copyright

Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman who was recently slapped with a $222,000 penalty for allegedly sharing music on the Kazaa network, is asking for a new trial.

Thomas' attorneys on Monday filed a motion asking for a new trial on grounds that the statutory damages that the jury awarded are excessive and therefore violate the U.S. Constitution's due process clause.

Alternatively, if U.S. District Judge Michael Davis refuses to grant Thomas a new trial, her attorneys have asked him to lower the damages to between zero dollars and $150. They cited an affidavit by analyst Aram Sinnreich … Read more

SAN BRUNO, Calif.--Google on Monday unveiled a new system for identifying pirated video on YouTube as it gets uploaded, but the system puts the burden on movie studios and other content owners to provide YouTube copies of the content first.

Content owners provide the video to YouTube and specify whether they want to block anyone else from uploading copies of it. They can also ask YouTube to allow others to post it and put ads next to it or otherwise promote it on their sites, David King, YouTube product manager, told reporters in a briefing at YouTube.

The automated YouTube video ID system looks at all video as it is uploaded and tries to match it with a database of visual abstractions of the copyrighted material that has been provided by content owners. If the system finds a match it will either block it, post it, or--depending upon the policy specified by the content owner--put ads on it, with the revenue being shared with the content owner.

If the copyright owner wants pirated copies to be blocked and the system finds a match, the pirated video may be posted, but only for a few minutes and then the system will remove it. The copies of the copyrighted content that owners provide YouTube for anti-piracy purposes will not end up posted on YouTube unless the company posts the content itself.

… Read more

Editors' note: The report cited in this article originally misstated the name of one of the Web sites studied. The correct Web site is RachaelRayMag.com.

The next big copyright battle may be fought in the kitchen.

Content tracking company Attributor recently conducted a study to get an idea of how frequently online recipes are copied and reposted to other sites. What it found might concern some recipe publishers.

Attributor collected all the original recipes that appear on Epicurious.com, Allrecipes.com and RachaelRayMag.com. The software then checked those recipes against what was available elsewhere on the Web, looking … Read more

WASHINGTON--Prominent champions of tougher copyright enforcement from the entertainment, media and publishing industries took over a stately Capitol Hill caucus room on Thursday, staging an expo aimed at playing up the legal protections' importance to their livelihood.

The event was put on by the Copyright Alliance, which formed earlier this year to promote the "vital role" of copyright in the U.S. economy and job market, encourage inclusion of copyright protection requirements in trade agreements, urge tougher civil and criminal penalties for piracy, and dissuade any weakening of copyright law. Its 42 members include heavy hitters like the Recording Industry Association of America, the Association of American Publishers, the Motion Picture Association of America, Microsoft, Viacom, NBC Universal and Walt Disney.

Most of the major players had booths at Thursday's shindig, and some of their messages were hardly subtle.

The RIAA hung wrinkled T-shirts that read in bold print: "feed a musician, download legally."

… Read more

To avoid having to turn over user information to the motion picture industry, the BitTorrent indexing service TorrentSpy cut off access to its site in the United States. Apparently, that wasn't enough to satisfy Hollywood.

According to documents filed with the court last week and reviewed by CNET News.com on Wednesday, the studios still want information on the site's visitors. Lawyers representing the studios--armed with a court order--say TorrentSpy has refused to hand over the data. Because of that, the movie sector wants the judge to throw the book at the company.

"(TorrentSpy) took steps to … Read more

Jammie Thomas is hard to rattle.

She doesn't raise her voice or get angry when a reporter asks her to read a story where she is called a "liar" by a member of the jury that found her guilty of copyright violations and ordered her to pay the recording industry $220,000 in damages.

She calmly reads the quotes by juror Michael Hegg that appeared Tuesday in a story by Wired.com. She then draws a bead on where Hegg said he is a father, former snowmobile racer and has never been on the Internet.

"I … Read more

One of the side issues of the Jammie Thomas controversy is whether someone may have steered her into taking on the recording industry.

The question came up last week shortly after Thomas was ordered by a federal jury to pay the record industry more than $220,000 for violating copyright law. Why would a 30-year-old mother of two, who makes $36,000 a year, want to go toe-to-toe with the recording industry, asks Chris Castle, an attorney, former music executive and owner of a small record label.

Castle, who routinely appears at conferences to debate the morality and legality of … Read more

As anyone who has been following the NBC saga knows, the media company has laid down some heavy fire over purported copyright violations on the part of "bastions of piracy" and has even gone to Congress to ask lawmakers to pass laws that make copyright enforcement even more stringent.

But with the recent news of NBC violating copyrights by not asking for rights to play the song featured on Andy Samberg's latest viral video, "I Ran So Far," isn't it ironic that this company that supports such draconian laws has violated those laws itself? Because the company did not ask for permission to use the Aphex Twin sample used in the video, will it gloss over it like so many have before or will it put its money where its mouth is and admit that it's a pirate? Either way, I'm going to love watching this one unfold.… Read more