Topic: COPYRIGHT - on February 21, 2008 at 12:22:00 PM CET
RIAA Training Video Leaked onto Torrent Sites
The RIAA apparently produced a new video, already available on a variety of torrent tracker sites, in conjunction with the National District Attorneys Association with the goal of instructing U.S. prosecutors on how to deal with music piracy cases. According to early reports, the video, called In Trial, also provides instructions on how to get an RIAA investigator qualified as a court expert.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on February 20, 2008 at 12:04:00 PM CET
Anti-Piracy Ads
Yesterday I rented another movie from my local videostore and planned to have a nice evening watching it. But I didn’t. Because, as all movies nowadays, it had one of those annoying anti-piracy ads before the main menu turned up. Usually they don’t let you hit the (top-)menu button while those ads are playing so you cannot skip them. Annoying enough. But the last one I’ve seen even topped that annoyance - you couldn’t even fast forward it, that button was locked out too. What. The. Hell?
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on February 8, 2008 at 5:06:00 PM CET
RIAA talks about network filters
At a conference last week, RIAA president Cary Sherman said he didn't support mandatory filtering by ISPs, but in a video clip posted by Public Knowledge, Sherman offers a far more troubling 'solution': installing filters on users' PCs. From Ars Technica's coverage: 'The issue of encryption "would have to be faced," Sherman admitted after talking about the wonders of filtering. "One could have a filter on the end user's computer that would actually eliminate any benefit from encryption because if you want to hear [the music], you would need to decrypt it, and at that point the filter would work.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on February 6, 2008 at 4:00:00 PM CET
Great research on movie piracy
Kudos to Los Angelino Andy Baio for putting together a fabulous review of online movie piracy since 2003. It's mainly raw data today; Baio promised to offer some analysis on his blog, Waxy.org, tomorrow. Focusing on a slice of the film industry -- the titles that earned Academy Award nominations for their producers, actors or crew -- Baio examined how many days elapsed between the movie's release and the availability of various bootlegged versions online.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on February 5, 2008 at 1:42:00 PM CET
Arte sendet Beitrag unter CC
Die Arte-Sendung Metropolis hat am vergangenen Samstag zum wiederholten Mal eine Creative Commons Lizenz genutzt. Der Beitrag “Ein Science-Fiction Roman des Internetzeitalters: „Backup“ von Cory Doctorow” von Susan Loehr kann zu nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken kopiert und verändert werden, solange Veränderungen wieder unter derselben Lizenz veröffentlicht werden. Das ist erfreulich und ausbaufähig.
Link: via
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on February 5, 2008 at 1:39:00 PM CET
Danish Court Tells ISP To Block PirateBay
Back in 2006, a Danish court demanded that ISP Tele2 start blocking access to the AllofMp3.com website. It seemed like a bizarre request, focused on just one ISP. While the ISP complied, apparently the block was quite easy to get around and the overall impact of the ban was minimal.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on January 8, 2008 at 11:34:00 AM CET
Copyright liner-notes for the future
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on January 2, 2008 at 10:38:00 AM CET
Now RIAA says copying your own CDs is illegal
The Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA) has began a legal spat with a man who copied CDs he had bought onto his computer.
Jeffery Howell of Scottsdale, Arizon has taken his case to court after he received a letter from the RIAA, reports the Washington Post.
The RIAA, which lobbies on behalf of a music industry hammered by tumbling sales as fans increasingly turn to free downloads and file sharing for their listening pleasure, insists that it is illegal for someone who has legally bought a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on January 2, 2008 at 9:32:00 AM CET
Steal This Film II
These are strange times indeed. While they continue to command so much attention in the mainstream media, the 'battles' between old and new modes of distribution, between the pirate and the institution of copyright, seem to many of us already lost and won. We know who the victors are. Why then say any more?
Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations. If STEAL THIS FILM II proves at all useful in bringing new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think 'after intellectual property', think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity, we have achieved our main goal.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on December 27, 2007 at 1:15:00 PM CET
How to copyright Michelangelo
Some of the world's greatest artworks are turning into copyrighted properties.Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Today, those images are copyrighted. How can ancient cultural icons become commercial properties, centuries after they fall into the public domain?
How this happened is a story that takes us from a Crusading Pope in the Borgias era, all the way to Bill Gates' mansion on the shores of Lake Washington.
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on December 8, 2007 at 6:41:00 PM CET
Western Digital drive is DRM-crippled for your safety
Western Digital's 1TB My Book World Edition external hard drive has been crippled by DRM for your safety.
A kindly Reg reader tipped us off that the remote-access HDD won't share media files over network connections. Which is, as you can see here, the entire stinking point of it.
It's a scary world full of potentially unlicensed media. We're fortunate there's a hard drive vendor willing to step forward and do some indiscriminate policing for us.
From the WD site:
"Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access."
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Topic: COPYRIGHT - on December 5, 2007 at 1:27:00 PM CET
DMCA idiocy slideshow: explaining the DMCA to info-civilians
Wellington Grey has a great little slideshow about the idiocy of the DMCA's "anti-circumvention" measures, which prohibit breaking the digital locks off the stuff you own. In it, Grey recounts how offended he was when he bought a TomTom GPS that came with a CD in a sealed envelope, the seal on which read, "By breaking this seal, you agree to our contract," but the contract itself was on the CD, behind the seal. In other words, the CD said, "By breaking this seal, you agree to a bunch of secret stuff."
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