The Podium
Blog posts tagged with 'Copyright'
Wednesday, August 04
By Brad
Via USA Today, college students returning to campus this fall will find it a little more difficult to download movies and music illegally:
Every college across the country must either have installed software to block illegal file-sharing or have created some other procedure for preventing it. The requirement is part of the 2008 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which took effect July 1.
Some schools have been working to comply with the provisions for several years.
Under the law, student violators face fines from $750 to $30,000 for each song or movie downloaded. If a court determines the infringement was “willful,” that fine can be as much as $250,000, although some judges have reduced higher fines, saying they’re unreasonable. Schools’ liability is limited if they cooperate with law enforcement.
Tuesday, June 22
By Brad
Via the New York Times comes the story of a website’s April Fool’s prank involving magical unicorn meat described as “the other white meat,” a cease and desist letter from a confused National Pork Board, and the online hilarity that followed.
Tuesday, May 18
By Brad
On Monday, BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay — long the scourge of movie studios and record companies for providing access to illegal downloads — was ordered shut down by German authorities. But as usually happens with the site, the shutdown didn’t last long. Reports CNet:
This is at least the third time a bandwidth provider was forced to take down the site and the third time the site has returned. One has to question whether the studios are actually playing into the the hands of The Pirate Bay operators with these attempts to knock out the site. Every time they do, The Pirate Bay rises again, and to the file-sharing community these comebacks boost the site operators’ reputation as unconquerable heroes.
Thursday, May 13
By Brad
Via MSNBC, a high court in Germany has ruled people with WiFi in their homes need to protect it with a password — or face a fine if someone they don’t know downloads something illegal:
Internet users can be fined up to euro100 ($126) if a third party takes advantage of their unprotected WLAN connection to illegally download music or other files, the Karlsruhe-based court said in its verdict.
“Private users are obligated to check whether their wireless connection is adequately secured to the danger of unauthorized third parties abusing it to commit copyright violation,” the court said.
In other copyright news — this time closer to home — a U.S. judge has ruled against file-sharing application LimeWire. From the Wall Street Journal:
The blistering, 59-page ruling from Judge Kimba Wood of U.S. District Court in Manhattan granted several requests for summary judgment made by the music labels, which are represented by the Recording Industry Association of America.
For many in the music industry the ruling is a throwback to an earlier digital era. LimeWire and similar software had their heyday several years ago, and while still present on many people’s computers they have been eclipsed by newer downloading methods such as BitTorrent.
In a statement, LimeWire Chief Executive George Searle said: “LimeWire strongly opposes the court’s recent decision.” RIAA CEO Mitch Bainwol, in a statement, called the ruling “an extraordinary victory for the entire creative community.”
Tuesday, April 21
By Brad
The website TurnItIn.com offers a web-based plagiarism detection service used by teachers to keep students honest. As part of the service, the site adds full term papers to a database, where it’s used for future plagiarism checks.
The database led to students from Virginia and Arizona to sue TurnItIn. The accusation was copyright infringement. But now, via Ars Technica, comes word that after two years of arguing the lawsuit has been thrown out:
TurnItIn has known for years that this would be a sensitive issue, and in 2002 commissioned an opinion from law firm Foley & Lardner. The group concluded that the use of the papers constituted fair use, but admitted that “the archival of a submitted work is perhaps the most legally sensitive aspect of the TURNITIN system.” The lawyers argue that because the text is not displayed or distributed to anyone, it can hardly be called “infringement.” Fair use should allow TurnItIn to do what it does.
A federal court agreed that this was legal, for two reasons. First, TurnItIn required students to enter into a “binding agreement” when they uploaded papers to the site. Second, TurnItIn’s use was “fair” according to the four factors found in US copyright law, with most weight being given to the “transformative” nature of what TurnItIn was doing with the papers.
Wednesday, April 15
By Brad
Recently, a French law that would sever the Internet connection of online pirates went down in defeat. Now, Ars Technica reports, South Korea has picked up the idea:
South Korea is crazy for baseball—it’s national team made it to recent finals of the World Baseball Classic, only to lose to Japan—so it seems especially appropriate that the country would be one of the first in the world to adopt an official “three strikes” policy toward copyright infringement on the Internet. While the government can order the disconnection of individual users, a key emphasis here appears to be on websites. Host some infringing content, and the government can shut you down at its discretion.
There’s a problem with focusing on individual websites, however:
An anonymous source summed up the problem for the paper: “It is virtually impossible for Web portals to totally filter illegal content when there are millions of postings coming up everyday. And I am talking about companies that spend massive amounts of money to monitor copyright violations and hire hundreds of monitoring personnel. I mean, how much does the government expect us to spend in developing and operating a simple Web service? No matter how hard we try, the culture minister will easily find his three strikes and could order us to shutdown a site at anytime, regardless of whether the copyright holder has a problem with us or not.”
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
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