copyright

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.--Rep. Howard Berman, who heads a congressional panel in charge of writing copyright legislation, lashed out at Internet pirates this week and defended his effort to add stiffer anticopying penalties to federal law.

Berman, a Democrat who represents the congressional district near Hollywood, said at a technology policy conference here that he was on track to enact the so-called Pro-IP Act by the end of 2008. The bill ratchets up civil penalties for copyright infringement and creates a new federal agency charged with bringing about a national and international copyright crackdown.

"I don't think there's … Read more

The movie industry has seen mixed results from suing individuals for file sharing but continues to clobber BitTorrent search engines.

TorrentSpy, once one of the most popular indexes of BitTorrent files, shut down on Monday following a two-year copyright battle with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). TorrentSpy, accused in a lawsuit of encouraging copyright infringement, finally crumpled under the legal costs.

This can't come as good news to Gary Fung, chief executive of IsoHunt. His company was among a group of torrent-file search engines, which also included TorrentSpy, accused of copyright infringement in a 2006 lawsuit filed … Read more

A prolonged legal fight with the movie industry has forced TorrentSpy, BitTorrent's popular search engine, to shut down.

"The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests, and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile," said a note on TorrentSpy's front door. "We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves... we now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users - permanent shutdown."

In 2006, the largest Hollywood film studios … Read more

Add Japan to the ranks of countries cracking down on illegal file sharing over the Internet. The Yomiuri Shimbun is reporting that the country's four Internet providers agreed to disconnect Internet connections "of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music."

The four organizations include the Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association. About 1,000 major and smaller domestic providers belong to the four associations, which means the measure would become the first countermeasure against Winny-using rights-violators used by the whole provider industry.

They organizations plan … Read more

MobiTV, a company that streams television channels to mobile devices, has backed away from its threats to censor a mobile forum Web site and pull the plug on its domain name.

Lawyers for the Emeryville, Calif., company had threatened the owner of HowardForums.com on March 4, saying that users of the Web site had posted an illegal link that allows anyone to watch television channels such as MSNBC or the Discovery Channel over the Internet for free without registering.

But after a firestorm of protest arose online, with Internet users saying that MobiTV should add greater security rather than … Read more

MobiTV, a company that streams television channels to mobile devices, is upset that someone has pointed out a link on its Web site that lets anyone watch TV for free.

So it's threatening to sue.

A letter that a lawyer for MobiTV sent to the owner of HowardForums.com on March 4 invokes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and says posting the hyperlink is a violation of U.S. copyright and trade secrets law. (Howard Forums is a popular place to find information about mobile devices, including technical tips and availability of unlocked phones.)

(For the record, Howard Chui, … Read more

WASHINGTON--To avoid having a copyright bill favored by the music industry become mired in controversy, a U.S. House of Representatives panel has agreed to remove a section that would have dramatically increased fines in copyright infringement lawsuits.

Under the original Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (the PRO IP Act), a defendant accused of unlawfully downloading each track from, say, the best-selling 22-track Janet Jackson album Discipline could be forced to pay $30,000 in damages per song. That's $660,000--far above the $30,000 maximum damages-per-compilation that current law allows.

Now the current $30,000-per-compilation … Read more

Baidu.com, the top Chinese search engine, gets lots of its traffic from a service that tracks and links to MP3s, most of which are illegally posted. Now a Chinese music industry group is suing the site over alleged copyright violation.

The AP reports:

Music Copyright Society official Qu Jingming said in a statement posted on the society's Web site Friday that Baidu.com provided "music listening, broadcasting and downloading services in various forms on its Web site without approval, and through unfettered piracy, earning huge advertising revenue on its huge number of hits."

The copyright society … Read more

When writing earlier this week about Adobe's sponsoring of the SQLite project, I ran into a complicated issue: is software released into the public domain also open-source software?

I have an editor who hates headlines with question marks, but I'm afraid this time it's appropriate, because even experts disagree.

For background, software or other material in the public domain simply means that it's not copyrighted. Requirements to meet the official Open Source Definition are listed by the Open Source Initiative. Two programmers, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens, founded the OSI about 10 years ago to formalize … Read more