The Motion Picture Association of America is squaring off against a coalition of Internet giants and public interest groups over the key question of whether it's possible to directly infringe copyright by embedding an image or video hosted by a third party.
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By now, most of us have grown pretty used to hearing the word “theft” used to describe what happens when someone downloads a movie or a song that isn’t theirs, and certainly media and entertainment lobby groups make heavy use of such terms — as do people like News Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch when talking about what Google News does with his newspaper content. But as Rutgers law professor Stuart Green describes in a New York Times opinion piece, this terminology is fundamentally flawed, since copyright infringement is a very different thing from theft of physical property.
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In recent weeks the battle has continued to save the data stored at the now-defunct site Megaupload. Contrary to the image painted by the entertainment industries, untold numbers of people used the file-hosting service for completely legitimate sharing. Today we can reveal that not only did people at the Senate, Department of Homeland Security, FBI and NASA hold Megaupload accounts, so did more than 15,600 members of the US Military.
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MegaUpload's demise has been rather traumatic for the cyberlocker world. Some big sites simply shut down, other disabled third-party downloads, some removed their paid uploads program.
Now, it seems that RapidShare, one of the biggest cyberlocker sites and not exactly a favorite of the entertainment industry, is reacting as well.
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Last Thursday the US Justice Department came down hard on Megaupload and its mega founder, Kim Dotcom. In the days since, there has been a shake-up of sorts in the digital storage realm. Several smaller sites have drastically changed their business models. Others, like MediaFire, reached out to me after I published this post attempting to distance themselves from Megaupload.
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You wouldn’t download a car, the Internet meme predicted. But if The Pirate Bay has its way that action will be a reality in the years to come. In preparation for this world-changing day, the world’s biggest torrent site has just premiered a new section containing the plans for physical items that can be downloaded then printed out. Today its a plastic pirate ship, but one tomorrow in a decade or two it may well be a car.
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Summary: Only days after the Megaupload website was taken offline by U.S. authorities, similar businesses are scrambling to protect themselves before any action is taken against them.
File-sharing site FileSonic has announced that it is has disabled “all sharing functionality”, and that its service can “only be used to upload and retrieve files you have uploaded personall
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The filesharing site Megaupload.com has been taken down by the FBI as the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging seven people associated with the site. The 72-page indictment, handed down by a federal grand jury in Virginia on January 5, charges the seven people, including Megaupload's founders Kim Dotcom and Mathias Ortman, with conspiracy.
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After it was revealed that games developer CD Projekt had been sending cash settlement letters to Internet users based on flimsy IP address-based anti-piracy evidence, this week the company decided to end their campaign. Today TorrentFreak reveals the names of many other famous games companies conducting almost identical operations – “Send us cash settlements,” they tell their targets, “…or else…”
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Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old British college student who operated the TVShack link site, can be extradited to the United States, ruled Judge Quentin Purdy of the Westminster Magistrates Court today. O'Dwyer's attorney says he will appeal the ruling.
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Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick has pointed out the mother of all ironies: The Pirate Bay, one of the largest outlets of copyright infringement, would be immune to the takedown tendrils of the imminently incoming Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
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Re: What are you listening to right now?
grizzli Yesterday, 07:22 PM