Chilling Effect: Oracle Wins Appeal to Copyright APIs
The federal appeals court that handles U.S. intellectual property cases ruled that APIs can be copyrighted, a finding that may have significant consequences for cloud computing, software...
View ArticleMonkey Selfies Drive Internet Ape-Sh**
Here's another entry for the selfie hall of shame. When photojournalist David Slater got mugged by a camera-hogging monkey in 2011, he couldn't have imagined that three years later, he'd still be...
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Is Reddit Dropping The Ban Hammer On BuzzFeed?
Reddit rolled out some rules on Tuesday targeting "viral" websites like BuzzFeed that traffic in listicles and other material plundered from Reddit users' posts. Want to cut and paste that amusing...
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4chan Will Now Remove Awful Images—If They're Copyrighted
Visitors to 4chan may have noticed the site’s shiny new Digital Millennium Copyright Act policy page, apparently established in the wake of a large scale celebrity photo leak. Over the past few days...
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To Apple, Copying Is Always “Stealing”—Unless It's Doing The Copying
Jony Ive, Apple vice president of design, at the Vanity Fair New Establishment SummitYou know that saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery? It’s total hogwash, at least according to...
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New YouTube Tool Tells You If Your Video's Song Is Copyrighted
Music copyright issues often get YouTube videos muted or even blocked. Now the service launched a new feature that lets video creators check those song rights before uploading, the company announced in...
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The Pirate Bay Goes Offline Following A Raid By Swedish Police
The notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay went offline Tuesday morning following a raid in Stockholm by Swedish police, TorrentFreak reports. Swedish police have reportedly seized servers and...
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Pirate Bay Cofounder: Site 'Has No Soul Left,' Should Stay Offline
It's been more than 24 hours since a Swedish police raid took down file sharing site the Pirate Bay, marking the site’s longest downtime in eight years. See also: The Pirate Bay Goes Offline Following...
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How The Inventor Of The Selfie Stick Got Shafted
Inventor Wayne FrommWayne Fromm spent roughly a decade hustling to get his camera monopod off the ground. But, the inventor says, he “met resistance.” People just didn’t get the concept of using an...
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How DMCA Takedown Notices Work [Infographic]
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Its "safe harbor" provision is what draws the line between pirates and legally legitimate Web companies. That line isn't always crystal clear, as the ongoing saga...
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Attorney Says Pinterest Needs To Change Its Digital Copyright Policy
Questions continue to mount about Pinterest's uneasy relationship with copyright law, with one attorney (and avid Pinterest user) saying the company needs to upgrade its Digital Millenium Copyright...
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Everything Pinterest and Tumblr Users Need To Know About Copyright Law
It's hard to write a story or post about Pinterest and copyright law without at least one reader leaving a comment along the lines of "What about Tumblr?"Indeed, comparisons between the two sites are...
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The Pirate Bay Switches from Torrents to Untraceable Magnet Links
The Pirate Bay will no longer link to .torrent files. It will use better technology instead. "Today marks the end of an era," the Pirate Bay blog says. "Sort of." The famed torrent site will now use...
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Pinterest Will Make It Easier To Report Copyright Violations
Bowing to pressure about how its uses content users post to its site, Pinterest announced changes to its service terms Saturday.Pinterest said the new terms are easier to understand and were developed...
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Despite Policy Changes, Pinterest Still Doesn't Comply With DMCA
Despite changes over the weekend to its usage policies, Pinterest may still not be in compliance with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, according to copyright attorney and blogger Connie...
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How the Megaupload Shutdown Screwed a High School Sports Broadcaster
The trouble started with what should have been a routine file backup. In midsave, the external hard drive Kyle Goodwin was using slipped off his coffee table and onto the floor, rendering the data on...
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Soon, Your ISP Will Scold You For File Sharing - Will it Make a Difference?
This summer, many who routinely download movies and music without paying will be in for a rude awakening... maybe. Or, that awakening may turn out to be little more than a series of toothless warnings....
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SOPA Lives! New Bill Seeks to Resurrect Expansion of IP Enforcement Powers
A new bill is about to be officially introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives that would resurrect some unsavory aspects of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that sparked...
View ArticleCopyright Enforcement Irony: Hip Hopper Lord Finesse Silences YouTube Rapper...
In an ironic twist, YouTube has honored a request by hip hop producer Lord Finesse to remove a video in which Dan Bull, a songwriter, rapper and YouTube satirist, criticized the producer's own...
View ArticleCensored Romney Videos Highlight YouTube Abuse of Copyright Claims
Earlier this week, YouTube took down videos attacking President Obama due to a copyright claim by music publishing giant BMG Rights Management. The clips, which featured Obama singing Al Green’s hit...
View ArticleCopyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless
The proposed Copyright Alert System, in which U.S. Internet service providers would identify customers who download music or movies without authorization, has been roundly criticized as abusive. At...
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Link A Video to That Photo: Stipple Opens Its Image Tagging Service to the...
Social image site Stipple is relaunching Thursday with new tools and indexing features designed to fix the perpetual problem of image attribution and introduce brand-new sales channels through the use...
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What the Internet Association is Really About
It took 115,000 websites and more than 13 million Internet users to get Congress' attention on January 18 and bring down the SOPA and PIPA Internet copyright bills. But now a new group is setting up...
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Google Adjusts Search Results To Appease Copyright Owners
Googling for illegal access to movies or music? Starting today, those links will begin to slip down the results list. The search giant has revamped its algorithm to take into account complaints about...
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Craigslist, 3taps & The Court Battle For The Soul Of Public Data
Who owns the kind of information collected by Craigslist? The classifieds site has staked its claim in a series of lawsuits against apartment listings mapper PadMapper and Craigslist data scraper...
View ArticleFile Sharers, Get Ready For Copyright Violation Warnings
After a series of delays, the Center for Copyright Information's "six strikes" anti-piracy scheme has a launch date. Starting on November 28, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner and Verizon...
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Music Pirates Find Download Tools On Microsoft's Windows Phone 8
As on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, a number of apps allowing users to download free and copyrighted music have cropped up on Microsoft's Windows Phone.Windows Phone apps including Audiotica, Music...
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Microsoft Wants To Turn Xbox 360 Kinect Into Big Brother!
A Microsoft patent application published this week suggests that the software giant could use its Xbox 360 Kinect hardware as a “Big Brother” sensor to prevent too many people from watching rented...
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How RapidShare Plans To Avoid MegaUpload's Fate
It's not everyday an Internet company watches its traffic numbers plummet - and rejoices. But that is precisely the scenario that cloud storage service RapidShare finds itself in as it seeks to draw a...
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Metallica Makes Up With Sean Parker As Spotify Gets More Social
Lars Ulrich wants you know that he's cool with Sean Parker. To show it, the Metallica drummer and anti-filesharing crusader didn't just share a stage with the Napster cofounder this morning - he hugged...
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Facebook Poisons Instagram For Its Most Valuable Users: Real Photographers
I'm going to keep using Instagram. But I can understand why some folks, especially professional photographers, may leave.The service's recent terms-of-service update trouble me greatly, but it's not...
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Surprise! Digital Music Just Had Its Best Week Ever
After more than a decade of hand-wringing over the music industry's tumultuous decline, there's a glimmer of hope. Last week, more people paid for digital music than during any week-long period in...
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Aereo Is Expanding To 22 More Cities: Are You Ready To Watch Broadcast TV...
Aereo, Barry Diller's uber-controversial Internet TV service currently available only in New York, is expanding. This spring, consumers in 22 more U.S. cities will get the ability to tune into...
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How The New "Six Strikes" Anti-Piracy Scheme Could Ruin Public WiFi
It's almost here. The "6 strikes" anti-piracy scheme crafted by Hollywood and U.S. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) is due to be implemented in the next few weeks. As the program's long-delayed...
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5 Absurd Copyright Takedowns That Make The Law Look Outdated
NOTE: This story has been updated from its original version to clarify some points about the "Birdsong" takedown in the second item.No matter where you stand on copyright issues, it's hard to argue...
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Kim Dotcom Boasts About Mega's First-Month Milestones
To file-sharing guru, alleged pirate and international Internet activist Kim Dotcom, his new creation, the encrypted file-sharing service Mega, is not only a company but also a "belief," not to mention...
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Why 3D Printing Will Be The Next Big Copyright Fight
It's finally happening. That moment we've been hearing about for years - the one where futuristic-sounding 3D printing becomes ubiquitous - is actually upon us. President Obama even mentioned 3D...
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RIAA Slams Google For Anti-Piracy Fail
Frustrated and bitter that laws like SOPA and PIPA have yet to get pushed through Congress without those pesky constituents objecting to turning the U.S. government into muscle for entertainment...
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4 Ways Google Has Already Appeased Big Copyright
Google and the entertainment industry have long had a complex relationship. After years of taking heat from the MPPA and RIAA, the search giant is desperately trying to shed its reputation as an...
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Six Strikes Anti-Piracy System Makes Its Debut
What if every time you shared an illegally downloaded file a copyright alert went off and notified your Internet service provider? Well, that day is pretty much here.It's the new "six strikes" plan...
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"Soft SOPA" & How Copyright Disrupts Technological Innovation
Copyright. Innovation. Free speech. These firestarting issues and the relationship between creation, law and technology were the topics in a Sunday panel that just may have been the sleeper hit of...
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To Truly Stop Aereo, TV Broadcasters Need To Innovate Like Hell
Television broadcasters are freaking out. Certain that the courts would see things their way, companies like CBS, Comcast and News Corp. instead found that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in...
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Not Even 6-Second Vine Videos Are Safe From The Copyright Police
Well, that didn't take long. Two months after its launch, the social video-sharing app Vine has received its first copyright takedown notices. The complaints were sent by NPG, the record label owned by...
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Watch Aaron Swartz's 'Last' Video Interview [Video]
Turns out the world hadn't quite heard the last of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist and Reddit co-founder who killed himself in January. The makers of an unreleased documentary about the fight over...
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Beware The House 'Review' Of U.S. Copyright Law — It's A Trap
Yesterday, an influential congressman announced plans for a "comprehensive review" of U.S. copyright law, potentially the first such effort in more than 35 years. And that's got hearts palpitating...
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RiffTrax: Michael J. Nelson & The MST3K Crew Riff On Hollywood
Mystery Science Theater 3000 - affectionately known as MST3K to its legion of fans - is a "cult television comedy series" that mocked forgotten science fiction films from 1988-1999. Its heart still...
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Craigslist Wants To Reform The Same Law It Uses To Sue Others
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is consistently inconsistent. Even as he personally lobbies to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA"), Craiglist has been using that same law to sue...
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Copy Protection For 3D Printing May Have Arrived
Mountain View, Calif.–based Authentise claims to have devised a way to prevent piracy of 3D printing blueprints. The company's software allows the designs to print, but they disappear once the job is...
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Judge Orders Developer's Computer Seized ... Because He's A 'Hacker'
A software-copyright dispute blew up but good after a judge was swayed by the fact that a developer and security consultant describes himself and colleagues on his website as "good at hacking...
View ArticleSupreme Court Refuses To Decide If APIs Are Copyrightable
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied an appeal from Google in its ongoing legal battle with Oracle over software copyright. The move means that the search giant, which argues that its reliance on Oracle's...
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