copyright

The goal of technology companies is to stuff their pockets with money, said Robert Levine.

"Venture capitalists may -- I haven't confirmed this -- also want to make money," Levine told snickering audience members, who were mostly from book publishing, during a panel discussion last March at the On Copyright conference.

What Levine wants to know is why everyone in tech gets upset when musicians and filmmakers try to earn a living. Levine has become a notable proponent of copyright and a defender of protecting the work of artists.

Since the publication last year of his book, … Read more

MegaUpload has been on a winning streak in court, but last week a U.S. district judge denied the company's request to dismiss a criminal indictment against it.

The U.S. Attorney's office has accused MegaUpload and its leaders of operating the cloud-storage service as a criminal enterprise. U.S. officials allege that founder Kim DotCom and six other associates encouraged users to upload pirated movies, music, and other media to MegaUpload's lockers so managers could get rich on advertising revenue and premium subscription fees.

MegaUpload's lawyers asked the court to throw out the indictment against … Read more

Facebook has cracked the whip on The Cool Hunter. After little warning the social network shuttered the design and pop-culture Web site's Facebook page eight weeks ago, leaving both the founder and its 788,000 fans wondering what went wrong.

In a blog post this week, founder Bill Tikos bemoaned the shutdown and said that it has severely hurt the site's business. According to Tikos, its Facebook fan base grew by 1,500 to 2,500 per day and also generated more than 10,000 click-throughs to the site per day. Overall, The Cool Hunter has 2.1 … Read more

Oracle announced today it plans to appeal the verdict in its long-running patent and copyright battle with Google over Java.

The database giant filed a "notice of appeal" with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California for an appeals court review of Judge William Alsup's decision in the trial, which found that Oracle's Java API was not copyrightable.

Oracle sued Google for copyright infringement related to Google's use of 37 Java APIs used on its Android mobile operating system. Google argued it was free to use them because the Java programming … Read more

U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady will hold another hearing to help him determine what to do with the digital files owned by MegaUpload users.

O'Grady is responding to a motion filed by Kyle Goodwin, an Ohio-based sports videographer. Goodwin has sought the return of the video files, mostly of high school sports action, that he stored at MegaUpload, the Internet storage locker that was taken offline by the U.S. government.

In January, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia accused MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom and six other company managers of criminal copyright violations, … Read more

Google and a trade group representing U.S. book publishers today announced they have settled a copyright dispute that has dragged on for seven years.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google said in a joint statement that as a result of the settlement, the Google Library Project will receive access to publishers' copyrighted books.

Both parties also said that U.S. publishers can "choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project."

In the statement, AAP and Google said: "Apart from the settlement, U.S. … Read more

Swedish police raided Web host PRQ earlier this week but it wasn't clear what they were after. Now, the ISP's owner is saying that the authorities seized servers for Web sites that allegedly dealt in illegal file-sharing.

According to TorrentFreak, police took three servers -- one belonged to one of Sweden's popular torrent sites called Tankafetast, another to an alleged Android app piracy site called Appbucket. It's unclear what was on the third server.

On Monday, the authorities targeted PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet. Former … Read more

YouTube is rolling out a major upgrade to Content ID, its digital toolset for copyright policies and content management for videos posted by everyone from freelance producers to major media companies.

Most of the updates revolve around content legality claims and what to do with challenges to them. So far, over 3,000 content owners have supplied more than 500,000 hours of reference files to the Content ID system.

First is the new appeals process in which users have more choices in challenging Content ID claims. The key to the new process is that when a user files an … Read more

The Swedish police seem to be going straight to the source in their battle against copyright infringement. According to Forbes, the country's authorities raided the Stolckholm-based Web host PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet, including the Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, the North America Man-Boy Love Association, Pedophile.se, and the Chechen rebel site Kavkaz Central.

It's unclear why police raided PRQ, but its owner Mikael Viborg told the Swedish news outlet Nyheter24 that he believes the investigation had to do with intellectual property violations, according to TorrentFreak. Viborg also … Read more