COPYCENSE

"A competitor is running a search engine ad with your trademarked brand name. Another has copied your web site without permission. You suspect another of driving up your advertising costs through click fraud. What are your legal options?

"What can you do to protect your site from these online thieves? At the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago, a panel of experts explored a wide range of issues related to search engines and legal protection."

Grant Crowell. Search Engines and Legal Issues. SearchEngineWatch. Feb. 23, 2005.

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

"A Russian digital-music site offering high-quality song downloads for just pennies apiece is the target of a criminal copyright investigation by the local police, recording industry groups said Tuesday.

"AllofMP3.com has been operating for several years, asking consumers to pay just 2 cents per megabyte of downloads–usually between 4 cents and 10 cents per song. Alongside the catalogue available at traditional stores like Apple Computer’s iTunes, the site offered access to songs from the Beatles and other groups that haven’t yet authorized digital distribution.

"The Russian site claimed it had licenses to do so from a local clearing house, but record labels have maintained that the licenses weren’t valid. After long-standing complaints, the Moscow City Police Computer Crimes division completed an investigation earlier this month and recommended that prosecutors charge the site’s operators with criminal copyright infringement."

John Borland. MP3s for Pennies? Russian Cops Say No. News.com. Feb. 22, 2005.

See also:
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Recording industry Welcomes Police Investigation of Allofmp3.com. (Press Release.) Feb. 22, 2005.

John Leyden. Russian Police Probe Cheap Downloads Site. The Register. Feb. 22, 2005.

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

"Mike Godwin, the legal director for Public Knowledge, a digital-rights advocacy group in Washington, is a fan of Showtime’s new drama series ‘Huff.’ So three weeks ago, when he missed the season finale, he decided to download it to his personal computer.

"To Mr. Godwin, the time-consuming download (and the file’s poor quality) indicated that the rampant piracy of digitized broadcast programs – a threat Hollywood has long warned against – was hardly imminent. But to the Federal Communications Commission and the Motion Picture Association of America, cases like this one suggest a future of widespread illegal file-sharing that must be stopped before it begins."

"The debate will be presented in oral arguments tomorrow before the District of Columbia Circuit for the United States Court of Appeals in a lawsuit brought by Public Knowledge and others against the F.C.C., challenging a new regulation that is intended to prevent such bleeding of television content onto the Internet."

Tom Zeller Jr. Federal Effort to Head Off TV Piracy Is Challenged. News.com. Feb. 21, 2005.

See also:
Ed Felton. Broadcast Flag in Court. Freedom to Tinker. Feb. 21, 2005.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. Broadcast Flag "Just As Important As Grokster". Deep Links. Feb. 18, 2005.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF’s HDTV-PVR Cookbook. No date

Update: Declan McCullagh. Court Questions FCC’s Broadcast Flag Rules. News.com. Feb. 22, 2005. (A federal appeals court questions whether the FCC has authority to undertake such sweeping regulation.)

SNTReport.com™ Covering the Intersection of Collaboration and Technology. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"From a chenille-slipcovered sofa in the basement of their friend Dave’s mom’s house at the edge of a snow-covered field, Brad and Other Brad, sock-footed pioneers in the latest technology revolution, are recording ‘Why Fish,’ their weekly show.

"Clutching a microphone and leaning over a laptop on the coffee table, they praise the beauty of the Red River, now frozen on the edge of town, and plug an upcoming interview with a top-ranked professional walleye fisherman. Then they sign off.

"Their show, mostly ad-libbed, is a podcast, a kind of recording that, thanks to a technology barely six months old, anyone can make on a computer and then post to a Web site, where it can be downloaded to an iPod or any MP3 player to be played at the listener’s leisure.

"Since August, when Adam Curry, a former MTV video jockey, and David Winer, an early Web log writer, developed the podcasting technology, 3,075 podcasts have sprung up around the world, according to a Web site, Ipodder.org, that offers downloads of podcasting software."

Kate Zernike. Tired of TiVo? Beyond Blogs? Podcasts Are Here. The New York Times. Feb. 19, 2005.

Editor’s note:  SNTReport.com has been tracking podcasting technology since its inception.  Selected previous stories are available  here, here, and here.

(Editor�s Note: The Times allows free access to their stories on the Web for seven days before sending the stories to the paper�s fee-based Archive.)

SNTReport.com™ Covering the Intersection of Collaboration and Technology. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"An attempt to answer common myths about copyright seen on the net and cover issues related to copyright and USENET/Internet publication.

"Note that this is an essay about copyright myths. It assumes you know at least what copyright is — basically the legal exclusive right of the author of a creative work to control the copying of that work. If you didn’t know that, check out my own brief introduction to copyright for more information."

Brad Templeton. 10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained. Templeton.com. No date.

SNTReport.com™ Covering the Intersection of Collaboration and Technology. A Seso Group™ Venture.

"Macrovision on Tuesday released a new DVD copy-protection technology in hopes of substantially broadening its role in Hollywood’s antipiracy effort.

"The content-protection company is pointing to the failure of the copy-proofing on today’s DVDs, which was broken in 1999. Courts have ordered that DVD-copying tools be taken off the market, but variations of the software remain widely available online.

"Macrovision executives said that even if it’s not perfect, the new RipGuard DVD technology can prevent much of the copying done with such tools and can help bolster studios’ DVD sales."

John Borland. New Copy-Proof DVDs on the Way?. News.com. Feb. 15, 2005.

See also:
Macrovision. Macrovision Introduces RipGuard DVD to Dramatically Reduce Digital DVD Piracy. (Press Release.) Feb. 15, 2005.

John P. Mello Jr. Macrovision Aims To Stop DVD Rippers. TechNewsWorld. Feb. 15, 2005.

Mark Hachman. New Tech Prevents DVD Copying, Kills ‘Rippers’. eWeek. Feb. 15, 2005.

Tom Spring. DVD Ripping Flourishes. PC World. Feb. 9, 2005.

John Borland. Napster Hack Leads to Free Downloads. News.com. Feb. 15, 2005.

John Borland. Judge: DVD-Copying Software is Illegal. News.com. Feb. 20, 2004.

Courtney Macavinta. Movie Trade Group Tries to Block DVD Cracking Tool. News.com. Nov. 18, 1999.

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