Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Category

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A man from Baltimore in the United States has just been sentenced to 87 months in prison for infringing copyrights on more than 1,000 software programs including Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Mac OSX and Windows XP. The man, a 32-year-old, could potentially lose his freedom until close to his 40th birthday. Is that fair for willful large scale pirating or have the authorities lost touch ... Full story

During her speech yesterday at the World Creators Summit in Washington D.C, United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator for the White House Victoria Espinel warned that there is no "silver bullet" for ending online piracy. The copyright czar said that a variety of tools and approaches will be needed to reduce infringement and that existing collaboration with ISPs, advertisers, credit card companies and domain registrars ... Full story

When I was giving a presentation in Lisbon, Portugal this week, I called the copyright monopoly worship we see around us a "mass psychosis" and a "race to the bottom". My opponents from WIPO and the Motion Picture Association were not amused. Still, it's an accurate picture, if history is a judge.Source: Copyright Monopoly Enforcement Today Is A Mass Psychosis Full story

For the London Free Press – May 27, 2013 – Read this at lfpress.com It’s easy to copy video clips, music and photos from the Internet and use them on your own Website or ads. But we don’t have the … Continue reading → Full story

Last week, I attended MSU’s Fifth Annual Conference on Innovation and Communications Law, where I saw a wonderful presentation by Joshua Pearce, an engineering and material sciences professor from Michigan Tech, on “distributed open-source digital manufacturing” (a.k.a. open-source 3D printing). The hardware Joshua presented is called RepRap: RepRap takes the form of a free desktop Full story

The discussion around people's banished right to unlock their own cellphones has been framed as an unexpected and unanticipated effect of the copyright monopoly. To the contrary, it shows the heart of the monopoly's philosophy: killing ownership as a concept.Source: Jail Terms For Unlocking Cellphones Shows The True Black Heart Of The Copyright Monopoly Full story

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Righthaven LLC v. Hoehn, No. 22-16751 (9th Cir. May 9, 2013) The copyright holder in certain newspaper articles granted to Righthaven the awkwardly-articulated rights “requisite to have Righthaven recognized as the copyright owner of the for purposes of Righthaven being able to claim ownership as well as the right to seek redress for past, Full story

BitTorrent copyright trolling continues despite Prenda Law’s self-implosion. But there is hope that courts are coming to their senses. Earlier this week Judge Wright issued a Hulk smash order lambasting the tactics of notorious copyright troll Prenda Law and finding, among other things, that the firms’ attorneys’ “suffer from a form of moral turpitude unbecoming Full story