A ruling handed down yesterday by Germany’s highest court represents a blow to rightsholders in their quest to clamp down on illicit file-sharing. The court ruled that the parents of a teenager who had made available more than 1,100 songs on file-sharing networks can not be held responsible for their son’s infringements, nor be required to monitor or hinder his online activities.
Following the ACS:Law ‘speculative invoicing’ debacle the last thing the UK needs right now is an influx of similar copyright trolls pressuring Internet users in order to extract cash settlements. In order to reduce the chances of that happening on a large scale, the Open Rights Group say they intend to intervene in a case currently being taken to appeal by a movie company. Success for ORG would be great news, but they need your help to pull it off.
Billionaire Alki David and a number of recording artists have not given up on their copyright infringement battle with CNET’s Download.com. Continuing with their allegations that Download.com induced piracy, the coalition have asked a court to issue a sweeping injunction, one that would ban all BitTorrent client downloads from the popular software download portal. Even an article published by CNET about the band Counting Crows legally distributing their music on BitTorrent is painted in a bad light
A judge in the United States has denied attempts by plaintiffs in three BitTorrent mass lawsuits to obtain the identities of individuals behind IP addresses. Chief United States Magistrate Judge Leo T. Sorokin said the plaintiffs had shown no interest in presenting a plan that would identify actual infringers and were instead relying on an action that “..smacks of a bad faith effort to harass the third-party subscriber.”
The RIAA has welcomed a mind-boggling jail sentence handed to a man who sold pirated movies and music. The 37-year-old man pleaded guilty to six felony counts of selling counterfeit media after he sold five movies and one music CD to an undercover investigator without the permission of copyright holders. As a result he will go to jail in Mississippi for 15 years to be followed by three years of supervised release.
After mounting pressure from international rightsholders, in August Google finally caved in and said it would start making ‘pirate’ sites more difficult for its users to find. But three months on and despite removing millions of links to allegedly infringing content every week, the content industries still aren’t happy. In the face of Google’s apparent inability to hide online piracy from its users, the search engine faces the specter of legislation forcing it to do so.
According to reports this morning, Twitter has withheld the first Tweet from one of its users on copyright grounds. Normally, disputed Tweets will simply disappear if there is a complaint, but one belonging to F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen has now been replaced with a copyright notice. While Twitter has indeed introduced a welcome policy change that will lead to more transparency, the first ever “withheld” Twitter comment was faked by a rather mischievous F-Secure employee.
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Peter Sunde Left Quote
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