Archive for copyright

Kim Dotcom Wins Access to all Data Seized in Police Raid

May 31, 2013 / Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / No comments
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In the long, hard-fought legal battle between Kim Dotcom and the United States and New Zealand authorities, Dotcom scored another small victory on Friday

The New Zealand High Court, which previously ruled that the warrants used to seize all his data and computers were illegal, ordered the authorities to grant Dotcom and his defense attorneys access to all evidence gathered in the police raid

Until now, the controversial file-sharing entrepreneur had no access to any of the computers, hard drives or documents that authorities confiscated in January 2012 when they raided his home in New Zealand. Dotcom argued that blocking access harmed his chances in the legal proceedings, putting him at a disadvantage in his fight against extradition. Read more...

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Category: copyright, Kim Dotcom, megaupload, US & World, world /

Filmmakers Seek Kickstarter Funding for ‘Arrested Development’ Movie

March 21, 2013 / Cameron Scott / No comments

kickstarter, arrested development, foxIn the wake of the Veronica Mars movie’s dramatic success on Kickstarter last week, filmmakers are trying to raise $20,000 on the crowdfunding site to release an “Arrested Development” movie.

Well, by filmmakers, we mean die-hard fans Jeff Smith and Neil Lieberman. And by movie, we mean a documentary about the making and reception of the cult-hit series “Arrested Development.”

The film has already been made; the fundraising project seeks to buy rights to use photos from the show from Fox. You’d think the studio would see the whole film as marketing for its show, but copyright’s a bitch.

The project launched Monday and has raised $7,836 from 225 backers, falling well short of the dramatic $1 million raised for the Veronica Mars in just a day.

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Category: arrested development, copyright, crowdfunding, intellectual property, Jeff Smith, kickstarter, Neil Lieberman, veronica mars, Web TV /

Kim Dotcom’s Mega Is Removing Files at a Frenzied Pace

January 31, 2013 / Cameron Scott / No comments

social media, social networks, file sharing, megaupload, mega, kim dotcomKim Dotcom’s latest website, Mega, promised to be a replacement of Megaupload, the file-sharing and mostly-pirated video host site the government took down a year ago. But Mega is a cloud-storage service: Users have access to their files, but no one else, not even the site’s administrators, know what’s in them because they’re encrypted before they reach Mega’s servers.

The site has vowed to protect copyrighted materials and comply with government requests for user data or file removal.

But some entrepreneurial types had an idea to bring back the freewheeling file-sharing of Megaupload: If users wanted to let others know what was in their files — say the latest episode of CSI — they could post links to their files for others to find in a crowd-sourced search engine. The search engine appeared over the weekend, and was reported yesterday. It has garnered some 8,000 links.

Thousands of the links supplied to the search engine have since ceased to work, as Mega removed the files, claiming to have received takedown requests from copyright holders.

But how could the copyright holders be finding the files so fast?

TorrentFreak conducted an experiment, uploading legal files to Mega and posting the links on the search engine, Mega-search.me.

Within minutes, they had received takedown notices, indicating that Mega had automated the process.

TorrentFreak raises the question of whether “Mega itself has put indexes such as Mega-search.me on a blacklist to prevent copyrighted material from spreading, perhaps in an effort to prevent potential bad press that comes with it.”

A notice on Mega-search.me confirms that Mega is automatically removing all files listed in its search engine.

“Due to a script developed by Mega to delete all files indexed Mega-search, the engine is temporarily unavailable. A solution to overcome this problem will be made shortly,” the website says.

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Category: copyright, File Sharing, Kim Dotcom, mega, megaupload, News, torrentfreak /

Megaupload May Have Helped Copyright Holders, Study Finds

November 26, 2012 / Cameron Scott / No comments

file sharing, megaupload, copyrightThe shutdown of Megaupload adversely affected movie box office earnings, according to a paper by European researchers Christian Peukert and Jörg Claussen.

The findings support the theory that pirating acts as free advertising for products, ultimately resulting in more paid use.

“Our counterintuitive finding may suggest support for the theoretical perspective of (social) network effects where file-sharing acts as a mechanism to spread information about a good from consumers with zero or low willingness to pay to users with high willingness to pay,” the authors conclude.

The negative impact on earnings was small enough, in some cases, to fall short of statistical significance. Blockbuster films, or those showing on more than 500 screens, benefited from the shutdown.

The study contributes to a mixed body of research addressing whether pirated distribution of media financially benefits or harms copyright holders.

Its findings — drawn from box office data for more than 1,200 movies during Megaupload’s operation and after its shutdown in January 2012 — are not enough to provide a definitive answer to that question, said Eric Goldman, the director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University.

“The study raises a great question: When does online distribution of copyrighted works act as marketing, and is that marketing benefit distributed equally,” Goldman said.

But the suggestion that Megaupload may not have materially hurt copyright owners makes the government’s move in January 2012 to shut down the file-sharing site for infringing on copyrights appear increasingly problematic, according to Goldman.

“The thing that this paper forces us to ask is did the U.S. government go after Megaupload based on false premises,” he said.

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Category: copyright, eric goldman, File Sharing, megaupload, News /

Pandora Sues Music Catalog ASCAP Over Licensing Fees

November 6, 2012 / Cameron Scott / No comments

music sharing, internet radioThe Internet music service Pandora filed suit yesterday against the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers yesterday, asking the court to establish reasonable licensing fees for the titles in ASCAP’s catalog.

Pandora has been negotiating with ASCAP for more than a year in an effort to establish licensing fees that are acceptable to both parties.

U.S. law requires copyright holders to license use of their intellectual property at reasonable rates.

ASCAP holds the rights to works by roughly 435,000 artists, according to the lawsuit. Pandora is the largest Internet radio station, with 150 million registered users in the United States who listen collectively for more than a billion hours a month, it said in court papers.

“ASCAP continues to seek rates higher than the current rates and above the agreement that they reached earlier this year with all of the major radio groups, which covers both broadcast and Internet radio usage for the majority of our competitors,” a Pandora spokesperson said.

ASCAP declined to comment.

The suit was filed in federal district court in the Southern District of New York. The same court approved in January 2012 ASCAP’s licensing deal with broadcasters the Oakland, Cal.-based Pandora sees as competitors.

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Category: copyright, Legal, Music, News, Pandora /

Planned Megaupload Replacement Site, Me.Ga, Tossed From Gabonese Domain

November 6, 2012 / Cameron Scott / No comments

The government of Gabon, Africa, will bar Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom from forming a new website on the Gabonese domain .ga, the AFP reports.

“Gabon cannot serve as a platform or screen for committing acts aimed at violating copyrights,” Communication Minister Blaise Louembe said.

Dotcom, a legally assumed name, had announced that he would launch a file-sharing site to replace Megaupload, which the federal government shuttered in January for copyright infringement. Dotcom has already posted a teaser page to which the planned URL, me.ga, redirects. The .ga domain is Gabonese.

According to Louembe, the me.ga site was set up to redirect traffic to another site hosted in France, which will provide access to shared files.

Dotcom, who is in New Zealand while the U.S. tries to expedite him, commented on Twitter that he has “an alternative domain.”

“This just demonstrates the bad faith witch hunt the U.S. government is on,” he said.

Dotcom had planned to launch the new site on the anniversary of Megaupload’s takedown.

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Category: copyright, File Sharing, gabon, Kim Dotcom, megaupload, News /

Pirate Bay Moves to the Cloud

October 17, 2012 / Cameron Scott / No comments

pirate bay, cloud, pirate cloud, consumer cloud, copyright, IP, intellectual property, file-sharing, bit torrentThe bit-torrent sharing site The Pirate Bay has abandoned its servers and moved its data to the cloud, the Swedish nonprofit said in a blog post.

Pirate Bay seemed to be responding to the threat of a law enforcement shutdown, similar to what happened to Megaupload.

The group’s blog post suggests that Pirate Bay has divided its data between several public clouds to make it much more difficult for law enforcement to lock down the site. Pirate Bay’s data is also “deeply encrypted,” the post said.

“All attempts to attack The Pirate Bay from now on is an attack on everything and nothing. The site that you’re at will still be here, for as long as we want it to,” Pirate Bay said.

We’ve contacted several cloud security experts to see if the strategy is likely to work and we’ll update this post if we hear back.

Update: Jefferson Scher, who specializes in intellectual property at the Menlo Park law firm Carr & Ferrell, said the cloud isn’t all that different from plain-old servers, so the move isn’t likely to stymie law enforcement.

“For the time being, the cloud is tethered tightly to terra firma by power and data cables, and therefore remains subject to the same earthly laws. Those employing extrajudicial means to take down the site (such as DDoS or insider access) probably will find that more difficult,” Scher said.

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Category: bit torrent, cloud, consumer cloud, copyright, Emerging Social Networks, File Sharing, intellectual property, megaupload, pirate bay /

BuzzFeed Sued Over Katy Perry, Kathy Griffin Photos

October 17, 2012 / Cameron Scott / No comments

katy perry, buzzfeed, mavrix, celebrities, celebrity photos, social networking, social media, copyright, intellectual propertyA celebrity photo agency, Mavrix, has sued the website BuzzFeed for using its copyrighted photos. At issue are photos of actress/comedian Kathy Griffin and photos of singer Katy Perry in Miami.

The photos are included with the legal filings, which are available on ScribD.

The lawsuit was filed on October 11 in the Central California district court. BuzzFeed is incorporated in Delaware and based in New York, but according to the lawsuit does business in Central California. Mavrix is based in Florida, but claims it suffered harm in the California district.

The lawsuit alleges that Mavrix obtained the photos “at significant cost,” and that BuzzFeed profited from them.

Mavrix further claims that the copyright infringement was “willful because … [d]efendants are sophisticated online publishers with full knowledge of the strictures of federal copyright law and the basic requirements for licensing the use of copyrighted content for commercial exploitation.”

BuzzFeed declined to comment, but is looking into the matter.

Photo of Katy Perry: Eva Rinaldi via Wikipedia

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Category: BuzzFeed, Celebrities, celebrity photos, copyright, intellectual property, Kathy Griffin, Katy Perry, mavrix, Social Media /

SoundCloud Will Allow Users to License Their Sounds Through Getty Images

October 9, 2012 / Cameron Scott / No comments

The sound-sharing service SoundCloud is rolling out a partnership with Getty Images that will let users sell licenses to their original sounds and music. By providing some basic paperwork, users will gain access to a button they can attach to their clips, inviting advertisers, media and others to pay to use the sounds through Getty’s well-established licensing processes.

At least initially, SoundCloud will not take any share of the royalties.

By opting in with some basic paperwork, users vouch that they hold all relevant rights to the clip. The deal users enter into with Getty is non-exclusive, so sound engineers and artists can continue to use and market their work.

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Category: copyright, Emerging Social Networks, Getty Images, licensing, soundcloud /

YouTube Takes Strides To Improve Content ID

October 3, 2012 / Megan O'Neill / No comments

YouTube launched Content ID nearly five years ago to help creators, big and small, manage their content and protect themselves from copyright violations on YouTube.  However, the service has not been without its flaws, as false copyright claims have abounded, with YouTubers as well-known as Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber being affected.  Today YouTube has announced a number of new updates designed to improve Content ID.
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Category: Content ID, copyright, video, Web Video, youtube /
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