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The Internet Commerce Security Lab at Australia's Ballarat University has developed a new program that can track illegal downloads on torrent websites. The program monitors copyright infringement online, targeting 100 individuals who upload the most content, including television shows and music. With the aid of the program, Australian Federal Police may prevent the sharing of illegal content.

International Publishing Company, Hachette has signed a "print-on-demand" agreement with the French National Library (BnF) which will allow them to sell out-of-copyright works from the BnF's online library. European Union countries have been known for setting limitations on the reproductions of oeuvres, particularly where the web is concerned. Hachette seems to have found a way to profit from this...

I think this plan to pass the Digital Economy Act is completely unfair. It is certainly important to protect copyrighted works, but it is necessary to do so at the risk of eliminating equal access to information?

the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has filed a copyright infringement suit against Hotfile (a file hosting service) on behalf of Disney Enterprises, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal City Studios, Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros, claiming that it promotes piracy. This suit is reminiscent of the music industry's attack on Limewire which resulted in it being shut down. Read the original Associated Press article on the Wall Street Journal Website: http://online.wsj.com/article/APba256b5b302d4d9c9e8af569d017dba6.html

Companies are suing other websites that fail to hyperlink copyrighted materials. However, it seems excessive if it's just over a single photo.

Viacom is maintaining its 2007 billion dollar lawsuit against Google (as it acquired YouTube in 2006), despite the latter continuous fervent denial. Though "Google argues that when YouTube promptly took down tens of thousands of videos after Viacom gave it notice, YouTube was within provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Viacom is stating that the infringement is taking the form of violating the 1998 Copyright Act. Which holds both content owners and systems operators responsible for the protection of copyrighted content online. After reading this article, a few questions come to mind: What can Google do to appease and keep the "integrity" of YouTube? and Isn't it interesting that Viacom only filed this $1 billion lawsuit AFTER Google had acquired YouTube? What can we say about interested parties possibly abusing copyright law?

Some claim that the digital music industry is not going to grow any larger than it already is--mostly due to piracy occurring online. Inspired by the U.S. Senate, which shut down LimeWire last year, other countries across Europe and Asia are looking to revisit copyright laws to crack down on piracy and promote growth in the digital music industry, as well as lead a shift away from monopolizing applications, like iTunes, and redirect sales to alternative subscription music service websites.

Do you think it's necessary to define all that is public or private on the Internet? Should this distinction determine whether or not we may quote these online works (ie. Facebook, Twitter, e-mail content)?

A reference to Section 512 of Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbors" exception from my blog entry.

NY federal judge ruled against google last week in their copyright case, having  "[tossed] out a 165-page settlement reached in 2008 between Google and authors and publishers groups". This article discusses Google's 2009 plan for a global digitized library and the lawsuits that have surrounded it.

The article is recent from March 25th (LA Times, Business Section). It's discussing Google's history regarding the e-book controversy. Judge Chin's decision forces us to think about what an online digital library might look like without infringing parties, like Google. As noted in the article, Google was attempting to use "orphan works," whose right holders could not be found. As a result, Google would be using the works without being held accountable under copyright law. Here's the original document, filed by the U.S. Supreme Court, on 3/22/2011: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/74854-chin-ruling

Google worries that the 2009 ruling against isoHunt will affect its own services and services of its website, YouTube. While Google believes isoHunt is liable, they would like the court to be more precise. They would like to see isoHunt charged with only specific instances of inducing. Google is also pushing to see isoHunt protected by safe harbor under DMCA. "It's clear this court thinks the DMCA online safe harbors only insulate against direct infringement, not secondary infringement," writes intellectual property attorney Eric Goldman on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog. "The interplay between the safe harbors and secondary infringement remains a multi-billion statutory ambiguity."