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Not very long ago, in a land not at all far away, there was a little company called Blueport. It held the copyright on a piece of software that the US Air Force liked using for logistics. Blueport protected its software with a time bomb—a bit of code that made the software self-destruct when the license expired. That date was approaching, and Blueport wanted to negotiate a new license with the USAF—and you know, get paid. Instead, it got a bit of the ol’ shock and awe. The Air Force not only didn’t pay up, it paid big contractor SAIC...

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...

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...

If there was ever a good time to put away petty, hell, even major differences; that time would be now. If there was ever a time to decide that now is a good time to begin serious proliferation of the Linux Operating System, that time would be now as well.Gotten pretty numb to RIAA tactics? Have their serpentine practices become ho-hum to you?They must have heard about that...your ho-humminess that is.This is their way of shaking you out of ho-hum land.Yep...so you've come to either accept the risk of trading music or you have stopped out of fear of being...

In the year ahead, a long-heralded revolution in wireless communications will finally come to pass. It may throw handset makers and service providers into turmoil, but over time it should be great for consumers. Fast, wireless data will become more widely available, the choice of data devices and mobile handsets will expand, and service just might get cheaper. The biggest driver of change is an event slated for February, 2009. It is, of all things, the shutdown of analog television broadcasting. The conversion to digital TV will free up space now occupied by UHF channels 52 to 69. A chunk...

Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), also known as Congressman Hollywood, is one of the most powerful members of the House when it comes to intellectual property issues, so when he muses aloud about "revisiting" the DMCA, people listen. Unfortunately, Berman wants to reform the DMCA because it doesn't go far enough, and his ideas sound like they're ripped right from the pages of the Big Content playbook. Berman chairs the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, and this morning oversaw a hearing on the PRO-IP Act, a bill that could boost statutory damages for copyright infringement and create...

Ottawa copyright circles are buzzing with hints that the government is preparing its new revised copyright bill, and will be tabling it soon, perhaps as early as next week.And the buzz is that the new law will basically be a copy of the controversial U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Much in the as-yet-unseen bill will not be too surprising, considering that its primary intent is to ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization Performances and Phonograms treaties adopted in December, 1996, and signed by Canada a year later. That was also the basis of the DMCA.Further, informed sources are getting...

LOS ANGELES - A federal judge has granted a request by Ticketmaster LLC to block a software company from making or distributing computer programs used to flood the ticket retailer's Web site with orders, beating consumers who log onto the Web site manually to buy tickets. ADVERTISEMENT U.S. District Court Judge Audrey B. Collins issued a preliminary injunction against RMG Technologies Inc. on Monday, barring the Pittsburgh, Pa.-based firm from buying or facilitating the purchase of tickets from Ticketmaster's Web site for the purpose of reselling them. Collins concluded Ticketmaster would prove its claims that RMG infringed on its copyrights,...

Duluth, Minnesota — Testimony today in Capitol Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas quickly and inadvertently turned to the topic of fair use when Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, was called to the stand to testify. Pariser said that file-sharing is extremely damaging to the music industry and that record labels are particularly affected. In doing so, she advocated a view of copyright that would turn many honest people into thieves. Pariser noted that music labels make no money on touring, radio, or merchandise, which leaves the company particularly exposed to the negative effects of file-sharing....

Any group that believes a worldwide flood created the Grand Canyon 4,000 years ago, that Cain married his sister, and that the King James translation of the Bible is inerrant must be used to a certain level of skeptical questioning, even downright hostility, but it doesn't mean that they enjoy it. Creation Science Evangelism, whose founder Kent Hovind ("Dr. Dino") was recently sentenced to ten years in prison for tax evasion, has been sending out DMCA takedown notices to YouTube in an attempt to halt the criticism. Now, critics claim that CSE has perjured itself by filing the claims.... A...

From reports that we are getting, starting yesterday a user account on YouTube, called cseministry, began fraudulently claiming that any video which criticized the felon, cheat, liar, fraud, huckster, etc. Kent Hovind violated the copyrights of the Creation Science Evangelism. Under the draconian DMCA, CSE can use such false claims to silence their critics, with little legal risk to themselves. Once a claim has been filed, YouTube is required by US Law to remove the content immediately and without any review. The real copyright holders then have to jump through hoops to get their content back on YouTube, that is...

A Seattle man is suing Autodesk for abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in an attempt to restrict the resale of its software. The plaintiff, Tim Vernor, alleges that Autodesk has repeatedly sent copyright infringement notices to eBay, where he has tried to sell legal copies of Autodesk software, because the company does not want the used copies to compete with new sales of the software. According to a copy of the complaint seen by Ars Technica, Autodesk began sending copyright infringement notices to eBay in May of 2005. He says that Autodesk never took the appropriate legal action to...

Back in April, a court found that Kaleidescape's high end DVD jukebox was perfectly legal, despite complaints from the entertainment industry. The DVD jukebox clearly was not for pirating materials. It would rip DVDs and store them on a hard drive, but it included all kinds of copy protection and cost $27,000. This wasn't for kids ripping DVDs in their bedrooms. When that lawsuit came out, the group in charge of the DVD spec, DVD-CCA whined that the lawsuit would delay the rollout of the latest DVD specs -- though it wasn't clear why. Now we know. PC Magazine has...

The Sony Betamax Supreme Court decision was one of the most important "fair use" decisions of the last 25 years, but it's been a constant source of frustration for Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights in the US since 1994. As head of the Copyright Office, Peters is in charge of the triennial DMCA anticircumvention review process. And every three years, her office sees the Sony case used as the basis for the most popular requested exemption: DVD ripping. Each time the Copyright Office deals with the issue, consumer groups contend that fair use rights to use the material on...

YouTube has restored a video critical of hip-hop star Akon posted by columnist Michelle Malkin after Universal Music Group issued a DMCA takedown notice to the video aggregation site. The saga began about a week and a half ago, when Malkin criticized Verizon for its sponsorship of Akon after a video of the performer dry-humping a 15-year-old girl at a concert in Trinidad surfaced. In her post, Malkin embedded an episode of her Hot Air show from YouTube. The episode was highly critical of Akon, and a few hours later, it had vanished. It was replaced by the now-all-too-familiar infringement...

What do Vista, Flash, RealPlayer, and iTunes have in common? According to Media Rights Technologies (MRT), all of them are infringing products under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and MRT has just sent cease-and-desist letters to Microsoft, Adobe, Real, and Apple. "Together these four companies are responsible for 98 percent of the media players in the marketplace; CNN, NPR, Clear Channel, MySpace, Yahoo, and YouTube all use these infringing devices to distribute copyrighted works," said MRT CEO Hank Risan in a statement. "We will hold the responsible parties accountable. The time of suing John Doe is over." Media Rights Technologies...

Remember last week’s kerfuffle over whether the movie industry could own random 128-bit numbers? (If not, here’s some background: 1, 2, 3) Now, thanks to our newly developed VirtualLandGrab technology, you can own a 128-bit integer of your very own. Here’s how we do it. First, we generate a fresh pseudorandom integer, just for you. Then we use your integer to encrypt a copyrighted haiku, thereby transforming your integer into a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. We then give you all of our rights to decrypt the haiku using your integer. The DMCA does the...

A coalition of consumer groups and corporations that includes everyone from IP Justice to AT&T has just issued a statement calling on the US WIPO delegation to opppose WIPO's proposed Broadcast Treaty in its current form. In the letter, the groups worry that the treaty's support for worldwide legal rules regulating any device that can decrypt video signals "would presumably require wholesale regulation of general purpose computers and other devices, and have significant harmful consequences for the technology industry generally." We've taken a detailed look at the treaty before, but let's refresh our collective memories. The Broadcast Treaty has been...

Building a business on mob rule is dangerous. Digg.com, a website that lets anyone post and rank news stories and blogs, found that out when its members staged a revolt over what they saw as an effort to censor them. It began this week when Digg started banning members from posting a software code that helps online pirates make bootlegged copies of movies. Digg took action because the entertainment industry had threatened to sue. The ban set the masses off. Scores of Digg's 1.2 million registered users deluged the site, breaking traffic records and making sure that every one of...

Excerpt - The folks at Digg.com have let the social news genie out of the bottle, and now they can't control it. Since the HD-DVD encryption code was discovered and published, readers at Digg have been repeatedly submitting stories with the 16 digit hex code in the titles and bodies. Just as quickly as these posts crawl up the Digg charts, admins seem to be deleting them. Just search Google for 09 F9 and you'll find the key. Will AACS send a Cease and Desist to InfoWorld because I posted the text "09 F9"? If so, we might as well...