dmca

Google is willing to fight Viacom all the way to the Supreme Court in the companies' legal battle over YouTube and pirated videos, but Viacom is taking a hard line of its own, executives from the companies said Wednesday.

David Eun, Google's vice president of content partnerships, told Dow Jones Newswires that Google has no plan to resolve the Viacom case outside court. "We're going all the way to the Supreme Court," Eun said. "We're very clear about it."

Separately, Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone told Dow Jones he's standing up for broader … Read more

An open-source project called CoreAVC-for-Linux is back up and running at Google Code after a copyright tangle with a company called CoreCodec.

Google removed the CoreAVC-for-Linux project after CoreCodec said the software violated its copyright in a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) "takedown" letter dated April 30. "We have directly verified by downloading the file from the site provided by Google Inc. that the file does include CoreCodec's copyrighted software," the company said in the letter, available at the Chilling Effects Web site.

Now the project is online again, after the company sent a reinstatement … Read more

In response to a copyright complaint, Google has taken down an open-source project called CoreAVC-for-Linux it had hosted on its Web site.

Google didn't share details, but said on the project site that it removed CoreAVC-for-Linux from its Google Code site after receiving a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

CoreAVC itself is proprietary software for Windows supplied by a company called CoreCodec. The software can play video encoded with the H.264 standard.

According to a cached version of the Google Code page, CoreAVC-for-Linux provides patches to open-source media player software such as MPlayer or MythTV … Read more

If you're an aficionado of Twitter or the short-form blogging platform, Tumblr, over the last couple of weeks, you've no doubt become aware of the make-your-own-mix tape service, Muxtape.

A seemingly home-spun operation with no obvious profit motive, Muxtape allows anyone to upload a series of songs to its servers to create, and then distribute online, a digital "mix tape" along the lines of the ones you made for your unrequited paramours back in college.

And even as Muxtape has caught fire in the Twittersphere, another service, Mixwit, has come along, also giving users the ability to create a custom digital mix tape, but this time without uploading your own songs. Instead, you choose available songs from two existing music search services, SeeqPod and Skreemr, albeit on a much more polished site that seems primed for seeking to bring in revenue.

As my colleagues Rafe Needleman and Josh Lowensohn have noted, Muxtape appears to be a legal time bomb, merely awaiting the wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America, while Mixwit seems to exist on firmer legal footing.

But are those impressions accurate? I decided to check in with some legal scholars to find out.

… Read more

Tech/culture connector Scott Beale turned me on to Muxtape, a super-simple site that streams a list of MP3s via the browser. Playlists you create get their own simple URLs and the interface for controlling the stream is plain and intuitive: Click a track to play it. Click again to pause.

You have to upload MP3s to the site to create your playlists, though, and while the interface for doing so is simple, it's rather a drag. There's no bulk uploader. You have to select each file from your disk and upload it individually.

Unfortunately, the site is … Read more

Update 2: MobiTV has backed down, and appears to have kissed and made up with HowardForums. See below.

Updated to include a statement from MobiTV (see below)

In a fantastic demonstration of the Streisand Effect, Silicon Valley startup MobiTV is currently engaged in an almost comedic yet futile effort to scrub a 31 character "secret" URL from the Internet.

MobiTV sells a streaming TV subscription service to mobile phone users. For $9.99 a month, Sprint, AT&T and Alltel customers can view low bandwidth streams of a number of TV channels right on their handsets. The … Read more

Slate, a popular news site, seems to be openly violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

That law, much hated in cyberrights and computer security circles, is a thorn in the side to many researchers. The interesting question that we must ask is: Will Hollywood let Slate's probable violation slide, or will they lawyer up and go after the site owned by The Washington Post Co.?

A few days ago, Slate released a video mashup of footage of Hillary Clinton and a few scenes from the movie Election, starring Reese Witherspoon. The video is mildly amusing, and did at least … Read more

So Warner Music isn't as petty as I thought it was. According to this story in Billboard, Warner didn't ask for YouTube to remove videos of the recent Led Zeppelin show from YouTube. Rather, it was a company called GrayZone, which has been authorized to issue takedown notices on behalf of Warner. In this case, GrayZone acted on presumption, and YouTube's automated system inaccurately attributed the notices to Warner.

This makes an interesting point: under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the copyright owner is responsible for policing each violation and requesting its takedown. (I'm not a … Read more