those laws to your computer, forget it. The state claims copyright to those laws. It dictates how you can access and distribute them -- and therefore how much you'll have to pay for print or digital copies. It forbids people from storing or distributing its laws without consent.

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.