NewsCloud.com Dmca News

Air Force cracks software, carpet bombs DMCA

Last week, a US Court of Appeals upheld a ruling on software piracy. The organization doing the piracy, however, happened to be a branch of the US government, and the decision highlights the significant limits to the application of copyright law to the government charged with enforcing it. Most significantly, perhaps, the court found that because the DMCA is written in a way that targets individual infringers, the government cannot be liable for claims made under the statute.

YouTube Fires Back At Viacom

As we say in the legal profession, 'issue has been joined' in Viacom v. YouTube. In its answer to Viacom's complaint (PDF), filed Friday, YouTube says Viacom's lawsuit is intended to 'challenge... the protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") that Congress enacted a decade ago to encourage the development of services like YouTube.' It goes on to say that the suit 'threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression.'

Forget YouTube: Go To These Sites If You Want Hard Core Copyright Infringing Content

TechCrunch points the way towards downloading your favorite episodes of South Park, Scrubs and more.

EFF sues Viacom over YouTube takedown of Colbert parody

Oh Viacom, you should read those DMCA lists of clips before you order them taken down: The video, called "Stop the Falsiness," was created by MoveOn and Brave New Films as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Colbert's portrayal of the right-wing media and parodying MoveOn's own reputation for earnest political activism.

Lessig: Make Way for Copyright Chaos

But 20 months ago, the Supreme Court reversed this wise policy of deference. Drawing upon common law-like power, the court expanded the Copyright Act in the Grokster case to cover a form of liability it had never before recognized in the context of copyright the wrong of providing technology that induces copyright infringement. It announced this new form of liability even though at precisely the same time Congress was holding hearings about whether to amend the Copyright Act ...

Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bull**** DMCA notices

And Google can take steps now to reduce that load: sue the living **** out of Viacom. We've got precedent -- the Diebold debacle -- for the idea that abusing the DMCA takedown process is illegal. Courts have been willing to punish this kind of excess by awarding fees and damages.

CNN tells YouTube to pull down video outing GOP party head Ken Mehlman

Apparently, Bill Maher outed Ken Mehlman on Larry King the other night and CNN faked the transcript.

YouTube, Comedy Central Tussle More About Ad Inventory Than Copyright

While the battle currently centers on Comedy Central clips, the war is reportedly more about pre-roll ads than copyright concerns. ... Unlike Comedy Central's broadband offering Motherload (or similar offerings from Viacom-owned MTV and VH1), clips on YouTube don't include pre-roll ads, which is vexing to Viacom. It sees a large potential sales opportunity going to waste, and is using the DMCA requests as leverage in an attempt to get YouTube to allow both pre-roll ads on their content.

Truthiness is scarce at Viacom and YouTube this week

Surprisingly, most of the mainstream reporters who interviewed me about breaking the story Friday, October 27th that Comedy Central had issued copyright takedown notices to YouTube wanted me to verify that any videos were actually taken down at all. More recently, some media blogs are asking whether I started an unsubstantiated rumor based only on the two takedown notices that I received directly.

Tonight, using the Google Search API, I wrote a short PHP script to tabulate content from YouTube that is present or missing based on top search hits from Google’s search engine. I’ve posted my results at Idealog .

While not entirely scientific or entirely representative, my top line results show that 349 of 764 or 46 percent of the top Daily Show clips in Google search results are missing and broken, 190 of 537 or 35 percent of the Colbert Report results and 138 of 594 or 23 percent of South Park results. So, while you can still find 2,723 videos at YouTube.com of the Daily Show, 881 videos of the Colbert Report and 6,660 of South Park, the percentage of broken links from Google’s top results show that there either has been an ongoing take down or a large recent takedown effort at YouTube.

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DMCA revision proposal will criminalize "attempting" infringment

A new proposed set of amendments to the US's loathsome DMCA would send you to prison for attempting to infringe copyright. It would make it even more illegal to own tools that could be used to remove copy-restrictions.

Unintended Consequences: Seven Years under the DMCA

A collection of a number of reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors.

Why they say spyware is good for you