The Commerce Department recommendations, which represent the views of the Obama Administration, come as the Judiciary Committee remains very much in fact-finding mode in its review, setting up the potential for conflicting agendas and timetables in what will inevitably be a contentious process of revising current copyright law and policy.
A report issued Monday by a special commission appointed to recommend changes to French media laws and regulations proposes dismantling Hadopi, the agency created in 2009 to enforce France’s graduated-response system for policing online piracy.
A ruling by the WTO allows the government of Antigua to set up a website to sell movies, music and other material that infringes U.S. copyright without making payments to U.S. copyright owners.
BuzzFeed has been criticized for taking images from other sites such as Reddit without giving credit to the original creator — something that the web’s “remix culture” is making more and more difficult. But BuzzFeed’s desire to create sponsored content makes it more important than ever.
The entertainment industry lost a number of key allies on Capitol Hill as a result of the election and the returns have scrambled the leadership of key committees in both the House and Senate at a time when a number of major IP and telecom issues are being teed up.
The U.S. Justice Department seized three web sites it claims were distributing illegal copies of copyrighted Android apps, PCWorld reported early this morning. The operation, which is reportedly the first such crackdown in the mobile-app market, also involved the FBI, several U.S. Attorney’s offices and two European agencies, and nine search warrants were executed. This isn’t a huge threat to most consumers, of course, because the vast majority of Android users download their apps from Google Play (or, to a much lesser extent, Amazon Appstore). But I do expect to see much more of this kind of thing as app usage continues to surge.
Facing a lawsuit from major publishers, Boston-based free textbook startup Boundless Learning is now available for students at any university. Just in time for the new school year, the startup is opening to the public with an updated, more comprehensive platform.
France’s Supreme Court has set aside a critical piracy ruling won by Google in 2011, leaving the door open to the search giant being forced to censor some of its autocomplete listings to prevent copyright infringement and piracy.
The U.S. government continues to try and extradite British college student Richard O’Dwyer for simply linking to copyright-infringing files, on a site located in the UK. If they are successful, it could change the way we think about some of the fundamental underpinnings of the web.
A new study from Google and the UK copyright collection society PRS for Music finds that live TV is the fastest-growing segment of copyright infringement — and a large presence on social networking sites.
