Tag Archives: copyright

Earlier this year, a Harvard Law School student launched a petition to the US Copyright Office to allow for abandoned online games to become exempt to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This would mean that games abandoned by publishers with dead DRM servers could legally be cracked and played again. …

Popcorn Time for the web brought the torrent streaming service to web browsers, removing the need to download and use the app. However, following legal threats, the service went down. Then 24 hours later, new developers picked up the project and brought the service straight back to life. The original …

The Pokemon Company International is demanding $4000 from a fan of the series after he organized a Pokemon themed party to celebrate the kick off of PAX earlier this year. Ramar Larkin Jones organized the unofficial Pokemon PAX party this year but had to cancel it at the last minute …

Kim Dotcom's long awaited extradition trial has been ongoing for the past week, giving those who have followed his continued delaying tactics a light at the end of the tunnel: whether he goes or stays, at least soon there may be some resolution to the problems that have tied up …

A US federal judge has ruled that all copyright claims on the song ‘Happy Birthday To You' are now invalid. Music publisher, Warner/Chappell can no longer charge licensing fees for its commercial use and as long as the ruling holds up, the song will enter the public domain. The original copyright …

Copyright lobby groups that hope to push pirates and organisations that it feels benefit unfairly from piracy, to pay up, ostensibly do so because they care about the artists they represent. In practice though, that ideal rarely plays out. Take Rightscorp for example, which recently published its quarterly financial reports, only …

Pixels launched earlier this month and the movie is not off to a good start with critics, with an abysmal score of 17% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, it seems that Columbia Pictures is still pretty worried about piracy as the company has been sending out mass amounts of DMCA claims, one …

Don't you dare go using the name of some little halfling creatures from Middle Earth without paying first. A glamping company which wanted to build a Hobbit Hole holiday house for those looking for an authentic experience, has been forced to remove all mention of the diminutive little characters, after lawyers …

If you've used iTunes CD ripping feature recently, did you know you were breaking the law? If you backed up your PC to a remote cloud platform, did you know you were taking part in an illegal activity? Yes, thanks to a recent overturning of revised copyright legislation by the …

While the United States has been pretty tight lipped about its ongoing attempts to extradite and imprison internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, the German native has been very vocal about his side of the equation. In a recent Q&A on Slashdot, the Megaupload founder even suggested that the U.S. had attempted …

Google gets hit with thousands of takedown requests a day, a significant portion of which tend to be from movie studios attempting to combat piracy. Unfortunately, these requests often tend to be automated and sometimes don't make any sense at all. This week, Universal Pictures sent a Google a new …

Mega.co.nz, the file locker website originally set up by legally embattled entrepreneur Kim Dotcom in the wake of the shutdown of MegaUpload.com, may be about to take on a court case of its own. MegaSearch.co.nz not only allows for the searching of content on the encrypted cloud storage platform, but also …

Taking ownership of a domain that could be misconstrued as representative of someone else's IP is always a risky act to take, especially when that someone else is Disney. In the case of the owners of Starwars.co.uk, Star-wars.uk and a number of other related domains, Disney recently demanded they be …

Reddit, “the front page of the internet,” has been going through some changes in the past few months, in an effort to open up some of its decision making and staff dealings. It released a transparency report earlier this year, which gave users an idea of how often it complied …

It is no secret that many serious YouTube content creators are often frustrated with YouTube and how its Content ID system works. More often than not, completely legitimate videos are taken down over false DMCA claims and it can really mess with a channel and its standing on YouTube. One …

Russia is getting its own free to play version of Halo, titled ‘Halo Online’ based on a modified version of the Halo 3 engine in order to get the game running on lower end hardware. As you can imagine, modders have already got their hands on the files and have …

Although the tactics of media lobby groups that claim to be protecting the rights of movie makers have been dubious in the past, one of the more deplorable practices some take part in is the sending of extortive letters to households, threatening a court room if a fine isn't paid. …

Even though it barely seems to be operational these days, The Pirate Bay is the most iconic torrent search site in the world and is frequently cited by media lobby groups as a URL that ISPs should block – often with the courts backing that decision. While some ISPs might …

A German music company has attempted to claim copyright on some of the world's most popular downloads, including Skype, AMD drivers, Linux and many more. Over the years we have seen many copyright holders attempt to abuse the DMCA takedown system to censor legitimate content and the worst part is, there are …

One of the more exciting developments in copyright law history has been taking place over the past six months. While many governments around the world champion stricter copyright controls thanks to lobbying from select groups of media conglomerates, the European Union is considering reshaping copyright law to make it more …

Google recently made some changes to its search algorithm, which meant that sites that are on the receiving end of too many DMCA takedown requests would have their search engine ranking downgraded significantly. While you would imagine most people don't find their illegal downloads through Google, it actually had a …

You know what the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its contemporaries like the MPAA are fed up with? Their human rights being infringed upon. No, not because organisations like theirs are clamping down on freedom of expression by restricting access to information, but because those dastardly pirate sites are …

The City of London's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is a government funded organisation dedicated to clamping down on intellectual property and copyright infringements, most notably online piracy. It's been in operation for a few years now and clearly the government is pleased with its progress, as it's now …

If you use a virtual private network (VPN) to access another country's version of Netflix, then you could soon be out of luck, as major media lobby groups and movie studios are now pushing for Netflix to figure out a way to ban the practice from being able to access …

With the World Cup only taking place every four years, the way people interact over it and share related content changes quite dramatically each time as technology evolves. This time around, it was Vine that caused a lot of controversy – at least among Premier League Executives – as when …

The UK Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has made its first arrest under the new ‘Operation Creative' initiative to fight piracy on behalf of the entertainment industry. A 20 year old man from Nottinghamshire has was arrested on suspicion of copyright infringement for hosting a proxy server, which allowed access …

Oh dear. Twitch, the video game streaming site that is most likely set to be bought out by Google for a billion dollars in the near future, has announced sweeping changes that will see whole 30 minute sections of videos on demand muted, if they are found to contain copyright protected …

The RIAA baffled many onlookers last week when it went after Reel Radio, a site dedicated to providing archived radio air-checks, where it demanded that archives not be online for more than two weeks and that the site get permission from all stations that originally aired the checks, despite many …

While the landscape for media pirates is a lot better today than it was a few years ago, there's still a lot of copyright lobby groups and firms that are happy to bring legal action against ISPs, individuals and site owners alike. One of those companies is Zuffa, the owner …

One of the most distasteful elements of the copyright lobbyist vs piracy conflict over the past few years, has been the former group targeting individual file sharers with enormous lawsuits that try to force them into bankruptcy by demanding huge payouts per movie uploaded/downloaded. These got even worse when companies …