Forums: Copyright Law Of The United Kingdom

No Link. Steve Gibson is buying rights to newspaper content for the purpose of suing bloggers for posting the content without permission. The article at the link refers to this as a "copyright trolling litigation campaign". He scours the internet looking for content used without permission and uses the severe penalties in the Copyright Act (up to $150,000 per violation) to force a quick settlement.

We've written a couple of times about RightHaven, the new operation set up by the publisher of the Las Vegas Journal Review to shakedown any site that reposts its stories. There were some oddities in the way RightHaven was acting, starting with the fact that it gives no warning to sites and doesn't send a DMCA takedown. It goes straight to suing... and then quickly demands a settlement fee.

Story Newspaper Enlists Startup To Police Web For Copyright Violations Wendy Davis, Apr 22, 2010 07:13 PM As part of a copyright crackdown, a startup called Righthaven has filed five lawsuits against Web sites that allegedly lifted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In recent weeks, Righthaven has sued the nonprofit group NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), the association Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, real estate agent and blogger Matt Farnham, gambling site MajorWager.com and the company MoneyReign, which allegedly runs the site casinoreign.com. The lawsuits allege that the defendants reposted articles,...

Imagine for a moment your grandmother creating a blog to talk about her gardening. One of her friends leaves a comment on her blog with a news article about gardens in her area. Sounds innocent enough? Actions like this happen every second on the Internet. Now imagine the news source in the comment suddenly, without warning, suing your grandmother for the comment left on her blog, demanding high monetary compensation and possibly even control of her blog. Incidents like this happen all the time. The latest targets of these types of lawsuits include Jim Robinson, a disabled veteran, and his website FreeRepublic.com. Free Republic...

A recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has confirmed that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides a “safe harbor” for service providers who expeditiously take down allegedly infringing content when they receive written notice from copyright owners. In what may be the first round of a $1 billion dispute -- ongoing since 2007 -- Google subsidiary YouTube, Inc. won a summary judgment motion against Viacom, Inc., the owner of MTV, Comedy Central and other cable television channels, over copyright infringement liability for the posting of Viacom videos on YouTube.com (Viacom Int’l,...

A conservative news-sharing website with plenty of experience in dealing with copyright issues has been sued for copyright infringement after Las Vegas Review-Journal stories allegedly were posted on its site. Free Republic LLC, James C. Robinson and John Robinson, who are associated with the website www.freerepublic.com in Fresno, Calif., were sued in federal court in Las Vegas on Monday over the postings.

From TorrentFreak: http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-shut-down-wordpress-host-with-73000-blogs-100716/ Quote: After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result. End Quote Yesterday, an event took place here in the United States that got little comment – cue the crickets… WordPress host Blogetery and 73,000 WordPress...

from the going-behind-the-veil dept We recently had a fun post about Hollywood accounting, about how the movie industry makes sure even big hit movies "lose money" on paper. So how about the recording industry? Well, they're pretty famous for doing something quite similar. Reader Jay pointed out in the comments an article from The Root that goes through who gets paid what for music sales, and the basic answer is not the musician. That report suggests that for every $1,000 sold, the average musician gets $23.40. Here's the chart that the article shows, though you should read the whole article...

The struggling music industry may be aroused at the prospect of winning money from the porn industry. Warner Bros. and a number of other record labels filed a lawsuit last week alleging copyright infringement on the part of an adult entertainment company whose porn videos allegedly featured such spectacles as actors lip-synching to Justin Timberlake's "Sexyback" while engaging in sexual acts on camera. The defendant in the legal action is a Florida-based company... Damages claimed on the alleged nasty use of copyrighted music could run in the tens of millions of dollars. ...The defendant specializes in a particular brand of...