COPYCENSE

"A Moscow court has found Maxim Moshkov, owner of the biggest and most popular Russian on-line library, lib.ru, guilty of breaching copyright law.

"It was the only lawsuit brought against Moshkov that has ended in success for the plaintiff."

MosNews. Russia’s Biggest Online Library Found Guilty of Breaching Copyright. MosNews.com. April 1, 2005.

See also:
CCRC Staff. Russian Courts Attack On-line Libraries. Computer Crime Research Cente. April 1, 2005.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"College junior Kyle Taylor is downloading hundreds of songs by No Doubt, Bruce Springsteen and others onto the Compaq laptop in his cramped dormitory room.

"With a few more clicks of his mouse, Taylor is watching commercial-free ‘Seinfeld’ episodes on his computer. In just minutes, he then downloads the entire movie ‘A League of Their Own.’ The 20-year-old is not breaking any laws. Nor is he at risk of expensive lawsuits by the entertainment industry over copyright violations."

Ted Bridis. Students Using New Generation of Downloads. BusinessWeek Online. April 3, 2005.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"Freelance writers have reached a settlement worth as much as $18 million with The New York Times Co. and other defendants in a copyright infringement case involving work posted online or in databases, the writers’ representatives said on Tuesday.

"A motion for approval of the settlement was filed last week in federal court in New York, said Gerard Colby, president of the National Writers Union, one of several writers’ groups that brought the class-action lawsuit."

Reuters. Freelance Writers Win Online Settlement. MSNBC News. March 30, 2005.

See also:
Rachel Metz. Freelancers Hit the Jackpot. Wired News. March 29, 2005.

National Writers Union. $18 Million Settlement to Freelance Writers Filed for Court Approval. (Press Release.) March 29, 2005.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"The world’s largest chipmaker, Intel, and a unit of German media giant Bertelsmann plan to cooperate in technology for downloading and sharing films, music clips and games from the Internet.

"Intel will make chips for PCs, notebooks and mobile phones that are compatible with Bertelsmann’s new online media file-sharing platform, capitalizing on a huge and growing public appetite for accessing music and other media online."

Reuters.Intel, Bertelsmann Link up for Online Media. News.com. March 30, 2005.

"Skype was created as a no-cost long-distance phone service. It does that very well. What it also allows you to do, if you’re just a little technically-minded and have a homebrew gene or two, is to record your Skype phone conversation, with the other person’s permission, to an audio file on a second computer. Once you’ve recorded the audio, you can edit out the uhms, ahs and pauses, compress the audio and then place it on the web for public consumption.

"I’ve been doing some experiments recording Skype interviews and am writing this article to pass along some tips and pointers."

Phil Shapiro. Using Skype as a Community Media Production Tool. No publisher. No date.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"VeriSign has taken a major step toward retaining control of .net after beating out four rivals in a rating of the contenders seeking to run the Internet’s third-largest domain.

"VeriSign Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., ranked the highest in a report (.pdf) released late Monday by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the main oversight body for the domain-name system. ICANN now will begin negotiating a registry agreement with VeriSign, a process that is expected to last about two weeks.

"Once an agreement is reached, the selection of VeriSign as the registry for .net could go before ICANN’s board of directors as early as its scheduled meeting in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on April 8. ICANN also has begun accepting public comments on the report."

Matt Hicks. VeriSign Favored to Run Major Internet Domain. eWeek. March 29, 2005.

See also:

Jim Wagner and Michael Singer. VeriSign Retaining Stewardship of .net. InternetNews.com. March 29, 2005.

Anick Jesdanun. Panel: VeriSign Should Retain Domain Name Control. Globe and Mail. March 29, 2005.
ICANN. ICANN .net RFP Evaluation. (.pdf). March 2005.

ICANN. ICANN Publishes Telcordia Report on their Findings and Rankings for .NET. (Press Release.) March 28, 2005.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"Yahoo took another step toward fulfilling a promise to make its portal a platform where communities develop, rather than a stagnant site limited to serving information.

"The latest feature, released Thursday as a beta, allows users to search content hosted by Creative Commons, a nonprofit group that specializes in copyrighting material made available for limited reuse.

"While most material on the Internet comes with a copyright, Yahoo Creative Commons will help developers and site owners find content published by authors willing to share or reuse it, according to the company."

Tim Grey. Yahoo Offers Creative Commons Search. InternetNews.com. March 24, 2005.

See also:
Larry Lessig. Larry Lessig on Searching Creative Commons. Yahoo Search Blog. March 23, 2005.

Editor’s note: See also SNTReportcom’s prior story on the Creative Commons Search Engine.

SNTReport.com™ The Online Journal for Social Software, Digital Collaboration & Information Policy. A Seso Group™ Venture.