A Screen Actors Guild member who leaked the Oscar-winning Black Swan and other first-run films to BitTorrent has agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal copyright-infringement charge, according to court records.

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Welcome to the homepage of popular sports streaming and p2p site Rojadirecta.com. Why all the birdy logos and harsh words about going to prison? Well, it’s a convoluted story, which began when a whole bunch of sports sites — including Rojadirecta — were summarily seized by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, based on “probable cause to believe” they’d been involved in copyright infringement. Awkwardly, the Spanish owners of this particular site had already been cleared of any wrongdoing by courts in Spain, but this counted for nada because their .com URL was American. So, their one hope was to convince a US judge that the seizure violated the First Amendment and should be overturned. This case won support from freedom of speech activists like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but on Thursday it finally failed. The presiding judge ruled that no rights had been violated, because Rojadirecta could easily set up shop at a non-US address and continue to function. Bad news indeed for the Spaniards — maybe they should move to the UK, where due process takes a whole lot longer.

US judge won’t return seized URL to Rojadirecta.com, absolutamente no originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Aug 2011 04:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against CNET for facilitating “massive copyright infringement” by distributing peer-to-peer software have finally come up with a list of all the movie and music titles it claims CNET helped pirate. All six of them.

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In an entirely too-predictable development, a group of media outlets has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creators of Zite, a magazine-style aggregator for the iPad. The publishers allege that by pulling in their content and displaying it in a more readable way — that is, without a lot of the extraneous website elements, including ads — Zite is guilty of copyright infringement. While this may be true in a legal sense, it ignores the bigger picture, which is that readers are looking for better ways of consuming content, and they aren’t getting it from traditional publishers. Why not learn from Zite and others like it instead of threatening to sue them?

The letter to Zite from the group, which includes the Washington Post and the Associated Press (the full letter is embedded below or you can read it here), uses the standard legal language about “damaging our businesses by misappropriating our intellectual property” etc., and says the company puts publishers at risk by “reformatting, republishing and redistributing our original content on a mass commercial scale.” Much of this is legal grandstanding, of course, since Zite is a tiny startup based in Vancouver, B.C. whose iPad app is probably used by a tiny handful of information junkies (including me).

But Zite isn’t doing anything that differently from plenty of other apps and services which are pulling in content from sites like the Washington Post and others named in the letter. Many apps that are essentially RSS-feed readers do this — including Pulse, which got slammed by the New York Times within hours of its public launch (although that dispute appears to have been resolved).

Readability is a web plugin that strips out advertising and other site features, leaving just text, and is so popular Apple built it into the company’s Safari browser as a viewing option. Why hasn’t anyone sent Apple a threatening letter about copyright infringement? Designer Marco Arment’s Instapaper does fundamentally the same thing — although he and Readability are also trying to use their services to generate income for sites through a kind of tip-jar model.

Some iPad apps provide a “web view” that effectively shows the entire originating news site in a browser window, but others such as Flipboard pull the RSS feed or scrape the site for content. Flipboard got in some hot water after it first launched as well, because it reformats and displays published content without ads or other website features, but it appears to have evaded the kind of legal threats that Zite has been hit with (Flipboard says it respects publishers’ wishes, and will remove or truncate feeds if a site asks, and Zite has said since receiving the letter that it will provide a full web view if publishers request it — CEO Ali Davar has posted a response here).

The bigger issue here isn’t whether such apps and services are breaking the letter of the copyright law by reformatting content — it’s whether any media outlets are learning anything from what apps like Zite and Flipboard are doing, apart from how to file legal threats. Amanda Natividad notes at PaidContent that as a content producer, she doesn’t like the implications of what Zite and others are doing, but as a reader she enjoys it because it is so much nicer to look at.

That’s the point the Washington Post and others are missing: As the way we consume media changes and evolves, a growing subset of their readers are looking for other ways to consume content through aggregators like Zite and Flipboard. Since no traditional media entity was smart enough to come up with those ideas first, why not figure out how to work with them or learn from them instead of just hitting them with C&D letters?

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Italy is rightly famous for many things — great food, glorious history, boring soccer — but in the past few years it’s also developed a reputation for antagonizing the world’s biggest Internet companies. Legal actions targeted at the likes of Google and Facebook have created a fractious relationship between the government and leading technology brands.

In the case, heard by Rome’s ninth circuit, the makers of the award-winning Iranian film drama About Elly sued Yahoo. The movie’s Italian distributor, PFA, claimed that pirated clips and links to illegal film downloads were appearing in Yahoo Video searches and demanded that the company remove the videos from the search results. When Yahoo didn’t respond, the case was taken up by Open Gate, a regulatory lobby group run by Tullio Camiglieri, a former journalist and executive in Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Italia.

According to this report in Reppublica, one of Italy’s leading newspapers, the complaint centered on the argument that PFA’s right to profit from About Elly was undermined, since Yahoo search results were prioritizing bootlegs over the legitimate version of the film. “The film’s official website was not even in the top positions,” argued attorneys, who also pointed out that “it was ranked lower than links to pages that allowed users to illegally download the movie.”

The judge agreed with PFA and, in his ruling, ordered Yahoo to do more to “inhibit” copyright infringement. If his ruling holds, it could put search engines on notice that they are responsible for links to illegal downloads.

It’s a move that not only holds Yahoo liable, but could spark further action: Camiglieri, the president of Open Gate, said that this “opened the way” for his company to lead action against Google and YouTube in Italy over similar claims. (Whether it will work is unclear: Google already uses digital fingerprinting techniques to filter out some pirated material, even though a U.S. court ruled in its favor after a billion lawsuit by Viacom, brought amid similar claims).

It’s far from the first time that the Italian courts have taken a search service to task for what it sees as an invasion of rights. Google has been involved in a number of lawsuits there — most notably when three executives were found guilty of violating privacy laws after YouTube failed to prevent a gang of teenage bullies from uploading a video. Meanwhile the Pirate Bay has been locked in a long-running dispute over its legality, and is subject to an on-again, off-again, on-again block on its service. These cases are all different, but the search engines have countered in similar ways: that they can’t be held responsible for monitoring the legality of search results and that doing so would be prohibitively expensive.

It’s worth pointing out that the ruling in this case doesn’t force Yahoo, or other search services, to police material themselves. In fact, the court specifically recognized that content policing of this sort would be impossible. Where Yahoo went wrong, according to the Italian court, was in failing to act on the alleged infringement after it was notified of it. The court ruling, then, requires Yahoo to act once it’s given evidence of infringement, regardless of whether actual infringement has occurred.

This is a particularly important decision since, right now, Italy is undertaking a a public consultation to decide whether it needs an equivalent to the U.S.’s notorious Digital Millenium Copyright Act. There’s currently nothing of the sort in Italy, aside from isolated cases, but judgments such as this might make such a system more likely.

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Continuation of part 2. The documentary is a property of British Sky Broadcasting. No copyright infringement intended. Superman and all related characters are a property of DC Comics. Superman film series and soundtrack are property of Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Smallville TV series is a property of The CW Television Network. All rights reserved.
Video Rating: 4 / 5