The U.S. Copyright Office and Librarian of Congress announced six new exemptions to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Digital Rights Management (DRM)  measures stating, “Persons making noninfringing uses of the following [...] classes of works will not be subject to the prohibition against circumventing access controls (17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) until the conclusion of the [...]

BBC news reports that the Swedish anti-copyright group which founded The Pirate Bay has disbanded. The Piracy Bureau, or Piratbyrån website states, “STÄNGT FÖR EFTERTANKE” which means “closed for reflection” in English. The announcement follows the recent death of co-founder Ibi Kopimi Botani. Apart from launching the infamous BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay in 2003, [...]

Public Access Media interviews Girl Talk (Greg Gillis) prior to his performance at the Capitol Hill Block Pary in Seattle, WA (2008). “With my work,” Gillis says, “there’s a thing called fair use in United States copyright law that allows you to sample without asking for permision if it falls under certain criteria — if [...]

YouTube’s head of user experience, Margaret Gould Stewart, talks about how the site manages copyright and contributes to an “ecosystem of culture.” Stewart notes that content owners deliver “assets” into a database. Uploads are compared to reference files in the YouTube database. Interestingly, content owners provide a usage policy on how to handle matches. “Most [...]

LimeWire owes RIAA millions billions? Thirteen music industry giants and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are looking freeze the assets of P2P file sharing service LimeWire post copyright suit: via Reuters. Judge questions copyright lawsuit jamming US District Court Judge Collyer demands a justification for the US Copyright Group joining 4,577 defendants into [...]

I was just having a conversation about the joy of vintage NES clones and now this. The Tetris Company, LLC, licensee of various Tetris copyrights and Tetris trademark, sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice Tuesday demanding the removal of 35 games from the Android Market: Google’s facilitation of the distribution, without permission, [...]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently approved the use of Selectable Output Control (SOC) to prevent viewers from recording newly- and recently-released movies via an analog signal. Said Wired, “The reason: Analog video signals can easily be recorded, while digital video standards include a copy protection scheme that lets providers set a no-copy flag on [...]

Willem B. pointed me towards a great post by David Bollier from On The Commons. It explores transformative literature via a mashup of Nabokov’s Lolita and Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Otto Lambert’s A Tangle of Thorns Or, the Fair Use of the Commons in a Transformative World “improbably manages to blend the warped, [...]