copyright infringement

Slate has an interesting article about someone (or a group of folks) under the name aXXo who is the "biggest name" in BitTorrent and consistently offers up high quality movies on a variety of BitTorrent platforms.

Apparently, when aXXo uploads something, it's likely to become one of the top BitTorrent downloads on various sites.

Since I don't use BitTorrent (or any file sharing system), I wasn't aware of this, but find the situation to be quite interesting.

The Premier League, the UK based football (or soccer, for those of us on this side of the Atlantic) league has a long history of misunderstanding the internet, and often that seems to involve having its lawyers lash out at the wrong people.

First, back in 2005, the league blamed broadband providers for allowing fans to stream games live online, rather than recognizing that fans streaming such games showed a real demand for such a service.

You may remember last month that we had a story about Google taking down a video on Google Video for copyright infringement, even though the video itself (a brief Christmas home movie) was set to private, and only 3 or 4 people had seen it.

We were curious as to why Google would be scanning videos set to private and taking them down. At least in that case, Google admitted that it was an automated scanner (though never explained why it was reviewing private videos).

Ignoring numerous other court rulings concerning whether or not "making available" is copyright infringement, a judge has rejected a woman's request for a jury trial in her file sharing lawsuit, and ordered her to pay the $7,400 fine already set.

There are some out there who have suggested that search engines such as Google and Yahoo are basically just massive copyright violators, because they scan, index and keep an archive of websites.

That copied archive (usually called a cache) is, according to these commenters, an unauthorized copy. Now a court has basically destroyed that argument, noting that putting content online is giving an implicit license for search engines to index and copy.

Isn't it funny how some of the strongest defenders of copyright seem to have other opinions when they're on the other side of the fence?

EA, which has kicked up lots of dust about copyright and DRM and the importance of intellectual property, is now finding itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit from from a composer and song writer alleging copyright infringement for the use of the UNLV "fight song" in various EA sports games.

The MPAA thinks that the EFF is being "disingenuous and wrongheaded" in its comments about the MPAA's lawsuit to stop RealDVD.

The organization says that the EFF is living in the past and needs to get with the program when it comes to dealing with copyright infringement.

The EFF tells Ars otherwise.

It's no secret that the RIAA is pushing quite hard to make ISPs responsible for policing the various content that traverses their networks or is hosted by their customers.

However, if you want a perfect example of why this is a terrible idea, witness this story of a record label that purposely puts all its music online for free to download, who had its web host take down the sites for copyright infringement.

In the wake of a federal judge's overturning the $222,000 infringement award against Jammie Thomas, the RIAA has now decided that it would rather avoid a trial and accept damages of $200 per song in a case of innocent copyright infringement.

The website of a record label which offers completely free music downloads has been taken down by its host for copyright infringement, even though it only offers its own music.

Quote Unquote Records calls itself “The First Ever Donation Based Record Label”, but is currently homeless after its host pulled the plug.