Media & Culture @ HM

Date issued: January 7, 2010. An article from Law Vibe. Written by C.C. at International Law News/Lawyer Lifestyle. The article was written about what in the writer's opinion were the top ten biggest copyright infringement lawsuits between 2000 and 2009. Cases such as "Napster shuts down", "Apple sues Pystar", and UMG and Viacom take on Veoh and Youtube" lead the article. A reoccurring theme in the business of copyright lawsuits seems to be illegal file sharing online. Many websites that provided options for illegally downloading music have been sued or shut down over the years, including Napster and Pirate Bay. Modeling agencies such as Perfect 10 sued Google over copyrighted pictures of their models showing up online, the courts however ruled this fair use and the case has since been closed. This article shows a brief history of how copyrighting has become a central legal issue over the past decade and how various companies and defendants have dealt with the cases presented to them.

This article, taken from the "Montreal Gazette," talks about the copyright of new media material. Traditionally, there are three main categories of media protection: Copy Right, Trademark, and Patent. "In terms of new media, the category of protection that most often applies is copyright." The article goes on to say that copyright is automatic as long as your product is original and fixed. Meaning the work was 1) not copied and 2) the idea has to have a "Tangible form." Just a couple of things to think about when protecting your ideas. -Ck

Embedding Youtube videos into your website can be a dangerous thing, as it might not be you that's uploaded a copyright infringing video, but it can be you that accidentally embeds a Youtube clip that is infringing made by someone else, into your website. The law against this is: Any time you incorporate a copyrighted work into a site without the rightsholders' consent, you're potentially liable to be sued. Because people are seeing that on your website, it doesn't matter if it's on Youtube or not, or whether you made it or not, you embedded it somewhere else. It also does not matter whether the person knew it was copyright infringement or not. If an innocent embedder were to be taken to court, they could still be fined up to $30,000. However, because of Youtube's copyright infringement policy, it can remove the copyrighted work from Youtube and the websites it was embedded in. Also, there would be little gain for the rightsholder if the person with the website they sued couldn't afford a lawsuit, which would hardly be worth their time. Also, there are precautions that the embedder should take as well, to ensure that even if they do post copyrighted material, they won't really be potential candidates to be sued.

In the USA, intellectual piracy laws outlaw piracy of goods from all forms of the market, from medical to the watch industry. This helps prevent the origenal producers of drugs and products from losesing billions on the market. China does not have such laws, allowing for piracy of everything from Viagra to Rolex, causing companies to lose billions

China does not have these laws primarily because under communism, there is no privet property, including ideas. This allows for easy bootlegging of products, and when this involves drugs such as Viagra, it endangers the lives of the people using the bootlegged drug, because there has not necessarily been the same testing of the bootlegged drug as there is on the drug made by the company. Intellectual property laws ensure quality within a product.

This article was issued October 27, 2010. This article was written by a frequent writer, David Kravets. It was edited by Kevin Poulsen and contributions to the article were made by Kim Zetter and Ryan Singel. This article is discussing the "loophole" that was found in order to avoid copyright infringement lawsuits. All that was needed was the small payment of $105. After paying this, if any information found on the cite that was not from the author, such as comment or a blog, the writer of the article cannot be sued. This way, the owners of the article would not be responsible for any information that they themselves do not post. This may seem quite silly, but keeping in mind the danger of being sued for copyright infringement for $150,000, this is a very necessary $150. According to the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), a website will receive complete immunity from the threat of being sued by something that was posted by a viewer. The author does not clearly show any bias towards the issue. However interpreting the language that he uses, we can infer that he agrees and supports this act. Therefore websites cannot be held responsible for what their viewers post.

Date issued: April 17th, 2009. This article from wired.com by David Kravets deals with a lawsuit filed by students against turnitin.com. The students claimed this website was breaching the copyrights the students owned for the essays they wrote. There was a countersuit filed against one of the students accusing because the student in question was already cheating the essays he was writing. This article discusses the problem of whether your work is really yours and is just another step in the process of trying to make rules to govern the internet.

Issued on April 6, 2010 in San Francisco. This article was written by Miguel Helft in the New York Times. He is a well known author for the New York Times that covers Internet companies such as Google or Yahoo. This article discusses how photographers and other artists filed a lawsuit against google for the mass copying their work. The artists claimed that they were not adequately compensated by google for the use of their work. Google was given permission from the visual artists to scan their work onto the website, however the artists feel that this partnering program with Google turned out to be unfair. Google is now being sued for copyright infringement. This article is informative to all people because it shows that even largely popular websites like Google may not be as trustworthy as perceived.

In July of 2010, Paul Ceglia sued the owner and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, saying that he was the rightful owner of 85% of Facebook. His said that he loaned Zuckerberg $1000 so that he could start the company Facebook. The reason that this is going to court is that there is debate over what website the money that Zuckerberg recieved was used to build. During that time, Zuckerberg also built a website about job advertising. Ceglia claims that his money went to both sites, while Zuckerberg says that it only went to the advertising website. This lawsuit shows that copyright laws extend far beyond direct copying of other peoples ideas and property. This is a case that emphasizes how difficult it can be determining the winner in cases like these.

There is a law, that allows "any blog or other website to register a DMCA takedown agent with the U.S. Copyright Office, an obscure bureaucratic prerequisite to enjoying a legal "safe harbor" from copyright lawsuits over third-party posts, such as reader comments." This is a reason why websites like youtube can exist. However, there is a loophole to law. A company based on Las vegas bought copy right for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, just for the purpose of suing any websites who have failed to pay 105 dollars and register with United States Copyright Office.

After 4 years of debate between the popular file sharing service LimeWire and the RIAA, LimeWire has been officially shut down by Judge Kimba Wood for its sharing of unauthorized copyright material. Wood ruled that the company behind LimeWire did not take appropriate steps to prevent its users from committing mass copyright infringement. The question posed now is where LimeWire's 50 million different monthly users will turn to share and download files.

Issued: March 2009. Big companies are starting to crack down on copyright infringements. With over 15 lawsuits in 2007, the number of lawsuits targeted against blogs has started to rapidly rise. The author, Brian Stelter, is a writer for New York Times who's main focus is on television and the digital media. This article seems to be aimed at the big companies who the author believes are unfairly digging into to copyright laws. The article mentions a lot of disputes such as the ones between New York Times and Gate House Media, Silicon Alley Insider and The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and All Headlines News and others. Most of the websites getting sued were blogs or newspaper websites that quoted other people's works, assuming it would be okay under the "fair use" statute of copyright laws.

i went to the New York Times online to search the term, "copyright" to get an article relating to copyright issues or infringement. this article by Brian Stelter was published on March 1st, 2009. Stelter is a journalist for the New York Times. Stelter sides with the people who claim to be getting copyrighted. He bases the majority of his article against the bloggers and other online publishes "who seem to be on the rise." He also questions when excerpting from an article becomes illegal copying. Although he mostly sides with the people claiming to be copyrighted he also sheds light on those bloggers and online publishers whom give credit to those sites they excerpted information from. Statler keeps bringing up the issue of "excerpting to find value" in which online publishers combine articles to validate their thesis. In the end, Statler shows both sides of the story and doesn't leave out any information regarding the thoughts of both parties.

By BRIAN STELTER Published: March 1, 2009 Brian Stelter focuses on a quotation from the Silicon Alley Insider which quoted a quarter of Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal. "We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you." The editor added "in advance" because Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, had not given the blog permission to use the column. With this particular instance of copyright infringement and others, Stetler brings light to the fact that permission isn't being given between different industries when taking direct quotations or titles from that industries publication. "Some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work - a practice sometimes called scraping - are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content." He also brings up the numerous lawsuits that arise because of copyright infringement.

The article is about a case regarding a violation to the Copyright Act. Whitney Harper, a high school cheerleader, participated in infringing activity on LimeWire between the ages 14-16, claiming that she thought she was simply internet radio streaming. With this "innocent infringer's" defense, she is requesting a $200 fine per song to the Recording Industry of America as opposed to the Copyright Act's minimum $750 per song fine. This would result in a total payment of $7,400 rather than $27,750. The final decision has not yet been made, and the justices of the Supreme Court have the option of taking the case and issuing a ruling, or declining to hear it. The author takes a very neutral viewpoint on the issue, expressing the opinions on both sides of the case. He presents the information in a very factual rather than biased way, and concludes the article in a non-opinionated manner. David Kravets is a technologist, political scientist, humorist, and reporter.

This article is about how there are many ways that people are trying to stream music, movies, and television shows through the internet. These are legal or illegal depending on the location of the computer based on the countries piracy laws and on the contracts that the media streaming company makes with publishers/recording companies/etc. since they are trying to do this in a legal fashion. In some European companies, they are streaming music via a new service, Spotify, where subscribers can listen to music for free with advertisements, or pay short of 5 pounds for ad-free streaming. However, due to contractual disagreement, Spotify is not available in USA but they are in fact trying to bring this cheaper (but legal) music service to the Americans which could abruptly change the music industry as well as bring turmoil to services like iTunes.

LimeWire, the popular music downloading site, has been shut down. A judge determined that the "downloading or sharing copyrighted content without authorization is illegal." LimeWire will negotiate with the major music companies about licensing deals to offer the legal sale of music. The company is now liable for damages because of their violations of the copyright laws. Issued: October 27, 2010

An article from BNO News has recently reported that LimeWire has been shut down by a U.S. court on claims that the site was used for infringement. LimeWire is notorious for allowing its users to download music without paying for the file, which begs the question, is this legal? The Recording Industry Association of American, which represents several important record labels such as Sony, EMI, Universal, and Warner filed a lawsuit against LimeWire in 2006 stating that the company was allowing downloading of illegal music, violating the terms of the music's copyright. Since these record labels own the copyrights to the majority of the music that was being distributed, they were losing money and business because they were not getting paid for the use of their music. Lime Group, the company that owns LimeWire, continues to function otherwise, it is just this subsidiary that has been ceased to conduct business. Although the future seems bleak for LimeWire, its CEO remains optimistic.

On October 27, 2010 a very popular music sharing application called Limewire was shut down due to copyright infringement. BNO news reported the story to wireupdate.com and the a few record labels like SOny, EMI, Universal and Warner filed a lawsuit against Limewire in 2006 so this is nothing new for the file sharing company. The Lime Group CEO and owner of Limewire George Searle said "challenging time, we are excited about the future." So he seems to have a good outlook on the future eeven though his company is going through this touch time.

EDIT: The above link doesn't direct to the proper page. Try this one: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/technology/03youtube.html?_r=2 This article is from the New York Times, written by Claire Cain Miller and published on September 2nd, 2010. It discusses how copyrighted work is dealt with on YouTube, a video-viewing website currently owned by Google. A system called Contend ID is used to recognize videos/music that match up to material provided by copyright owners. Said owners can decide if the content should be taken down or left up. For example, someone uploaded a clip of Mad Men, a show owned by Lion's Gate. The clip was not taken down, because the revenue gotten from the advertisements surrounding the clip was enough to convince the copyright holders that leaving the video up was beneficial. This is because the money made off of YouTube ads is split between Google and the owner of the copyright, so both sides profit, legally.

Many students in this new generation are plagiarizing other people's work for academic gain. Some college professors hypothesize that this is due t the laziness of students nowadays. Others believe it is because students were never taught about plagiarizing in middle school and highschool, so they do not understand that what they are doing is bad. However, regardless the case, internet is leading to an easy accessibility of past works, which makes it further difficult to stop plagiarizing.

Motorola and Apple have filed many lawsuits against each other regarding stealing of each others Intellectual Property. Motorola sued Apple in early October claiming they violated eighteen of their patents regarding

This article basically takes note of the fact that in this world today, originality is not really that abundant, a prospect which can be noticed when one takes a look at, for example, the remakes of The A-team and The Karate Kid over the summer. More specifically, the article deals with the controversy that Kanye West faces with Virginia rapper, Vince P. (Vincent Peters) on the basis that West had stolen the basis for his 2007 hit "Stronger" from Mr. Peter's 2006 song "Stronger".

This article is about creative commons, and how music artists are starting to prefer it over traditional copyright. Artists such as "Chuck D and the Fine Arts Militia" released their new single under creative commons, and encouraged people to copy it, mix it, criticize it and other things. Now the song has been incorporated into new types of music and videos, and every time those are viewed, it links back to the original artist, giving them immediate popularity. Once other artists saw how this was giving the band more fans, they started releasing their songs under creative commons as well. Copyright laws provide limited flexibility, and make it harder for artists to get as many fans as they would if they released their songs under Creative Commons. Artists and authors have been saying that creative commons allows others to "build upon their creativity -- without calling a lawyer first." Now, artists are making half of their money off downloads and the other half off licensing fees. However, while many artists and authors are starting to release their work under creative commons, others like major movie studios or record labels will not, because they already make plenty of money off the current traditional copyright system.

Creative Commons licenses are changing the media sharing environment of the internet. When people share media with a creative commons label, anybody is allowed to download, upload, and share it for free. This is good for artists who want to grow their fan bases, but bad for companies who are looking to profit from their work.