Lawyers have abandoned a closely watched lawsuit against the document-sharing site Scribd that alleged the site’s copyright filtering technology is itself a form of copyright infringement. The Texas federal court case broached a novel legal theory that the U.S. courts have never squarely decided. The Scribd suit maintained that the  copying and insertion of a copyrighted work into a filtering system without compensating the copyright... 

Google-owned YouTube won a major victory Wednesday when a federal judge ruled the video-sharing site was protected under U.S. copyright law. Viacom, which vowed an appeal, was seeking $1 billion in damages in a case testing the depths of copyright-infringement protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 . The ruling, if it survives, is a boon for internet freedom, especially as it applies to search engines, video-hosting companies,... 

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... 

Google deliberately weakened its copyright compliance standards after it acquired YouTube in 2006 so it “would profit from illegal downloads,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin once said, according to a Friday filing by Viacom in its infringement suit against the company. YouTube, in its own Friday filing and in a blog post , said it was legally immune to copyright infringement claims -– even if it knowingly hosted copyrighted works... 

Online rights activists are divided Wednesday over an Italian court’s guilty verdicts against Google executives who were convicted on privacy charges for not blocking a video that made fun of a child with Down syndrome. All agree the controversial ruling runs counter to longstanding U.S. and E.U. “safe harbor” laws immunizing online service providers for what users do — but the activists are mixed over what the decision... 

A federal court policy-making body is belatedly entering the internet age by proposing that judges clearly inform jurors they must not electronically discuss cases they are hearing. It’s standard procedure to inform jurors to remain mum and not conduct any research about the case until a verdict. But recent gadget use by jurors has forced the hand of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body of the federal courts.... 

A leading Australian internet service provider was cleared of copyright allegations Thursday when a federal judge ruled against Hollywood’s lawsuit that iiNet was responsible for infringing BitTorrent data traveling its pipes. The Australian Federal Court decision siding with the country’s third-largest ISP was a legal blow to worldwide efforts to make ISPs liable for the unlawful behavior of their customers. “I find that the... 

The Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked cameras from a federal civil trial in San Francisco concerning the legality of same-sex marriage. The decision came two days after the court tentatively sided with same-sex marriage foes who told the court they would be harassed and intimidated if their testimony was disseminated on such a grand scale. The high court’s opinion suspends a courthouse experiment (.pdf) that could have paved the way for...