takedown

This isn't the first time, and probably won't be the last time, that the Recording Industry Association of America will complain about Google's work to tackle copyright infringement and piracy.

The trade group released a report card (PDF) today claiming that little has changed since Google promised to crack down on piracy six months ago.

"We recognize and appreciate that Google has undertaken some positive steps to address links to illegal music on its network," RIAA's EVP and general counsel Steven M. Marks said in a statement. "Unfortunately, our initial analysis concludes that … Read more

Microsoft recently issued a takedown notice to Google, citing several sites that allegedly infringe its intellectual property. But there's just one problem: many of the URLs it cited have nothing to do with its business.

According to a document obtained by TorrentFreak, Microsoft pointed to several legitimate Web sites in its request for URL removals related to Windows 8 infringement. In addition to seemingly legitimate links featuring Windows 8 downloads, Microsoft lists a BBC URL linking to the 45th day of the Olympic torch relay. The company also asked Google to remove a Wikipedia entry on the 45th Fighter … Read more

Twitter released its first ever Transparency Report detailing statistics on international requests for user data and content removal today, the same day news came out that it would have to hand over user information in a court case in New York.

The Twitter Transparency Report breaks down the countries from where such requests come and specifies how many requests it has received, what percentage it complied with, and numbers of user accounts affected, all spanning the first six months of this year.

The company has received more government requests in the first half of this year than in all of … Read more

The Recording Industry Association of America has claimed that Google's transparency report detailing takedown requests of copyright material is misleading, because the search giant limits the number of notices a company can make.

Google's statistics, since July 2011, show that Microsoft made the largest total number of takedown requests of any company, asking for a total of 2,544,209 URLs to be removed from Google's search results, which contained files or links to BitTorrent files that the company believed to be infringing on its copyrights.

The RIAA fell to third on the list, with 439,546 … Read more

The woman who posted a video of her children dancing to the Prince tune "Let's Go Crazy," and waged a three-year court fight with a top record company over the clip, has been accused of violating a court order and could be held in contempt of court.

Pennsylvania resident Stephanie Lenz generated a lot of headlines in 2007 after she claimed in a lawsuit that Universal and music star Prince knowingly made a false copyright claim about the dancing-baby video she posted to YouTube. Now she finds herself with a court-order hanging over her head that requires … Read more

If you've been thinking about starting a Twitter account under the pretense of being someone else you might want to think twice if it has anything to do with someone else's intellectual property.

In the past few weeks users, who have been trying their best to emulate characters from AMC's television series Mad Men have apparently had their accounts wiped clear and de-authorized by the microblogging start-up at the request of AMC's lawyers.

That's not the only instance, though.

More troubling is the story of Rich Johnston, a columnist for ComicBookResources.com. Johnston had gotten … Read more

Everybody knows that copyright owners can demand that YouTube and other Web sites remove unauthorized copies of their work under the law. But what happens when the owners of intellectual property err in their claims?

On Wednesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group that advocates for the rights of Internet users, issued six principles that copyright holders should consider before trying to remove a piece of content.

EFF has represented several individuals who have seen their videos removed from Web sites after a copyright owner erroneously claimed that their copyright was violated. EFF recently filed suit against Prince on … Read more

Facebook Secrets is no more.

The blog, which had been set up specifically to share the leaked source code that Facebook's front page accidentally displayed to a number of users over the weekend, has been taken down by host Blogger's parent company Google.

The company cited violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, evoking the similar takedown notices that plagued Digg when its users 'dugg' HD DVD crack code earlier this year.

Since the Facebook source code inevitably made its way into plenty of hands while it was public, the action probably won't do much--it'… Read more