NewsTrust - Copyright - Most Recent Stories

Technology should help us share, not constrain us

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Richard Stallman - Apr. 18 (Opinion) - Companies like Amazon can control the way we use the ebooks we buy. Instead let's build a publishing model based on freedom I love the detective novel The Jehovah Contract , and I'd like everyone else to love it, too. I have lent it out at least six times over the years. Printed books let us do that. I couldn't do it with most commercial ebooks; it's not allowed. And if I felt like telling the publishers to take their evil rule and stuff it, the software in e-readers has digital restrictions management – malicious features that restrict access, so it simply won't allow it. And the books are encrypted in such a way to force you to use that malicious software. Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are not allowed for ebooks. With the Amazon Kindle, for instance, you're not allowed to buy a book anonymously. Kindle books are typically available from Amazon only, and Amazon doesn't accept cash so users must identify themselves. Thus Amazon knows exactly which books each user has read. ...

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Now The Largest Game Companies In The World Have Dropped Support For A Bill The Internet Hates

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

businessinsider.com - Dec. 30 (News) - Whew.

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MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Popular Mechanics - Dec. 21 (Opinion) - The U.S. Congress is considering the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). MythBuster Adam Savage says that if these sweeping pieces of legislation pass, the U.S. will join the likes of China and Iran in censoring the Internet.

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Stop Online Piracy Act Vote Delayed

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - Dec. 16 (News) - The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set – a surprise given that the bill looked certain to pass out of committee today. The committee’s ch

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Net founders oppose piracy laws

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - Dec. 16 (News) - Some of the founding fathers of the modern web have signed a strongly-worded letter opposing US piracy laws.

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Sandia Labs: SOPA will 'negatively impact' U.S. cybersecurity

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

CNET News - Nov. 17 (News) -

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Piracy problems? US copyright industries show terrific health

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - A major report from the largest copyright owners shows that they are earning record foreign profits, beat the US economy handily during the recent recession, and pay better than most industries. That's why we need draconian new laws to help them out.

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Congress Introduces Another Awful Anti-Piracy Law - Because the DMCA and Protect IP Weren't Obnoxious Enough

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0700

dslreports.com - Oct. 28 (Opinion) -

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Spreading Freedom: Google And The War For The Web

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Ryan Grim, Zach Carter, Paul Blumenthal - Sep. 25 (Special Report) - [Google] is now giving money to the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Republican Governors Association, the GOP firm The David All Group, Crossroads Strategies, the Republican Attorneys General Association and the Republican State Leadership Committee, among others. On Thursday, Google and Fox News cosponsored a Republican presidential debate.

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Analysis: New US anti-piracy bill will kill the Internet

Tue, 31 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

tgdaily.com - May. 31 (Opinion) -

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Senators announce Internet death penalty bill

Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - May. 12 (Opinion) -

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Page Sharing Service Bo.lt Lets You Copy, Edit And Share Almost Any Webpage

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Alexia Tsotsis - Apr. 21 (Review) - With $5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, webpage sharing service Bo.lt launches today after about a year in private beta. Like a “Bit.ly on steroids,” the service lets you paste any URL into its copy engine or bookmarklet, creating a duplicate of the page on its servers. Once copied, Bo.lt lets you quickly edit the page itself. You can change the text, edit and delete images and text and change links — either through the Bo.lt visual editor or its HTML editor.Page Sharing Service Bo.lt Lets You Copy, Edit And Share Almost Any Webpage

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The Google Books settlement should teach the company humility. It won't

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Siva Vaidyanathan - Mar. 23 (Opinion) - Google has been humbled. For a company with the audacity to make "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" its mission statement, it takes a lot to take Google down a peg. But yesterday federal Judge Denny Chin did just that. He ruled—after more than two years of study and debate—that the elaborate new used-book store that Google had designed in collaboration with the most elite authors and publishers could not stand. Or, at least, Chin ruled that the methods Google chose to build this massive digital bookstore, now called Google Books, was improper.

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Blaming Piracy, Music Industry Says It's Lost a Third of Its Value Over Past 7 Years

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - By Audrey Watters - Jan. 20 (Opinion) - It's a familiar refrain from the music industry: sales are down and piracy is to blame. That's the gist of the the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) annual Digial Music Report, which points to a slowdown in the growth of digital music sales. While digital music revenue has grown 1000% over the past seven years, the entire music industry has lost a third of its value over that same time period. And while digital music seems to represent both the best hopes and the worst fears of the industry, even its growth is slowing.

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LimeWire, After Lengthy Battle, to Shut Down Dec. 31

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Ben Sisario - Dec. 04 (News) - LimeWire, the popular music file-sharing service that ran afoul of the music industry, has reached its end. The company said on Friday that it would be shutting down by the end of the year and closing its sole office in New York.

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Viacom Says YouTube Ruling Will ‘Completely Destroy’ Copyright

Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By David Kravets - Dec. 03 (News) - Viacom appealed Friday its unsuccessful $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google’s YouTube in a case testing the depths of copyright-infringement protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

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U.S. Government Seizes 82 Websites: A Glimpse at the Draconian Future of Copyright Enforcement?

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

eff.org - By Corynne McSherry - Nov. 30 (News Analysis) - Over the past few days, the U.S. Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and nine U.S. Attorneys’ Offices seized 82 domain names of websites they claim were engaged in the sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and illegal copyrighted works.

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U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

torrentfreak.com - By Enigmax - Nov. 26 (News) - Following on the heels of this week’s domain seizure of a large hiphop file-sharing links forum, it’s clear today that the U.S. Government has been very busy. Without any need for COICA, ICE has just seized the domain of a BitTorrent meta-search engine along with those belonging to other music linking sites and several others which appear to be connected to physical counterfeit goods.

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What do we want copyright to do?

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Cory Doctorow - Nov. 23 (Opinion) - A recurring question in discussions of digital copyright is how creators and their investors (that is, labels, movie studios, publishers, etc) will earn a living in the digital era. But though I've had that question posed to me thousands of times, no one has ever said which creators and which investors are to earn a living, and what constitutes "a living".

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Twitter Gets to Use Your Photos, for Free? (Updated)

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Violet Blue - Oct. 18 (News Report) - Twitter has been making a lot of changes lately, and photographers may want to re-read that fine print in the Terms of Service... every photo you share on Twitter can be sub-licensed by Twitter, or worse - all royalty-free.

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Thousands more exposed on ACS:Law file-sharing lists

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

BBC News - By Daniel Emery - Sep. 28 (News) - A list of more than 8,000 Sky broadband subscribers and a second of 400 PlusNet users surfaced following a security breach of legal firm ACS:Law.

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Censorship of the Internet Takes Center Stage in "Online Infringement" Bill

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

eff.org - By Richard Esguuerra - Sep. 21 (News Analysis) - COICA sends the world the message that the United States approves of unilateral Internet censorship. Which governments deny their citizens access to parts of the Internet? For now, it is mostly totalitarian, profoundly anti-democratic regimes that keep their citizens from seeing the whole Internet. With this bill, the United States risks telling countries throughout the world, "Unilateral censorship of websites that the government doesn't like is okay — and this is how you do it."

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Patent Office Admits the Truth: Things Are a Disaster

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

bnet.com - By Erik Sherman - Sep. 10 (News Analysis) - The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, under its new director, David Kappos, has finally begun to seriously address transparency of information with a new data visualization dashboard. The big lesson? As a number of people who watch the organization have thought, for years — years — the USPTO has blown smoke and lived in a world of denial and obfuscation.

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Latest leaked draft of secret copyright treaty: US trying to cram DRM rules down the world's throats

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boing Boing - By Cory Doctorow - Sep. 06 (Opinion) - Michael Geist writes in with the latest news on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the secret, closed-door copyright treaty that will bring US-style copyright rules (and worse) to the whole world. Particularly disturbing is the growing support for "three-strikes" copyright rules that would disconnect whole families from the Internet if one member of the household was accused (without proof) of copyright infringement.

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Iranian Government Runs Public Warez Server

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

torrentfreak.com - By Ernesto - Aug. 24 (Investigative Report) - The Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology is directly connected to the Iranian Government. Aside from evaluating and advising policy makers on science and technology issues, the largest research outfit in the country also provides a warez server where Photoshop, MS Office and many other applications can be downloaded for free.

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