Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says …  Read More →

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money. “We believe it’s the best solution out there,”... 

Thomas-Rasset testifying during her first 2007 trial. The nation’s first file sharing copyright infringement trial has morphed into a legal Groundhog Day. In a bid to avoid a third trial — after two mistrials — the Minnesota federal judge presiding over the 4-year-old Jammie Thomas-Rasset case wants the Recording Industry Association of American and the defendant to negotiate a settlement . But, as Thomas-Rasset’s attorney,... 

The record labels have told a federal judge LimeWire is liable for possibly “over a billion dollars” — the latest sign that the industry is seeking to annihilate the New York-based file sharing company. The Recording Industry Association of America’s court filing Monday comes a week after the labels asked U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood to shutter LimeWire (.pdf). Weeks before, the New York judge ruled LimeWire’s... 

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 →

LimeWire COO Zeeshan Zaidi The company behind the file sharing software LimeWire is considering aggressively filtering out pirated content and is hoping to strike a deal with the music industry in which it would be permitted to live on as a for-pay music download service, a company executive said Monday. “The biggest challenge right now is changing the behavior of a generation of internet users to get them to pay for music,” said... 

LimeWire was found liable of copyright infringement Tuesday in a decision that threatens to financially devastate the New York company behind the file-sharing application. In a 4-year-old case brought by The Recording Industry Association of America, U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood ruled that LimeWire’s users commit a “ substantial amount of copyright infringement ” (.pdf) and that the Lime Group, the company behind the... 

A federal appeals court is blessing the legal process by which the recording industry and other content owners unmask the identities of alleged peer-to-peer copyright infringers. The decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is believed to be the first appellate court to sanction a process that has ultimately hauled tens of thousands of alleged P2P infringers into court , (.pdf) many at the request of the Recording Industry Association... 

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,”... 

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... 

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... 

There’s equal reason to support or object to the proposed Google Books settlement. Creating a digital catalog of the worlds’ words might be the Holy Grail of intellectual empowerment. Yet building that library in the clouds would be allowed without the rights-holders’ consent — which the Justice Department and others contend is a complete and fundamental alteration of copyright law . The Authors Guild is backing the settlement... 

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...