When it comes to appropriating images found online, the situation is understandably confusing. If an individual posts something on social media, does that give someone else the right to use it in a different forum? Most lawyers would likely answer, “Not so fast,” and yet on Monday came a suggestive ruling perhaps otherwise from a New York federal court. From a…
Tag: infringement
The Supreme Court Says States Cannot Be Sued For Copyright Infringement
sandbagger shares a report from PetaPixel: The Supreme Court of the United States dealt a major blow to photographers’ copyright protections when it declared that states cannot be sued for copyright infringement because they have “sovereign immunity.” The opinion came down as part of a writ of certiorari regarding the case of Allen v Cooper. A writ of certiorari is basically…
Activision Fights ‘Call of Duty’ Leaks With Subpoenas to Reddit
Gizmodo shares the saga of a now-deleted video claiming to show Call of Duty’s new “battle royale” mode: The YouTube video, initially posted by a user who goes by TheGamingRevoYT, was slammed with a copyright claim and ripped from the platform. Meanwhile, other gamers noticed that Reddit posts and Twitter threads even mentioning the upcoming release were being taken down for…
Don’t Use the Word ‘Did’ Or a Dumb Anti-Piracy Company Will Delete You From Google
In 2018, the owner of Two-Bit History, a site dedicated to computer history, wrote a successful article about mathematician Ada Lovelace, who some credit as being the first computer programmer. Sadly, if you search Google for that article today you won’t find it. Some idiotic anti-piracy company had it deleted because it dared to use the word “did.” TorrentFreak reports: In…
‘Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits’, Argues Rolling Stone
A new article in Rolling Stone argues that the forgotten 2013 hit song “Blurred Lines”, which a court later ruled infringed on a 1977 song by Marvin Gaye, turned copyright law into “a minefield” — for the music industry. While copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies (a prime example is the Chiffons’ successful suit against George Harrison in…
FBI Busts Massive Pirate Streaming Service With More Content Than Netflix
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal officials… An FBI investigation led officials to Darryl Polo, 36, and Luis Villarino, 40, who have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges for operating iStreamItAll, a subscription-based streaming site, and…
Court Rules Apple Doesn’t Owe Patent Troll $503 Million
An appeals court ruled that Apple doesn’t have to pay $503 million to VirnetX, a company often accused of being a patent troll. The court didn’t reverse the original patent-infringement decision though, it just said the amount must be recalculated or a new trial held. Cult of Mac reports: VirnetX Holding Corp is sometimes referred to as a patent troll because…
US Court Shields Internet Subscribers From Futile Piracy Complaints
A New Jersey district court has issued a devastating order against Strike 3 Holdings, the most active filer of piracy lawsuits in the US. In four separate cases, the court denied a request to obtain identities of alleged BitTorrent pirates. The court argues that the underlying complaints are futile. Even if they held up, other issues such as the privacy of…
Big ISPs Worry DNS-Over-HTTPS Could Stop Monitoring and Modifying of DNS Queries
“Big Cable and other telecom industry groups warned that Google’s support for DNS over HTTPS (DoH) ‘could interfere on a mass scale with critical Internet functions, as well as raise data-competition issues,'” reports Ars Technica. But are they really just worried DNS over HTTPS will end useful ISP practices that involve monitoring or modifying DNS queries? For example, queries to malware-associated…
Top US Publishers Sue Amazon’s Audible For Copyright Infringement
Amazon’s Audible was sued by some of the top U.S. publishers for copyright infringement on Friday, aiming to block a planned rollout of a feature called ‘Audible Captions’ that shows the text on screen as a book is narrated. From a report: The lawsuit was filed by seven members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), including HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Random…