mpaa

EFF sides with TorrentSpy in MPAA lawsuit

As expected, the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to file a friends-of-the-court brief in support of TorrentSpy, the search engine accused of copyright violations.

The top motion-picture studios filed a lawsuit last year against TorrentSpy and other search engines that locate torrent files. The studios allege in their suit that these companies simplify the illegal sharing of copyright content.

The magistrate judge hearing the case recently ruled that computer RAM or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit. If allowed to stand, the groundbreaking decision may mean that anyone defending … Read more

MPAA accuses TorrentSpy of concealing evidence

The movie studios may have discovered a new and powerful weapon in their war on copyright infringement.

The courts have for the first time found that the electronic trail briefly left in a computer server's RAM, or random access memory, by each visitor to a site is "stored information" and must be turned over as evidence during litigation, according to documents seen by CNET News.com.

Jacqueline Chooljian, a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles, issued the decision while presiding over a court fight between the studios and TorrentSpy, the BitTorrent search … Read more

Arrgh...Movie pirates nabbed with night-vision goggles

You'd think catching movie pirates would be as easy as preventing anyone with a camcorder from entering a movie theater. Or throwing a net over Johnny Depp's house.

Instead, Malaysian theater workers are employing a high-tech strategy. According to a Reuters report, the Motion Picture Association is training Malaysian theater workers to strap on night-vision goggles to catch pirates in the act of filming.

And it's working. In the past two months, 17 illegal movie-tapers have been caught by begoggled Malaysian ushers.

Could New York City be the next test bed for the night-vision goggle probe? According … Read more

Jack Valenti, former head of MPAA, dies

Jack Valenti, the longtime Washington lobbyist for the motion picture industry has died, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

Valenti suffered a stroke in March and was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore for weeks before returning home to Washington on Tuesday, the newspaper reported.

As chief of the Motion Picture of Assn. of America for nearly 40 years, Valenti became famous for creating the movie-rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17).

In Silicon valley, many technologists considered Valenti an antagonist and enemy of innovation.

Twenty-five years ago this month, Valenti testified before a congressional committee reviewing whether … Read more