copyright

ASPEN, Colo. -- It hasn't been an especially felicitous year for the founder of file-sharing site MegaUpload: his domain name has been seized, his assets have been impounded, and Kim Dotcom faces potential extradition to the U.S. on criminal charges of copyright infringement.

That's a fate that RapidShare is determined to avoid. The Swiss company says it wants to be a legitimate hosting service that not only responds promptly to removal requests from copyright holders, but that goes far beyond what the law requires.

RapidShare's "responsible practices" policy may have pleased Hollywood when it … Read more

The lawyers for Kim DotCom and MegaUpload continue to rack up court victories in New Zealand.

One of the country's courts has ordered the United States to turn over evidence it says it has that proves DotCom committed criminal acts of piracy. The U.S. Attorney's office has accused DotCom, founder of the cloud-storage service, of operating MegaUpload as a criminal enterprise.

U.S. officials say that MegaUpload made over $175 million by enabling users to store pirated digital media, including movies, music, and software on the company's servers. They accuse him of encouraging the looting and … Read more

In the continuing fight against copyright infringement, U.K. authorities sentenced the owner of Surfthechannel.com to four years in prison today.

Anton Vickerman, 38, who founded Surfthechannel -- a Web site that offered users links to streaming pirated material -- was convicted of two counts of conspiracy to facilitate copyright infringement, according to the Guardian. The sentencing came after an eight-week trial in June.

The way Surfthechannel worked was it let users search for movies or TV shows and then provided them with a list of links to both legal and pirated material. Essentially, the site acted like a … Read more

Fox has filed a lawsuit against another TV streaming service, alleging that BarryDriller.com is violating its copyrights by retransmitting the programming of one if its affiliates.

The network filed a lawsuit against the upstart service Friday in Los Angeles, claiming BarryDriller.com violates its right of public performance by streaming the signal of L.A. affiliate KTTV to BarryDriller.com subscribers without authorization, according to a Variety report. The site, which just launched this week, streams New York channel programming, as well as that of KTTV-DT, to subscribers for $5.95 a month.

"No amount of technological gimmickry … Read more

Google denies that its new copyright-policing policy won't affect Google-owned YouTube as it does other Web sites, despite the fact that YouTube has been known to play host to illegally posted copyrighted material.

The new policy, announced yesterday, knocks sites down in search results if Google receives a lot of "valid copyright removal notices" involving content on those sites.

But Search Engine Land reports that flagging supposedly illegal content on most sites involves using an online process that starts on a page labeled "Removing Content From Google," whereas flagging content on YouTube involves using the … Read more

Google announced on the company's blog today that sites that generate too many take-down notices will find themselves pushed down in the search rankings. Takedown notices are the documents that owners of copyrighted material file in order to request the deletion of unauthorized copies of their work from Web sites.

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web site owners must remove unauthorized files once they've received a legitimate takedown notice. … Read more

Google search will be less welcoming to sites accused by copyright owners of piracy.

On the company's blog, Google outlined a new measure designed at penalizing sites that generate too many complaints from copyright owners.

"We will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site," Google said in the blog post. "Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results."

This appears to be among the most significant antipiracy measures Google has ever adopted. The company'… Read more

The punches just keep coming for Zynga.

Electronic Arts is suing the social games creator for copyright infringement, alleging that Zynga ripped off EA's "The Sims Social" when it created "The Ville," EA said today in a press release.

The gaming giant filed its lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California today.

The Sims Social is the Facebook version of EA's "The Sims" game. After launching in August 2011, the game has gained "several million active" users on Facebook, according to EA's press … Read more

Embedding a copyright-infringing video on another Web site is not illegal, a court ruled yesterday.

Judge Richard Posner ruled at the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals that MyVidster, a social video bookmarking site, did not infringe the copyright of Flava Works, a porn production company, when it embedded copyright-infringing versions of Flava Works content from third-party Web sites.

The decision overturned a preliminary injunction from 2011, imposed by a lower court after Flava Works filed suit against MyVidster in 2010.

According to the Appeals Court ruling, MyVidster "doesn't touch the data stream" and therefore doesn'… Read more