Tag Archives: MAFIAA

European link tax, compulsory copyright scanning sent back to the drawing board

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“The law will now be sent for a full reconsideration and debate inside the parliament, during which activists will try and remove the controversial Article 11 and 13. Article 11 has been referred to by campaigners as instituting a ‘link tax’, by forcing tech companies like Google and Facebook to pay to use snippets of content on their own sites. Article 13 adds rules that make tech companies responsible for ensuring any copyrighted material is not spread over their platforms. Those rules could force technology companies to scan through everything their users post and check it doesn’t include copyrighted material.”

Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/european-copyright-laws-memes-link-tax-article-13-11-a8432486.html

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2015 News Stories You Should Have Heard About, But Probably Didn’t

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“In 2015, the iron fist of power clamped down on humanity, from warfare to terrorism (I repeat myself) to surveillance, police brutality, and corporate hegemony. The environment was repeatedly decimated, the health of citizens was constantly put at risk, and the justice system and media alike were perverted to serve the interests of the powers that be.  However, while 2015 was discouraging for more reasons than most of us can count, many of the year’s most underreported stories evidence not only a widespread pattern that explicitly reveals the nature of power, but pushback from human beings worldwide on a path toward a better world.”

http://theantimedia.org/15-news-stories-from-2015-you-should-have-heard-about-but-probably-didnt/

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5 Years and $7 Later, Homeland Security Returns Seized Hip-Hop Website

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“In place of its usual feed of videos, song links and industry gossip, the site displayed a seizure notice from the federal government, a result of a raid of dozens of websites suspected of trafficking in counterfeit goods and pirated content.  The site stayed that way for nearly five years. But a few weeks ago, after lobbying the government for its return and paying a $7 fee, Kevin Hofman — a rank-and-file record label employee who ran OnSmash, first as a hobby and later as a full-time job — finally got it back, with little explanation and without ever being formally charged with any wrongdoing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/business/media/5-years-and-7-later-us-returns-a-seized-hip-hop-site.html

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

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“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/

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Movie studios keep mistakenly reporting their own servers for piracy

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“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

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Online Renegade, Wanted in U.S., Shakes Up New Zealand Election

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“Mr. Dotcom, 40, is fighting extradition to the United States, where he is wanted on racketeering charges stemming from his file-sharing site Megaupload, now defunct.  While out on bail as he appeals the case, he has introduced a new company,Mega; confronted the prime minister in Parliament; released an album; and founded the Internet Party.  The party advocates decriminalizing marijuana, setting a national goal of 100 percent sustainable energy generation by 2025, repealing surveillance legislation, and amending copyright laws to protect Internet companies from ‘civil liability arising from the action of their users,’ a fix that could shield hosting services like Mega.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/world/asia/kim-dotcom-online-renegade-shakes-up-new-zealand-election.html

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Mozilla caves to pressure, will enable HTML5 DRM in Firefox

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“The organization is partnering with Adobe to make the change. Mozilla will provide the hooks and APIs in Firefox to enable Web content to manipulate DRM-protected content, and Adobe will provide a closed source Content Decryption Module (CDM) to handle the decryption needs.  In a more technical post, Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal outlines some of the ways that the Firefox developers have tried to isolate the Adobe CDM to ensure that this closed source black box cannot breach user privacy or undermine system security. HTML5’s DRM system also includes a unique identifier that content providers can use to identify devices. Mozilla has taken pains to make this as minimally invasive as possible.”

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/driven-by-necessity-mozilla-to-enable-html5-drm-in-firefox/

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Google and Viacom Settle YouTube Lawsuit After $100 Million Defense

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“Google and Viacom have announced the end of a seven-year copyright violation lawsuit centered around YouTube with an agreement to settle out of court.  Viacom filed a lawsuit in March 2007 that sought $1 billion in damages from Google. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.  The agreement signals the end to a long and often publicly contentious battle. Viacom had alleged that YouTube was guilty of copyright infringement for allowing users to upload clips of its content and deliberately allowing it to remain on the site.  The case dragged on for years. In 2010, Google’s CFO said the company had spent $100 million on the case.”

http://mashable.com/2014/03/18/google-viacom-youtube-settlement/

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MP3tunes and its founder liable for $63 million in EMI copyright suit

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“Michael Robertson is an entrepreneur who is no stranger to drawn-out legal battles. He founded MP3.com, an early music storage service that was ultimately sued out of existence by record labels. And in 2005, he founded MP3tunes, which eventually suffered the same fate. MP3tunes filed for bankruptcy in 2012 after ‘four and a half years of legal torment,’ wrote Robertson.  But the lawsuit against MP3tunes, filed by the EMI record label in 2007, marched onward even after the company’s demise. Yesterday a Manhattan jury handed down a verdict in favor of EMI. It ruled that Robertson should be liable for copyright violations for the creation of MP3tunes.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/jury-mp3tunes-and-its-founder-must-pay-emi-for-copyright-infringement/

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“Happy Birthday” copyright defense: Those “words” and “text” are ours

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“There may be no song more widely sung in America than ‘Happy Birthday,’ but it isn’t free to sing. Warner/Chappell music licensing, which has long claimed copyright to the words, typically dings filmmakers and TV producers a few thousand bucks for a ‘synchronization license’ any time the song is used in video. Warner reported that by the 1990s the ‘Happy Birthday’ licensing enterprise was pulling in upwards of $2 million annually.  In June, a filmmaker who paid $1,500 to use the song in a documentary (called ‘Happy Birthday’) challenged Warner/Chappell in court. The plaintiffs hoped to form a class action and make Warner pay back everyone who’s paid a license fee since.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/happy-birthday-copyright-defense-those-words-and-text-are-ours/

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