Tag Archives: Intellectual Poverty

Filmmakers fighting “Happy Birthday” copyright find their “smoking gun”

Posted on by

“Warner/Chappell has built a licensing empire based on ‘Happy Birthday,’ which in 1996 was pulling in more than $2 million per year. [..] An important line of text published underneath the song’s lyrics was ‘blurred almost beyond legibility’ in the copy that Warner/Chappell handed over in discovery. Plaintiffs’ lawyers note that it’s ‘the only line of the entire PDF that is blurred in that manner.’  Plaintiffs acquired their own copies of the songbook, including a first edition published in 1916, which didn’t have the song, and versions published 1922 and later, which include it without a copyright notice.”

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/07/filmmakers-fighting-happy-birthday-copyright-find-their-smoking-gun/

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

Georgia sues legal rebel for posting state’s copyrighted law summaries

Posted on by

“Georgia claims that a legal rebel, Public.Resource.org, is publishing and making it easy for others to copy the physical text and accompanying annotations of Georgia’s state law—the Official Code of Georgia Annotated. The state’s Code Revision Commission maintains that PublicResource.org is not entitled to reproduce the annotated version of Georgia’s code. Annotations are summaries of the law’s meaning and those summaries are contracted to a third party to write. So what Georgia is essentially saying is it is not OK to copy and distribute the texts of the state’s laws if those texts are accompanied with the state-owned summaries of what the law actually means.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/georgia-sues-legal-rebel-for-posting-states-copyrighted-law-online/

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

Movie studios keep mistakenly reporting their own servers for piracy

Posted on by

“Scanning through the takedown notices posted to ChillingEffects.org, reporters at The Next Web noticed something strange and frankly sort of embarrassing. In a piracy takedown notice sent to Google last week, Universal Pictures France listed a local address (127.0.0.1:4001) as the illegal source for a copy of Jurassic World — ratting out their own computer for piracy and demanding Google delist it from public search rankings. Basically, they found their own movie on their own system and ran screaming to Google about film piracy.  It turns out, this happens all the time. TNW dug up more than a hundred other cases dating back years, using a simple ‘localhost’ search.”

http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/23/9025841/studio-piracy-scan-chililng-effects

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

Grooveshark co-founder Josh Greenberg found dead at 28

Posted on by

“Greenberg’s death comes several weeks after Grooveshark reached a final settlement with the record labels that sued it out of business over copyright violations. To avoid a damages trial that could’ve awarded those labels hundreds of millions of dollars, Grooveshark agreed to wipe away its entire existence, erasing all servers and giving ownership of its web domain, mobile applications, and all intellectual property to the labels.  At its peak, the service tallied between 35 million and 40 million users and employed 145 people.”

http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9005785/grooveshark-josh-greenberg-found-dead

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

Authors Guild demands ISPs monitor, filter Internet of pirated goods

Posted on by

“The Authors Guild, one of the nation’s top writer’s groups, wants the US Congress to overhaul copyright law and require ISPs to monitor and filter the Internet of pirated materials, including e-books. The guild, which represents thousands of authors, has been quite active in trying to protect its members’ works. Most recently, the guild is urging the Justice Department to investigate Amazon’s book-selling practices on antitrust grounds. The guild had been involved in long-running litigation against Google’s university book scanning project. Last year, a federal appeals court said that universities could scan millions of library books without the authors’ permission.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/authors-guild-demands-isps-monitor-filter-internet-of-pirated-goods/

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

Trans Pacific Partnership Is about Control, Not Free Trade

Posted on by

“The TPP would only marginally improve free trade, but would export to other countries stronger copyright and patent standards, which would increase the costs these monopoly privilege systems impose on economies, reduce Internet and artistic freedom, increase the prices of pharmaceuticals, and reduce innovation.  Another perverse aspect of the IP treaties is that any significant improvement to US copyright law, which is widely seen as being out of control and in need of reform, would arguably be in violation of US obligations under the Berne Convention. So Congress ties its own hands by means of international agreements and then uses this as an excuse later for why IP reform is not possible.”

http://fee.org/anythingpeaceful/detail/trans-pacific-partnership-is-about-control-not-free-trade

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

Homeland Security Confiscates Panties For ‘Copyright Infringement’

Posted on by

“Homeland Security’s mission has transformed from fighting terrorists to stealing women’s underwear for supposed intellectual property violations.  What’s interesting is how since the department’s inception their goal was never to stop terrorism but to police the domestic population, be it through raiding toy stores for suspected copyright infringement one year after the department’s creation back in 2004, or panty raids as they just did in Kansas now ten years later.  When there is no actual terrorists to police with all the high-tech police state gear you spent billions of taxpayers’ dollars on, you have to use it somewhere.”

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=48600

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

‘Each time police shut Pirate Bay, we’ll multiply other servers’

Posted on by

“No matter how many times law enforcement cracks down on The Pirate Bay, it will find a way to re-open, the Berlin chairman of the Pirate Party told RT – days after the website was taken offline by a Swedish police raid.   ‘It was already shut down in 2005, and the result was the creation of a party called Pirate Party coming with all the ideas of sharing of information, of knowledge and culture on the internet. And freedom on the internet,’ Kramm said.  Kramm also said that music industry has opened for streaming, adapting to the new circumstances – and the streaming has become one of the strongest developing markets.”

http://rt.com/news/213387-pirate-bay-party-chairman/

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

Germany’s top publisher bows to Google in news licensing row

Posted on by

“Germany’s biggest news publisher Axel Springer has scrapped a move to block Google from running snippets of articles from its newspapers, saying that the experiment had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.  Springer said a two-week-old experiment to restrict access by Google to some of its publications had caused web traffic to plunge for these sites, leading it to row back and let Google once again showcase Springer news stories in its search results.  Chief Executive Mathias Doepfner said on Wednesday that his company would have ‘shot ourselves out of the market’ if it had continued with its demands for the U.S. firm to pay licensing fees.”

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/05/us-google-axel-sprngr-idUSKBN0IP1YT20141105

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet

Spain Shuts Down Google, Confronts the Internet

Posted on by

the-daily-bell-top-logo61

“Spanish legislators have decided that any time someone reproduces even a few words of someone else’s writing, it is now considered stealing unless compensation is paid. Germany previously passed an unsuccessful law of this sort, but the difference is that most media companies waived their right to charge for excerpts because Google created so much traffic.  To make sure that the Spanish version was more successful, language stipulates that media companies MUST charge! There is no choice in the matter.”

http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/35907/Shock-Spain-Shuts-Down-Google-Confronts-the-Internet/

Scan to Donate Bitcoin to Freedomwat.ch Staff
Did you like this?
Tip Freedomwat.ch Staff with Bitcoin
Donate via Installed Wallet