copyright

Proposed expansions to criminal copyright law put forth by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday aren't exactly getting rave reviews from some inside-the-Beltway groups.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association on Tuesday blasted the sweeping proposal as "outlandish" and argued it would undermine the legitimacy of the nation's intellectual property laws.

"Will office workers be wiretapped for lingering too long near the photocopier?" CCIA president and CEO Ed Black asked in a statement. "Will music fans be sent to prison if they fail to secure their digital devices to the satisfaction of the … Read more

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including "attempts" to commit piracy.

"To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated," Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.

The Bush administration is throwing its support behind a proposal called the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007, which is likely to receive the enthusiastic support of the movie and music industries, and would represent the … Read more

Congressional momentum appears to be building in support of overturning a contentious ruling that Webcasters argue could cripple their services.

On Thursday, U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) introduced a bill that would repeal a U.S. Copyright Royalty Board decision scheduled to take effect July 15. The rules would raise the rate per song and per listener retroactively to 2006, and then in each year until 2010. It would also require each Internet radio "channel" to make a $500 minimum payment.

Opponents of the new rules, which include large and small commercial Internet … Read more

Early Wednesday we told you about a lawsuit that the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed against so-called psychic Uri Geller over allegedly misusing copyright law to silence critics on YouTube.

Now it turns out that there's a second lawsuit afoot, also filed this week. Geller's company, London-based Explorologist, filed a copyright lawsuit on Monday against a critic who is trying to debunk claims that the self-described psychic really is one.

Geller's company had sent YouTube a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice taking issue with the Randi video, and claiming under penalty of perjury that it owned the copyright … Read more

Editors' note, 3:40 p.m. PDT Wednesday: It turns out that Geller has filed his own lawsuit. Here's our follow-up story.

We've all heard about wacky attempts to misuse the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "takedown" sections recently. There's been the Digg.com flap over a certain hex number beginning with "09 F9," the spat over a parody of the Colbert Report, and even one about a fake ID.

The latest attempt involves Uri Geller, the purported spoon-bending "psychic" who is trying to suppress a video on YouTube that claims … Read more

HBO has requested that YouTube pull down footage of Saturday night's championship boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Oscar De La Hoya, according to a Los Angeles Times report on Tuesday (free registration required). A YouTube user had uploaded the broadcast from Las Vegas, originally shown live on HBO's pay-per-view channel, in a relatively high-quality format later that weekend. That was understandably problematic for HBO, which plans to show a rebroadcast of the match this coming Saturday.

The video was removed from the legally embattled YouTube around 4 p.m. PDT on Monday, replaced with a notice … Read more

NBC Universal and Viacom have come out against YouTube in a legal case that could help to determine whether the video-sharing site is culpable for copyright violations committed by users.

On Friday, NBC Universal and Viacom filed a request with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles asking that they be allowed to file a friends-of-the court brief in support of journalist Robert Tur, according to a copy of the request obtained by CNET News.com.

Tur, a Los Angeles-area news reporter, accused YouTube of copyright infringement in a lawsuit last summer. Tur said in his suit that footage … Read more

Google has added links to Belgian newspapers back into its main Web search site after beginning talks with a group that had filed a copyright lawsuit over Google's practice of linking to French- and German-language Belgian newspapers.

The group, Copiepresse, sued Google more than a year ago alleging that the search giant's use of headlines and snippets of Belgian newspaper articles in its Google News aggregation service, and its practice of providing links to cached copies of the articles in its main Web search results, violated copyright. A Belgian court sided with Copiepresse last September, ordering Google to … Read more

The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board has pushed back the date on which a contentious fee hike for Internet radio broadcasters takes effect.

In a 32-page final rule (PDF) formally published Monday, the three-judge panel within the Library of Congress set July 15 as the date that the new royalty rates required of Net radio operators will kick in--two months later than the original deadline.

After more than a year of vetting outside submissions, the judges issued an initial ruling on March 2, drawing widespread outcry from large and small commercial Webcasters and the public radio community.

The board prescribed … Read more