File Sharing

MP3tunes.com founder Michael Robertson claimed a victory yesterday in his copyright fight with record label EMI, even though Robertson could be forced to pay as much as $75 million to EMI in damages.

EMI also ballyhooed a triumph in the case, despite failing to convince the judge to bar MP3tunes from safe-harbor protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. EMI filed a copyright suit against MP3tunes in 2007, accusing that company and sister service Sideload.com of enabling users to search for copies of pirated music and then store them in MP3tunes' locker service.

The truth is that neither … Read more

A federal court has sanctioned the efforts of U.S. law enforcement to seize domain names belonging to suspected pirate sites.

In February, U.S. customs agents seized the domain names Rojadirecta.com and Rojadirecta.org. In June, Puerto 80, the owners of the domain names, filed a lawsuit and asked that the names be returned.

Yesterday, however, a U.S. district court in Manhattan denied Puerto 80's request. According to court documents, Rojadirecta was being used to publish links that led users to illegal Web broadcasts of live sporting events and other pay-per-view shows, which is a copyright violation.

Managers at Puerto 80 said that the seizing of the domain names would cause a financial hardship and violate First Amendment rights of readers and viewers since many posted comments to the site's forum. Critics of domain-name seizures say that the practice could be used as a form of censorship. Anytime that the government wants to silence dissension on a Web site, all it need do is claim that the site is guilty of copyright violations. … Read more

Meet the Mega man.

MegaPorn, MegaVideo, MegaLive, MegaPix, and Megaupload are all Kim Schmitz: entrepreneur, father, former hacker, former street racer, and former outlaw.

Depending on who you ask, all of these sites and brands created by Schmitz--a well-known hacker in Germany who is said to have officially changed his name to Kim Dotcom--are either part of the simple and successful Internet file-storage business he founded in 2005, or they're an extension of a vast online piracy empire that includes some of the most visited video sites on the Web--right there along with YouTube and Hulu. According to legal … Read more

A porn site with a litigious history has won an important early round in its copyright fight against Megaupload, alleged to be one of the Web's largest distributors of pirated films, TV shows, and music.

Last week, a U.S. District Court Judge refused to throw out claims that Megaupload is liable for direct copyright infringement as well as contributory infringement. Perfect 10, a creator and distributor of adult entertainment that has filed several high-profile copyright cases in recent years, also accused Megaupload of vicarious and trademark infringement but the judge tossed those claims.

Perfect 10 alleges that Megaupload … Read more

Apparently we were just kidding ourselves and the Internet really isn't going to send us to some digital TV Shangri-La, where all the content is free of charge, available at our fingertips, and stripped of commercial breaks.

All the signs coming out of Web TV over the past year or more tell us that the TV networks are done with their experiment with ad-supported online distribution and super low-cost content. The returns that these companies were collecting from Hulu just weren't attractive enough for them to brush off cable companies and other distribution partners.

Fox announced yesterday that … Read more

When we hear "File-Sharing,", we tend to think of P2P, Torrenting, or even cloud services. Services like DropBox, Fetch.IO, and MegaUpload all support file storage and sharing in some way or another but require a number of steps, such as registration, browsing files, labeling... a process that can easily become messy and time-consuming. Instead, Carl Hu and John Xie strive to remind us of the good ol' days of grade school back when sharing was considered fun, fast, and easy. Their philosophy gave birth to Minus, a Web application that makes sharing files so simple that even … Read more

Grooveshark just can't seem to shake its copyright woes.

A group of songwriters and music publishers filed a lawsuit on July 15 in Tennessee against the digital-music service, claiming Grooveshark enables users to obtain music illegally and therefore is liable for copyright infringement, contributory infringement, and vicarious infringement.

Grooveshark, based in Gainesville, Fla., is a service that offers free music by enabling users to post their own tracks to the site and then share them with other users.

Grooveshark's "users and subscribers are actively infringing plaintiffs' copyrighted musical compositions," the plaintiffs said in their complaint, filed … Read more

A federal court has once again lowered the damages award for Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the Minnesota woman found liable for copyright infringement by multiple juries.

Last year, Rasset was ordered to pay $62,500 for each of the 24 songs she was accused of uploading illegally to the Web but in a decision by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis that sum was lowered to $2,250 per song. The total damages award she is required to pay now has fallen from $1.5 million to $54,000. Lawyer and blogger Ben Sheffner broke the news about the latest decision … Read more

Supporters of a bill designed to block access to Web sites trafficking in counterfeit or pirated merchandise are pulling out the stops in their public relations campaign.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce began circulating a testimonial from a woman who says her friend died as a result of taking prescription medicine she bought over the Internet (you can watch her video above).

Glenda Billerbeck, a resident of Rhinebeck, Iowa, says Marcia Mooty Bergeron died in 2006, a day after Billerbeck concluded a visit to Bergeron's home in Canada. According to the statement from Billerbeck, her friend relied on … Read more