The Copyright Alert System (CAS) is here! Brainchild of such industries as the RIAA and MPAA, this new method to curtail illegal content sharing went live last week. An outline for the system began in July 2011, as the recording and movie businesses realized individual lawsuits weren’t accomplishing their goal of reducing or eliminating piracy. […]
The U.S. Justice Department shut down commercial file hosting service Megaupload today, accusing them of copyright infringement in excess of one billion dollars. Founder of Megaupload, Kim Schmitz (known as “Kim Dot Com”), was taken into custody along with co-founder and CTO Mathias Ortmann, chief marketing officer Finn Batato, and programmer Bram van der Kolk. […]
The internet’s back on. Everybody okay? No lost limbs? Good. A lot has happened in the last 24 hours since Wikipedia, Reddit, and many other powerful websites went dark to protest SOPA and PIPA. Let’s take a look at the developments, but first a new short video released by New Left Media explaining why PIPA […]
Thanks to Wikileaks’s distribution of diplomatic cables between the United States and Spain, we now know that the U.S. government heavily influenced the drafting of Spain’s copyright legislation. Now, a leaked letter, dated December 12, 2011, indicates the U.S. ambassador’s anger towards the Spanish Prime Minister’s office for failing to pass the Sinde Law, a […]
Remember July of last year, when the U.S. Copyright Office said it was totally cool for you to jailbreak your iPhone and there wasn’t squat Apple could do about it? It’s time for the rest of the tech industry to shake in their collective boots, because the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group that was at […]
On Friday, November 18, Universal Music Group filed a lawsuit against online music streaming website Grooveshark, suing the site for $17 billion worth of copyright infringement and damages. Grooveshark has had several skirmishes with copyright infringement and lawsuit since the site was founded in 2007, but none that equal the lawsuit filed by Universal. Grooveshark […]
