Category: Copyright
Friday was not a merry day for Keith Lipscomb
MALIBU cannot have it both ways. Thus, if the Court were to find that Plaintiff sufficiently implied commonality in the same transaction or occurrence or joint and several liability (despite the omission of any such language), by pleading same swarm/hash, the remedy is inconsistent with the cause of action, fails to state a cause of action, and must be dismissed because the complaint seeks non-cumulative statutory damages per defendant.
(…)
MALIBU seeks damages above that which would make it whole. Accordingly, Plaintiff may only seek damages per swarm, not per defendant. Moreover, it is not out of the realm of possibilities that Plaintiff may have already been made whole by alleged members of this swarm prior to bringing this action.
Men Tried for Extortion After Porn Download Threats
For more than a decade copyright holders around the world have been doing their best to extract money from those who download content without permission. The RIAA were probably the pioneers but today it’s the adult industry making the most noise.
Porn is a convenient weapon in this landscape. Few people want their adult content viewing habits to be made public so the chances of targets paying up following an unauthorized download are anecdotally higher than for regular entertainment content.
Out to make as much money as possible, this assumption wasn’t lost on a group of adult business ‘entrepreneurs’ based in Sweden.
Operating out of the region of Skåne, two years ago the individuals began sending threatening communications to people they claimed had downloaded pornographic content from sites without permission. The websites in question were all operated by the men.
In total around 4,000 people all over Sweden received ‘invoices’ for alleged illegal downloads. Each were warned that if they failed to pay the amounts stipulated they would be reported to the police and their activities made public.
YOU. Your women are mine. Give them to me. I want to sell them
It’s like this. YouTube provides recognised copyright owners with a tool called Content ID that helps them profile their own content and hunt for unauthorised copies across the YouTube servers. When it finds a match, it flags a message on the user’s YouTube channel to say that it has identified copyright content in the allegedly offending video, giving the user the opportunity to respond or take the video down.
Here’s the first problem: Content ID might be a clever piece of software but it is also thick as shit. Comparing the videos above, the only common feature is that there are gradient colours in the background. Duh, me see pink, me see purple, me see match. Ker-Ching! Content ID, he catch pirate!
Here’s the second problem: when a user responds to the claim, the message isn’t sent to YouTube but to the copyright claimant. This makes sense, of course. YouTube can help claimants hunt down copyright thieves but it does not want to get involved in disputes. If it’s to maintain its position as a platform rather than a publisher, it can’t. So this leaves you at the mercy and integrity of the claimant – as indeed David was about to find out.
With crushing inevitability, the whole thing happened yet again. This time, an international rights management business called INgrooves claimed one of David and Heidi’s ASMR videos was in breach of its copyright customers. This time, it turned nasty.
Getting used to this by now, David fired off his response – “it’s my wife’s voice, it’s Final Cut Pro X generating the visuals” – but this time there was no apology and withdrawal of the claim. Instead, INgrooves simply confirmed the claim by return, whereupon my friends’ YouTube channel automatically got slapped down with a naughty-boy strike. Three strikes and you’re kicked off YouTube.
David tried to complain and received a second automatic rejection by INgrooves. At this stage, there appears to be no appeal. YouTube assumes that if the alleged copyright owner reconfirms the claim after the user’s response, the claim must be valid.
MPAA Wants to Censor OpenCulture’s Public Domain Movies
Despite the growing availability of legal services in many countries, movie studios face a constant stream of pirated films.
In an attempt to deter these infringements, the MPAA and individual movie studios send thousands of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google.
When it comes to takedown notices the MPAA has a dubious track record. The movie industry group has got into the habit of asking Google to remove the homepages of allegedly infringing sites instead of individual pages where the infringing movies are listed.
A few days ago, for example, the MPAA asked Google to remove the homepage of the most popular torrent site Kickass.so, alongside several other torrent and streaming sites. As with previous requests Google declined to do so as the request was too broad.
The same takedown notice includes another unusual and perhaps more worrying request. Between all the “pirate sites” the MPAA also targeted Open Culture’s list of public domain movies.
For those unfamiliar with the project, Open Culture offers an archive of high-quality cultural & educational media. With Stanford University’s Dan Colman as founder and lead editor, the content listed on the site is selected with great care.
The MPAA, however, appears to have spotted a problem with the list and has asked Google to remove the entire page (containing 700 movies) from its search results
“THE INTERNET WOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED WITHOUT THE COPYRIGHT MONOPOLY”
Apparently, some copyright industry lawyers genuinely believe that everything created today could not possibly have been created without a strong copyright monopoly regime.
Jordan Rushie “represents” a sham client
You should read the excellent post at Fight Copyright Trolls to see why Jordan Rushie might not be completely accurate in that statement:
Steven Soderbergh Fought To Make Re-Editing Films Illegal; Now He’s Re-Editing Famous Films
it’s interesting and amazing that famed filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has apparently been re-editing classic movies and posting them online. Last year, he re-edited Psycho, Heaven’s Gate and Raiders of the Lost Ark. For whatever reason this hasn’t gotten too much attention until yesterday, when he also released his re-edit of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I think this is wonderful — and a great way to show off some creative editing ideas (and also just how much editing truly makes a movie).
But here’s the weird bit: Steven Soderbergh, as much as I admire him as a filmmaker, is a bit of a copyright maximalist, who has fought for stricter copyright laws, greater punishment and (get this) against the right of anyone but the director to make edits of films.
Google Porn Takedowns Carpet Bomb Github
Every single week thousands of copyright holders and anti-piracy companies demand that Google removes links to allegedly infringing content.
The effort required to deal with this deluge is considerable. Google has received as many as 11 million requests in a single week and in 2014 alone the search giant processed some 345 million URL takedowns.
While it’s believed that most takedown requests are accurate, Google still does its best to ensure that erroneous notices don’t negatively affect legitimate online services. Google regularly rejects overbroad and inaccurate notices but like everyone else, the company isn’t perfect.
The latest head-shaker arrives courtesy of anti-piracy outfit Takedown Piracy (TDP). Acting on behalf of porn outfit Wicked Pictures, TDP sent Google a notice containing thousands of URLs targeting dozens of well and lesser-known file-sharing sites.
Sadly, however, the notice also targeted coding site Github – over and over and over again. And Google complied.
“The materials reported in this notice are the copyrighted DVD/videos of Wicked Pictures,” the notice begins.
Not exactly.
Prominent YouTube Personality Locked Out Of His Account After A Bogus Copyright Claim (by Outfit7)
Firing up an app to talk to a bot isn’t copyright infringement. The app will talk to whoever will chat with it (and vice versa, in terms of CleverBot). Recording this interaction doesn’t violate Outfit7’s copyright anymore than someone recording their siblings/kids talking to it. The app exists to talk and presumably Outfit7 would like more people to download the Talking Angela app because in-app purchases is a numbers game. The more people that try it out, the more likely the chance that some of them will start tossing money into the company’s revenue stream.