[copyright] Forum Topics

Thanks to a federal copyright law ruling on Monday by the Library of Congress, jailbreaking your iPhone doesn’t have to be kept to the underground forums like it's alcohol during a digital prohibition. The process is now completely legal under US law. Grab a glass of e-freedom![ATTACH]16137[/ATTACH]The resulting decision was …

The University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom has been [researching](www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~tpc/Papers/P2PSecComm2012.pdf) how users of the hugely popular file-sharing BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol are being monitored by those acting for copyright holders. What the researchers found surprised them, and may surprise those using BitTorrent to download pirated content: the average time it …

Many bloggers have tried to find a business model for blogging, but Steve Gibson's figured out a way to make money off the bloggers themselves. He relies on suing them. Gibson is CEO of Las Vegas company [URL="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/copyright-trolling-for-dollars/"]Righthaven[/URL], which purchases the copyright to newspaper content and then sues bloggers and …

Internet marketers using social networks beware - linking to stories on the Internet, much as news bloggers do here on Daniweb and elsewhere, may be about to become a high risk activity. The owner of website [URL="http://www.skyscrapercity.com"]skyscrapercity.com[/URL] is being sued by the Las Vegas Review-Journal for infringement over one of …

The troubled newspaper industry has been railing for years about how the Internet is destroying their business model, and taking actions such as paywalls and talking about [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story220640.html"]changing [/URL]copyright law. Now, one newspaper is going further -- it's taking bloggers that posted its stories to court, with the result that …

[ATTACH=right]16132[/ATTACH]The U.S. Copyright Office has made new changes to the DMCA and there's some big ones in the mix. For one, it's no longer illegal to circumvent copy protection in order to copy a DVD for use in the classroom - under certain circumstances. Every three years, the office examines …

In the latest episode of the [URL="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9179007/SCO_appeals_ruling_in_Novell_case"]story that never ends[/URL], [URL="http://www.sco.com"]SCO[/URL] filed an appeal in the [URL="http://www.novell.com/prblogs/?p=2153"]closed[/URL] case against [URL="http://www.novell.com"]Novell[/URL]. Everyone in the Linux and Open Source Communities thought the case was finally brought to a close when the judge declared that Novell is the owner of UNIX copyrights. The …

Scrapping scissors and knitting needles at the ready, sellers on the handcrafting site [URL="http://www.etsy.com/"]www.etsy.com[/URL] are [URL="http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=6425050&page=1"]up in arms[/URL] over what they say are sites stealing their designs and images and then hiring other crafters to produce them. Discussion on the topic started earlier today, with more than 600 postings at …

It's enough to make anyone froth at the mouth: Film parodies making use of a ranting Hitler, with added subtitles explaining what current event he was ranting about -- which have grown increasingly popular on YouTube -- are gradually disappearing after a request from the company that owns the film. …

Keeping the Internet safe for satire, the World Intellectual Property Organization [URL="http://didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1990.com/legal.php"]ruled[/URL] that the domain name glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com was not a violation of the conservative political commentator's intellectual property. The WIPO [URL="http://reporter.blogs.com/files/decision-d2009-1182.pdf"]ruling[/URL] "dismissed Beck's argument that Internet users could be confused by the domain name and its accompanying Web site," noted …

A couple of months ago DaniWeb reported how British singer Lily Allen [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/news/story226113.html"]turned the music copyright debate into a copywrong farce[/URL] with some ill conceived blogging. Things went quiet soon after the media had swarmed all over Allen and her odd arguments, not least as she [URL="http://torrentfreak.com/lily-allen-deletes-pro-copyright-blog-and-ends-career-090924/"]closed down her blog[/URL] …

A [URL="http://gawker.com/5367093/mcsteamy-v-gawker-media-llc/gallery/5"]lawsuit[/URL] over a website's [URL="http://gawker.com/5339221/danes-anatomy-mcsteamy-his-wife-and-a-fallen-beauty-queens-naked-threesome"]publication[/URL] of a celebrity threesome sex tape is provoking some [URL="http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/11/does-gawkers-publication-of-mcsteamy-sex-tape-constitute-fair-use315.html"]thoughtful discussion[/URL] about fair use. Not to mention giving PBS, [URL="http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2009/11/what_a_celebrity_sex_tape_laws.html?sc=fb&cc=fp"]NPR[/URL], and the [URL="http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/mcsteamy-vid-lawsuit-its-a-copyright-beef/"][I]New York Times[/I][/URL] the opportunity to talk about sex tapes. The tape consists of [I]Grey's Anatomy[/I] actor Eric Dane and his wife …

Just when you thought it was safe to return to those keyboards knowing that all is well with the world and the ownership of Unix is happy with its rightful owner, Novell; he's baaaack. I'm sure that I'm not the first to look at this latest news and say "WHAA? …

OK, I can't resist this whole SCO thing, since it has again raised its ugly head. My [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry4658.html"]previous post[/URL] on the subject the other day drew a lot of attention from a diverse gaggle of readers and commenters so I thought I'd go back to the well at least once …

If Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, gets his way, blog postings like this one could be illegal. On his [URL="http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/06/the_future_of_n.html"]blog[/URL], Posner recently suggested that copyright law might need to be expanded. "Expanding copyright law to bar online access …

Seems like a silly question, right? But $80,000 per track is exactly how much Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother from Minneapolis, has been charged. Well, I say charged but actually she was fined this amount for each of 24 songs downloaded via a file-sharing site at the end of a …

It might seem like something of an odd question, unless your idea of a good night in is a box of popcorn and a copy of some dodgy DVD featuring a Captain Jack lookalike doing unmentionable things to his crew. Yet the answer is that these two things, the illegal …

The Pirate Bay is, without doubt, a huge thorn in the side of the music and movies business. As the [URL="http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry3479.html"]worlds largest bittorrent tracker[/URL] with more than 3 million users and well over 20 million peers it constantly flips the bird at The Powers That Be. Even the threat of …

Italian Internet Service Providers have been ordered to block access to the Pirate Bay file-sharing Bit Torrent tracker site in Sweden by a judge in the Northern Italian town of Bergamo. This is the same judge, who has not been named, which only last month closed a leading Bit Torrent …

According to ChannelWeb a federal judge sitting in the US Court of Appeals has ruled that open source software licenses are [URL="http://www.crn.com/software/210004167"]legal under copyright law[/URL]. This is a complete u-turn on a previous ruling which had thrown the not so small matter of open source licensing into something of a …

I'm on vacation right now in Germany, and I thought I could watch some American TV here on my PC. But I've learned that US sites consistently block their TV shows outside the US, a practice I find more than a bit curious. I tried the network sites. I tried …

Just when you thought it was safe to forget SCO and their ridiculous notions about suing IBM and others for infringing on their copyright ownership of UNIX, it isn't. It's been 5 years since SCO sent out its threatdown letters to large companies telling them that they may owe money …

Who could forget [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen"]DVD Jon[/URL], the Linux guru who was co-author of DeCSS? This Linux application 'unlocked' DVDs with content otherwise protected by Content Scrambling System (CSS) encryption and landed DVD Jon in front of a judge. Which did not stop him from continuing his quest to free audiovisual content …

Yes, in a bizarre twist and turn of fate, the original bad boy of illegal MP3 downloads which then went legit and hooked subscribers into music with Microsoft's digital rights management system has changed tack and announced it is to sell MP3 format tunes. So, OK, maybe not a real …

A proposal from the [URL="http://www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr/en/"]French Ministry of Culture[/URL] could hit online music and movie piracy very hard with a very big stick if it goes ahead. In addition to the existing law, introduced only last year, which made unauthorised file-sharing a criminal offence carrying a 30,000 Euro fine and up …

According to a legal [URL="http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/lenz_v_universal/final_lenz_am_cmplt.pdf"]document[/URL] published at the [URL="http://www.eff.org"]Electronic Frontier Foundation[/URL] site, the copyright Nazis at Universal Music Group might have bitten off more than they can chew when they ordered the removal of a Dancing baby clip from YouTube. Stephanie Lenz posted a video clip on YouTube of her …

Many of the world's leading Internet and media companies, including CBS Corp., Dailymotion, Fox Entertainment Group, Microsoft Corp., MySpace, NBC Universal, Veoh Networks Inc., Viacom Inc. and The Walt Disney Company, have pledged their support to a set of collaborative principles that are designed to foster the growth and development …

A [URL="http://blogs.allofmp3.ru/music_news"]statement[/URL] from the All of MP3 folk reads "the service will be resumed in the foreseeable future. We are doing our best at the moment to ensure that all our users can use their accounts, top up balance and order music." This follows a Moscow district court ruling earlier …

It seems like Apple is nearing a day we'd never think would come. [URL="http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKN0137689420070402"]This time it seems official.[/URL] According to the reports, Apple and EMI have formed a deal that would not only allow Apple to sell EMI's music on their store (quite possibly The Beatles), but "large portions of …

Google is being charged with content copying by none other than... Microsoft. They are complaining that Google is copying far too much information, information that many people make a living on. Google's been trying to make the whole web searchable, everything from books to news to magazines. Although Google has …