associated

The Motion Picture Association of America told a federal judge in Virginia today that any decision to allow users of the embattled file locker to access their own files risks "compound[ing] the massive infringing conduct already at issue in this criminal litigation" unless proper safeguards are taken to prevent the further dissemination of illegally copied material. (See the MPAA's brief embedded below.)

MegaUpload's servers with approximately 25 petabytes of data are currently unplugged, offline, and in storage at Dulles, Va.-based Carpathia Hosting.

When an FBI raid took down MegaUpload's U.S.-based servers … Read more

The U.S. Supreme Court spent this morning wrestling with an obscure section of copyright law that could curb listings of used DVDs, CDs, books, and even GPS devices through marketplaces including eBay and Amazon.com.

Large copyright holders -- including software companies, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Recording Industry Association of America -- have urged the court to limit Americans' right to resell legally purchased products manufactured outside the United States.

Many of the justices seemed skeptical. Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that the copyright holders' reading of the law would invoke a parade of "horribles,&… Read more

Netflix and the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) have come to an agreement about captions for the company's streaming videos: 100 percent must be captioned by 2014.

The agreement comes by way of a class action lawsuit filed by NAD in 2010 that alleged the streaming service was "failing to provide adequate closed captioning on 'Watch Instantly' streaming video programming," and therefore was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

After back-and-forth between the lawyers -- and Netflix working to get the case thrown out -- the two sides finally settled this week.

"We … Read more

Twitter users should be able to download their entire archive of tweets by year's end, the company's CEO, Dick Costolo said today.

During a keynote conversation at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco, Costolo told interviewer Emily Bell of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism that Twitter expects to provide its users by the end of the year with one of the most-desired capabilities of all -- being able to download their entire tweet history.

"The caveat is that this is the CEO saying this," Costolo joked, "not the engineer who's … Read more

COLOGNE, Germany -- There's room for a higher-end flash card format that's faster and more capacious than SD Card, and for years, CompactFlash has occupied that market niche.

But CompactFlash is running out of steam, and finding a successor to CompactFlash just got a lot messier courtesy of a new standard that arrived this week at the Photokina trade show here.

Last year, Nikon and Sony carried the XQD format to market as the would-be CompactFlash successor, with Nikon's flagship D4 camera accepting the cards and Sony making the cards. But Canon and professional camera maker Phase … Read more

France has assessed its first fine under the antipiracy law known as Hadopi.

Alain Prevost must pay the equivalent of $194 after being found liable for failing to secure his Internet connection and for ignoring warnings that the connection was being used to illegally download copyrighted content, according to a report in Ars Technica.

Prevost is the first person convicted under the "law promoting the distribution and protection of creative works on the internet." But he may not be the last. There are 13 other cases scheduled waiting to be tried. This is the French version of the … Read more

Apple ranked highest in J.D. Power and Associates' tablet satisfaction survey.

The survey, which J.D. Power plans to conduct yearly, relied on tablet users who had owned their devices for less than two years. The index was a composite of -- in descending order of importance -- a device's performance; ease of operation; styling and design; features; and price.

J.D. Power's survey points to a close battle between Apple and Amazon, which enjoyed a wide lead over the rest of the pack. The industry average was 832, according to the survey. Apple scored 848 of … Read more

Anton Vickerman wanted to make one final and lasting statement before going off to prison for copyright violations. It appears he won't get to even do that.

Vickerman, 38, was the operator of Surfthechannel.com, a Web site that provided links to unauthorized copies of TV shows and movies. A British court on Tuesday sentenced Vickerman to four years in prison. He is believed to be the first person in the United Kingdom to be incarcerated for linking to pirated material.

On the eve of going to prison, Vickerman decided to leave a message on Surfthechannel.com, but he … Read more

Google announced on the company's blog today that sites that generate too many take-down notices will find themselves pushed down in the search rankings. Takedown notices are the documents that owners of copyrighted material file in order to request the deletion of unauthorized copies of their work from Web sites.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web site owners must remove unauthorized files once they've received a legitimate takedown notice. … Read more