Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money. “We believe it’s the best solution out there,”... 

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money. “We believe it’s the…  Read More →

If you’ve used BitTorrent to snag unauthorized copies of independent films you should be interested in the arguments unfolding in Wednesday in federal court in Washington, DC. At issue is a mass-litigation campaign, in which the fledgling US Copyright Group is suing about 15,000 users whose IP addresses were detected harvesting films like Steam Experiment, Far Cry, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D . Several digital rights... 

The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a patent for a method to hedge weather-related financial risk, but declined to make it more difficult to patent “business methods” or software. The unanimous court found the patent too “abstract,” but emphasized that its ruling was intended neither to narrow nor widen patent law. “It’s a pretty disappointing decision,” says Ciaran O’Riordan, executive director... 

The association representing 380,000 composers, songwriters, lyricists and others associated with the music industry has begun a fund-raising campaign to stifle groups that support free culture and digital rights. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers is urging the membership to donate money to battle the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and even Creative Commons. In a letter sent to members this week, ASCAP... 

Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel unveiled Tuesday the Obama administration’s first “Joint Strategic Plan” concerning intellectual property enforcement — and she gave a big nod to fair use. The plan was required under the Pro-IP Act of 2008, which created Espinel’s post. The act was watered down to eliminate a Justice Department mandate that it assume duties of the movie studios and recording industry and sue copyright... 

The record labels have told a federal judge LimeWire is liable for possibly “over a billion dollars” — the latest sign that the industry is seeking to annihilate the New York-based file sharing company. The Recording Industry Association of America’s court filing Monday comes a week after the labels asked U.S. District Judge Kimba M. Wood to shutter LimeWire (.pdf). Weeks before, the New York judge ruled LimeWire’s... 

Whitney Harper was sued by the RIAA, when she was a teen. A case testing the meaning of the so-called “innocent infringer’s” defense to the Copyright Act’s minimum $750-per-music-track fine has landed at the U.S. Supreme Court. The case the justices were asked to review Wednesday concerns a federal appeals court’s February decision ordering a university student to pay the Recording Industry Association of America... 

A consortium of independent film producers is hitting a stumbling block in its plan to simultaneously sue thousands of BitTorrent users for allegedly downloading pirated movies. Time Warner Cable is refusing to look up and turn over the identities of about a thousand of its customers targeted in the lawsuits, on the grounds that the effort would require three months of full-time work by its staff. The brouhaha dates to March, when the ... 

LimeWire COO Zeeshan Zaidi The company behind the file sharing software LimeWire is considering aggressively filtering out pirated content and is hoping to strike a deal with the music industry in which it would be permitted to live on as a for-pay music download service, a company executive said Monday. “The biggest challenge right now is changing the behavior of a generation of internet users to get them to …  Read More →

After collecting cobwebs in a studio vault for the better part of a decade, an unreleased documentary on the 2003 hacking scene leaked onto the Pirate Bay Thursday. Narrated by actor Kevin Spacey, the 90-minute Hackers Wanted follows the exploits of Adrian Lamo, who pleaded guilty in 2004 to cracking the internal network of The New York Times . The film was produced by Spacey’s Trigger Street production company, and includes interviews with... 

Hollywood will soon have the power to remotely disable the analog outputs on your set-top box, under a decision by federal regulators on Friday intended to prevent home recording of new movie releases. The move by the Federal Communications Commission grants cable and satellite providers the power to block consumers from viewing just-released movies in an analog format through a process known as Selectable Output Control. Hollywood requested... 

A federal appeals court is blessing the legal process by which the recording industry and other content owners unmask the identities of alleged peer-to-peer copyright infringers. The decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is believed to be the first appellate court to sanction a process that has ultimately hauled tens of thousands of alleged P2P infringers into court , (.pdf) many at the request of the Recording Industry Association... 

One study after another purports to chronicle how much intellectual property piracy hurts the economy, and contributes to every societal ill from  terrorism to  child porn and slavery . A new study unveiled Tuesday sets out to examine intellectual property in a different light: How fair use — which doesn’t require permission from the copyright holder — actually benefits the economy. The trade group, Computer & Communications... 

A proposed global intellectual-property treaty no longer nudges the international community to develop “three strikes” protocols to suspend internet connections of customers caught downloading copyrighted works, according to a draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement released Tuesday. The official draft of the proposed intellectual property accord was released after months of leaks and assertions by the Obama administration...