A 22-year-old woman jailed two days in November after being arrested for filming two brief snippets of a motion picture is lashing back at the theater, claiming its manager demanded her arrest despite the police department’s reluctance. In a civil suit lodged in federal court in Illinois, Samantha Tumpach claims local police and the Motion Picture Association of American recommended against arresting her. A felony theater-filming charge... 

Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel unveiled Tuesday the Obama administration’s first “Joint Strategic Plan” concerning intellectual property enforcement — and she gave a big nod to fair use. The plan was required under the Pro-IP Act of 2008, which created Espinel’s post. The act was watered down to eliminate a Justice Department mandate that it assume duties of the movie studios and recording industry and sue copyright... 

A consortium of independent film producers is hitting a stumbling block in its plan to simultaneously sue thousands of BitTorrent users for allegedly downloading pirated movies. Time Warner Cable is refusing to look up and turn over the identities of about a thousand of its customers targeted in the lawsuits, on the grounds that the effort would require three months of full-time work by its…  Read More →

Hollywood will soon have the power to remotely disable the analog outputs on your set-top box, under a decision by federal regulators on Friday intended to prevent home recording of new movie releases. The move by the Federal Communications Commission grants cable and satellite providers the power to block consumers from viewing just-released movies in an analog format through a process known as Selectable Output Control. Hollywood requested... 

A proposed global intellectual-property treaty no longer nudges the international community to develop “three strikes” protocols to suspend internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement released Tuesday. The official draft of the proposed intellectual property accord was released after months of leaks and assertions by the Obama administration... 

A new malware scam is trying to dupe BitTorrent users into coughing up serious cash for illegally downloading copyrighted material. The code displays a box with the message “Warning! Piracy detected!” and opens a web page purportedly run by a Swiss company “committed to promoting the cultural and economic benefits of copyright.” The fake company, the ICCP Foundation, also claims to be backed by the Recording Industry... 

Warning to pirates: you’re no longer safe downloading movies that nobody ever heard of. A consortium of independent filmmakers has launched an RIAA-style mass-litigation campaign, suing thousands of individual BitTorrent users whose IP addresses were detected feeding and seeding films like  Steam Experiment , Far Cry , Uncross the Stars , Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D . “There’s two-way liability here with BitTorrrent,”... 

A U.S. judge is ordering one of the world’s leading BitTorrent search engines to remove all infringing content, a decision Isohunt’s operator said Tuesday likely would shutter the site with 30 million unique monthly visitors. The injunction targeting Isohunt follows similar rulings against competing pirate sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay , although the Bay has thus far eluded compliance. Last year, a federal court sided with... 

The United States is nudging the international community to develop protocols to suspend the internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a leaked draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The United States is leading the 2-year-old, once-secret negotiations over the so-called ACTA accord. The Jan. 18 draft, about 56 pages and labeled “confidential,”  just surfaced, and follows a string... 

The European Parliament delivered a political blow to Hollywood and the Obama administration, voting Wednesday 663 to 13 in opposition to a proposed and secret intellectual property agreement being negotiated by the European Union, United States and a handful of others. Wednesday’s developments concerning the Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement are substantial because the European Union’s 27 countries vastly outnumber the remaining... 

Those awaiting a legitimate method to duplicate DVDs for personal use will likely have to wait even longer, perhaps forever, after RealNetworks tossed in the white towel and abandoned its litigation on the matter. RealNetworks spent almost two years in a legal battle with the Motion Picture Association of America, which sued the Seattle company to block the sale of its DVD-copying software and hardware –- generally known as RealDVD. The company... 

A leading Australian internet service provider was cleared of copyright allegations Thursday when a federal judge ruled against Hollywood’s lawsuit that iiNet was responsible for infringing BitTorrent data traveling its pipes. The Australian Federal Court decision siding with the country’s third-largest ISP was a legal blow to worldwide efforts to make ISPs liable for the unlawful behavior of their customers. “I find that the... 

Lawyers for a music file sharer said Monday they would challenge a judge’s order reducing from $1.92 million to $54,000 the amount their client, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, must pay the recording industry for copyright infringement of 24 songs. The appeal concerns Friday’s head-spinning order by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis. The Minnesota federal judge dramatically lowered the amount a jury in June ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay —... 

A federal appeals court is reversing a lifetime internet ban imposed on a child sex offender also handed a 15-year prison term. The outcome highlights the appellate courts are all over the map when it comes to internet bans often imposed on defendants, especially sex deviants, once they have served their time. What’s more, the courts appear to be accepting the internet as a basic…  Read More →

A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind. Dan Burke, a Montana blind man, reads via a Pac Mate with a refreshable Braille display On Monday, dozens of nations will meet in Geneva to consider adopting the WIPO Treaty for Sharing Accessible Formats of Copyrighted Works for...