For Java, the question of whether there’s a FRAND licensing obligation under antitrust law is a non-issue: FRAND licenses for clean-room implementations are already available.

The Java example shows that FRAND is different from a fair use exception in some ways. While fair use denies that a creator is entitled to a payment, FRAND licenses are typically royalty-bearing. And it’s no less important to consider that FRAND licenses are often made available only to those who create a fully compliant implementation of a standard (whether a near-compliant implementation qualifies for FRAND under antitrust law is a separate question).

If Google made Android fully Java-compatible, it would be entitled to a FRAND license. In light of that, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Judge Alsup to depart from the standard for copyrightability (by a factor of 1,000 or more) or to invoke “fair use” when there actually is a FRAND option.

FRAND also has an advantage to implementers. For example, FRAND licenses relating to a standard typically cover all categories of intellectual property — including patents that are essential (i.e., they are inevitably infringed by a reasonable implementation of a standard). Patent law doesn’t have a “fair use” exception, and if you want to talk to a patent office about the public policy considerations Google puts front and center in the Android/Java case, good luck: patents are granted based on strictly technical criteria, and public interest exceptions only come into play under exceptional circumstances (such as in the event of an epidemia or national security concerns).

Antitrust law can’t impose a FRAND licensing obligation in connection with every API, but it doesn’t have to. If there are viable alternatives to an API, there may not be a FRAND obligation, but in that case, market dynamics will give the more available and affordable API a competitive advantage. But in those cases in which the market can’t take care of itself, competition law can come to the rescue.

Just to be clear: I don’t categorically reject competition-related arguments as far as intellectual property law itself is concerned. As far as my personal position is concerned, I’d like patent examiners to have to justify the grant of a patent in light of the fact that a patent is a (time-limited) monopoly. But we have to make a proper distinction between the way we’d like the law to be shaped and the way in which it can be reasonably applied today.

Google’s position on competition and IP is contradictory in itself. On the one hand, Google endorses and now directs Motorola’s abuse of standard-essential patents. On the other hand, Google wants free-of-charge and unrestricted access to certain Java-related IP and twists and turns the case law, suggesting that fair use cases established an actually non-existent conflict between copyrightability and compatibility and advocating that copyright holders should become victims of their own success. Right in the middle between those two extremes there’s a balanced solution called FRAND.

Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet. EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief supporting Aereo this week.

The suits against Dish are a response to the “Hopper” DVR and its “Auto Hop” feature, which automatically skips over commercials. According to the networks’ complaints, the Hopper automatically records eight days’ worth of prime time programming on the four major networks that subscribers can play back on request. Beginning a few hours after the broadcast, viewers can choose to watch a program sans ads.

This transparency report gives Google a chance to highlight some of its good citizenship as an online service provider. Although the burden of liability is supposed to be on the organization that sends the takedown notice — it is required to claim under penalty of perjury to have a good-faith belief of copyright infringement — in practice many groups are willing to skirt those rules, sending takedown notices to silence unfavorable speech or even without human review . The 3% of takedown notices that Google chooses not to comply with is a large absolute number, and each of those are instances of legitimate speech that would have otherwise been shut down. Google deserves to be commended for that behavior.

Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes.

An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will “come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through.”

The idea isn’t to deter current pirates, apparently (the new scheme requires all legal purchasers to sit through 20 seconds of warnings each time they pop in a film, but will be totally absent from pirated downloads and bootlegs). It’s to educate everyone else. As ICE Director John Morton announced in a statement yesterday, “Law enforcement must continue to expand how it combats criminal activity; public awareness and education are a critical part of that effort.”

Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.

The copyright phase of the Oracle v. Google trial is winding down. While the world waits for a jury verdict on the facts, the judge overseeing the case is wrestling with the complexities of the law. Oracle has argued that the “structure, sequence and organization” of the Java API is eligible for copyright protection, while Google disagrees.

On Thursday, Judge William Alsup asked each party to submit a 20-page brief answering a series of 13 in-depth questions about the Java API and the relevant precedents. Among other things, he asked the parties to weigh in on the implications of this week’s EU court decision that allowing functional characteristics of programming languages to be copyrighted would “monopolize” ideas.

Some of Judge Alsup’s comments in the courtroom in recent days suggested that he is skeptical of Oracle’s position.

After a year-long seizure and six more months of secrecy, the court records were finally released concerning the mysterious government takedown of Dajaz1.com – a popular blog dedicated to hip hop music and culture. The records confirm that one of the key reasons the blog remained censored for so long is that the government obtained three secret extensions of time by claiming that it was waiting for “rights holders” and later, the Recording Industry Association of America, to evaluate a “sampling of allegedly infringing content” obtained from the website and respond to other “outstanding questions.”

In other words, having goaded the government into an outrageous and very public seizure of the blog, the RIAA members refused to follow up and answer the government’s questions. In turn, the government acted shamefully, not returning the blog or apologizing for its apparent mistake, but instead secretly asking the court to extend the seizure and deny Dajaz1 the right to seek return of is property or otherwise get due process. The government also refused to answer Congressional questions about the case. ICE finally released the domain name in December of 2011, again with no explanation.

It’s not hard to guess what some of the unanswered “outstanding questions” might have been. Dajaz1.com, was seized with much fanfare by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security over the 2010 Thanksgiving weekend. It was widely reported at the time that Dajaz1 should never have been targeted, that much of the blog’s content was lawful, and that many of the allegedly infringing links were given to the site’s owner by artists and labels themselves – including Kanye West, Diddy, and a vice president of a major record label. So, at a minimum, we imagine the government was asking the RIAA to provide some evidence that the seizure was justified in the first place.

A new survey has revealed that young people are responding to tough legislation and increasing levels of online spying by investing in VPN services. The study, carried out by the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University, found that when compared to figures from late 2009, 40% more 15 to 25-year-olds are now hiding their activities online.

Faced with the almost impossible task of physically restricting people’s activities online, during recent years authorities and copyright holders have sought to have legislation tightened up, to encourage citizens towards a path of “doing the right thing” through the fear of more and more serious consequences.

In Sweden, the results of intense lobbying are clear. Due to a combination of fat Internet pipes and its status as the spiritual home of The Pirate Bay, Sweden and file-sharing go hand in hand. As a result the country is being subjected to considerable online surveillance.

But according to new research from the Cybernorms research group at Sweden’s Lund University, an increasing proportion of the country’s population are taking measures to negate the effects of spying on their online activities.

The study reveals that 700,000 Swedes now make themselves anonymous online with paid VPN services such as The Pirate Bay’s iPredator.

A similar study carried out in 2009 revealed that 500,000 Swedes were taking steps to anonymize their connections. Today’s results therefore reveal a 40% increase in privacy service uptake in roughly 2.5 years.

On Monday, the United States Trade Representative published its annual “Special 301 Report,” detailing the state of intellectual property rights around the world with American trading partners. Not surprisingly, Russia and China (which got over seven pages!) sat atop the list, but Argentina, India, and Canada were also given the honor of being on the “priority watch list.”

Canada had the same distinction as part of last year’s report (and the one before that), largely over “long-awaited copyright legislation,” and “whether it fully implements the WIPO Internet Treaties, and whether it fully addresses the challenges of piracy over the Internet. The United States also continues to urge Canada to strengthen its border enforcement efforts, including by providing customs officials with ex officio authority to take action against the importation, exportation, and transshipment of pirated or counterfeit goods.”

As Wikileaks revealed last year, the United States has been exerting diplomatic pressure against Canada for failure to impose stronger intellectual property legislation.

Argentina, meanwhile, was cited specifically for “piracy over the Internet,” while India has faced American criticism over generic knock-offs of pharmaceutical drugs, a case the Indian Supreme Court heard earlier this year.

Or, as the USTR puts it: “The United States continues to encourage India to promote a stable and predictable patent system that can nurture domestic innovation, including by resolving concerns with respect to the prohibition on patents for certain chemical forms absent a showing of increased efficacy.”

In addition to being concerned with Indian pharmaceutical patents, Washington, DC is also “expressing concern” that Finnish law “denies adequate protection to many of the top-selling US pharmaceutical products currently on the Finnish market.”

So who is Uncle Sam happy with? Malaysia, Korea, and, most notably, Spain—which recently passed the “Sinde Law,” again, after pressure from the Feds.

Aside from a nine-line function that’s been deleted from Android, Oracle acknowledges that Google didn’t copy any code from Java. Oracle says that by copying the “structure, sequence and organization” of 37 Java APIs, Google has violated copyright law. That phrase—”structure, sequence and organization”—came up so frequently when the lawyers were arguing over jury instructions today that both sides started to refer to the concept by an acronym, “SSO.”

The overall case also involves accusations of patent infringement, but those will be dealt with in the second phase of the case. For now, the jury is just getting ready to decide the copyright claims over Java APIs. The trial, now two weeks old, may last as long as eight weeks.

What the jury won’t know

Friday was a long day in court. After the final testimony from Catz and experts in the morning, lawyers argued all afternoon about what the jury’s final instructions will look like.

There is one thing the jury won’t know: the issue of whether APIs can be copyrighted at all is actually up in the air. It’s a legal gray area that will be decided by Judge William Alsup—but only after the jury gives its verdict in this case. (When that happens, even a jury verdict in Oracle’s favor could be a hollow one.) During debates over the jury instructions today, Alsup deleted a notation about how he’ll decide the “copyrightability” issue. Instead, the instructions will simply tell the jury to assume that Java API’s—which are like sets of instructions for how a programming language can be used—can indeed be copyrighted. Since that order emphasizes the importance of the APIs, it probably weighs in Oracle’s favor.

Google’s argument seemed to catch the Court off guard, and Judge Alsup then invited this motion by Google. Of course, Oracle disagrees (986 [PDF; text to follow]) (See Part II of Oracle’s filing). But Google’s point is Oracle can’t have it both ways. Oracle can’t argue that the 37 APIs “taken individually and as a unit” are covered by a copyright registration (a requirement for Oracle to bring a copyright infringement suit on them, not a requirement for copyright protection), but by insisting that the Java copyright registration is a collective work, Oracle seems to have stepped on themselves. Nowhere are those 37 APIs, either individually or as a unit, subject to a unique copyright registration; the only thing Oracle registered was the copyright in Java as a whole.
The determination of this issue in favor of Google will either (a) result in the dismissal of the copyright claims or (b) provide the support for Google’s de minimis and fair use copying defenses.

Sun Microsystems wanted $30 million to $50 million from Google for a Java license, but Google decided to build its own implementation for Android after negotiations broke down, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt reportedly said during testimony in the Oracle/Google trial today.

Jurors were shown an e-mail exchange between Schmidt and Jonathan Schwartz, the two CEOs of Google and Sun at the time Google developed and released Android. The e-mails showed the companies discussing a potential partnership between Google and Sun. Google didn’t object to the amount of money Sun wanted, but it didn’t want to give up too much control over Android.

“We would have paid that,” Schmidt said of the $30 million to $50 million, according to our sister site Wired .

Instead of taking a Java license, Google began developing Dalvik, a “clean room implementation” that would be compatible with Java without using its code.

“We began a clean room implementation. A clean room implementation is what was developed, and uses a completely different approach internally” than Java, Schmidt said, according to a liveblog of his testimony posted by The Verge .

The video is clear Fair Use. It's not even a close call. We've already asked YouTube to reconsider. And I'd be happy to litigate this issue with Limbaugh's lawyers in court, if they want to take it that far.
But I am perplexed—why is he suddenly so shy and retiring about his views on Sandra Fluke? He should be thrilled that us liberals are helping spread his noxious views. Or is he now embarrassed by them? In either case, we put the video up on Vimeo:

Remember over-the-air broadcast television? The kind that you can receive on a variety of devices, without scrambling or monthly fees? For decades, the principle that the public airwaves are just that – public property – has been an obstacle to TV studios’ efforts to control when, where, and how we watch their programs – and at what price-point. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying. The latest target is Aereo, a New York City startup that lets users stream local broadcast TV from a dime-sized antenna on a Brooklyn rooftop to their personal devices.

Supported by some of the same organizations that supported the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills, the TV networks complain that Aereo is “retransmitting” New York TV stations without a license. They insist that while Joe Citizen can put an antenna on his roof and run a wire to his TV, he can’t rent an antenna from Aereo and replace the wire with (oh, no!) the Internet. We’ve seen this before: a new user-empowering television technology emerges, and, almost on auto-pilot, the studios send their lawyers to try to shut it down. Their basic theory? If a new technology creates a new way to access the TV programming that we already have a legal right to view, the studios are entitled to control and profit from that technology.

But as the courts have said time and time again, that’s just not how the law works. A quintessential example: the VCR. Movie studios sued to keep home video recorders off the market, arguing that the ability to tape TV programs to watch later would destroy their industry. (Former Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti famously compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler.) The Supreme Court rejected the studios’ arguments, saying that people have a right to tape from the public airwaves, and VCR manufacturers didn’t need to pay royalties to the studios.

Fast forward to 2008, when a group of TV networks tried to shut down Cablevision’s “remote DVR” service. That service allowed cable subscribers to record shows to which they had already bought access and save them to a hard drive at the cable company’s facility, instead of on a DVR in the subscriber’s living room. Again, the TV networks insisted they should have a right to profit from and control – or stop – this new technology. Again, the court said no, because a customer’s personal recording and viewing of the cable shows she had already paid for doesn’t trespass on any of the rights that the law gives to copyright owners.

The familiar arguments are re-surfacing in the Aereo dispute. Just as they once claimed the right to charge a toll for recording a TV show to watch later, the studios claim that they, and no one else, should control the ability to receive free broadcasts and stream them to Internet-connected devices. Essentially, the networks are saying that simply because Aereo’s technology is valuable to TV watchers, copyright owners have a right to capture that value. The Institute for Policy Innovation repeated that argument in an e-mail blast denouncing Aereo this week, insisting that Aereo is not a “legal business” because “one must pay for the raw materials that go into a product.” – meaning, the television shows being broadcast on the public airwaves.

I guess no one told that to TV manufacturers like Samsung and LG. They don’t pay for the shows that go into their TVs. Radio Shack doesn’t pay ABC for the right to sell TV antennas, even though ABC’s shows make those antennas valuable. Movie theaters that sell popcorn don’t owe a cut of those sales to the studios, even though popcorn enhances the movie-going experience. We understand, intuitively, that just because a product or service adds to the experience of watching TV and movies, or makes it possible in more places and times, doesn’t mean that copyright owners should have control, or charge a toll.

The TV networks are hoping to squash Aereo before it can expand beyond New York City. Hopefully, the court hearing the suits against Aereo will focus on what the law says, not what the networks wish it to be.

Android Inc. founder Andy Rubin took the witness stand Monday in the patent and copyright infringement lawsuit Oracle filed against Google. Rubin answered questions related to e-mails he wrote in 2005 and 2006 on the topic of Java licensing.

According to reports from ZDNet and CNet, Oracle lawyer David Boies quizzed Rubin about e-mails in which Rubin discussed whether to take a Java license from Sun Microsystems. Rubin came to Google when it purchased Android in August 2005, and he still leads development of the mobile operating system. Sun was purchased in 2010 by Oracle, which promptly sued Google over the use of Java in Android.

In an Oct. 11, 2005 e-mail presented in US District Court in San Francisco, Rubin wrote to Google founder Larry Page that “My proposal is that we take a license that specifically grants the right for us to Open Source our product. We’ll pay Sun for the license and the TCK [Technology Compatibility Kits].”

One of the trial’s key issues is whether programming languages such as Java and their related APIs (application programming interfaces) can be copyrighted, with Oracle arguing that Google needed a license to use Java APIs. According to CNET, Boies “established that Rubin knew that he didn’t need a license for the Java programming [language], but that the e-mails made clear during that period of Android’s development that he thought Google would need a partnership with Sun or a TCK license from Sun, and the java.lang APIs were subject to copyright.”

Teller, the silent half of the well-known magic duo Penn and Teller, has sued a rival magician for copying one of his most famous illusions. The case promises to test the boundaries of copyright law as it applies to magic tricks.

In “Shadows,” a spotlight casts a shadow of a rose onto a white screen. When Teller “cuts” the shadow on the screen with a knife, the corresponding parts of the flower fall to the floor.

A Dutch magician with the stage name Gerard Bakardy (real name: Gerard Dogge) saw Teller perform the trick in Las Vegas and developed his own version. Bakardy sells a kit—including a fake rose, instructions, and a DVD—for about $3,000. To promote the kits, he posted a video of his performance to YouTube and prepared a magazine ad. (With the video down, the link points to screenshots from the video filed by Teller in his lawsuit.)

Teller had Bakardy’s video removed with a DMCA takedown notice, then called Bakardy to demand that the magician stop using his routine. Teller offered to buy Bakardy out, but they were unable to agree on a price. So Teller sued Bakardy last week in a Nevada federal court.

A new analysis of licensing data shows that not only is use of the GPL and other copyleft licenses continuing to decline, but the rate of disuse is actually accelerating.

That was the conclusion of Matthew Aslett’s analysis of recent data from Black Duck Software , which shows that while use of the GPL, LGPL, and AGPL set of copyleft licenses dominates free and open source projects, that use is still on the decline.

“The GPL family now accounts for about 57% of all open source software, compared to 61% in June,” Aslett wrote. More troubling for copyleft advocates, though, could be the projection Aslett and the 451 Group make based on the data.

“…[I]f the current rate of decline continues, we project that the GPL family of licenses will account for only 50% of all open source software by September 2012.”

Looking at the graph to which Aslett refers , you can see how that projection is a logical one to make. You can also see what developers are licensing their projects under instead: permissive licenses such as the MIT, Apache (ASL), BSD, and Ms-PL group of licenses.

This is big news. Huge. The judge in the Oracle v. Google trial, the Honorable William Alsup, has reached an important decision. He has decided he will rule on whether or not APIs can be copyrighted, not the jury.
The news came with the final report from our reporter on Day 4’s coverage . I’ve added it there in Update 5, but it’s significant enough that I wanted to highlight it, to make sure you don’t miss it. This is, in my view, an important win for Google, in that it ensures that Oracle will not be able to confuse a non-technical jury that also presumably doesn’t know much about the law. I know a lot of you have been wondering when Judge Alsup was going to realize that the buck stopped with him, and it has happened.

The last year has been a stressful period for online locker sites. Hotfile is currently defending itself from a lawsuit by the Motion Picture Association of America. In January, the federal government shut down Megaupload and indicted its officers. While the courts have yet to decide whether either company is legally responsible for the infringing activities of their users, there’s no serious dispute that copyright infringement accounted for a significant fraction of their business.

RapidShare argues that its service is fundamentally different. The company promotes non-infringing uses of its service and actively polices its site for illegal content. On Wednesday, at an event at the National Press Club, RapidShare formalized its anti-piracy stance with a new document. Its “Responsible Practices for Cloud Storage Services” outlines the steps the company takes to fight infringement on its site.

As we’ll see, these steps go well beyond the minimum enforcement efforts required to qualify for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor. Yet even RapidShare’s aggressive anti-piracy approach has not satisfied piracy hawks like the Recording Industry Association of America. Ars talked to RapidShare General Counsel Daniel Raimer following Wednesday’s event.

Many of Oracle’s claims and presentation in this case will be based on misdirection and creating a false understanding of Oracle’s rights and Oracle’s right to restrict the activities of others. The Oracle position is in direct conflict with the previous statements and actions of Sun upon which Google relied. If Google can keep the jury straight on these points, Oracle will be shown to have significantly overreached in bringing the copyright claims in this suit.

Page also described how the company reached an impasse with Sun. It would have been convenient to use Sun’s technology and code, and saved Google “time and trouble,” he said. But the price was too high. Google went down its own path, Page said.

“We tried hard to negotiate with Sun,” he said. “Ultimately the idea we had for Android was a very open source system, and that was in conflict with things like the TCK, where they [Sun] charge money just to test compatibility. We were unable to convince them on that, and a whole bunch of other issues.”

Also testifying today was Edward Screven, a Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle. Screven emphasized the importance of APIs to Oracle’s business. Screven testified about the importance of Java and its APIs to Sun’s business; he also said that Google had “fragmented and forked” Java by releasing Android.

Screven also testified that Java was the most valuable part of Oracle’s purchase of Sun. In doing so, Screven mentioned the purchase price: $7.4 billion. Alsup quickly jumped in at that point, telling the jurors to disregard that figure. He said it has “nothing to do” with this case. The judge had previously warned Oracle’s lawyers not to try to put “big numbers” in front of the jury. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison testified yesterday about his company’s purchase of Sun, but didn’t mention the purchase price.

Science fiction author John L. Beiswenger has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against game publisher Ubisoft in a Pennsylvania district court, claiming that the Assassin’s Creed series illegally copies ideas and themes he established in his 2002 novel Link.

Beiswenger’s novel, as excerpted heavily in the suit (PDF), focuses on the titular Link device, which lets users relive the “ancestral memories” of long-dead relatives through DNA. The author alleges that this is a bit too close for comfort to Assassin’s Creed’s Animus devices, which are key to the series’ sci-fi-meets-historical-assassinations plotline.

On Friday, EFF went to court to argue that innocent Megaupload customers like Kyle Goodwin should be able to get their lost files back. We were particularly concerned because the government, which had originally seized the files and still apparently holds all of Megaupload’s financial assets, had argued that it had no obligation to make sure the files of innocent Megaupload users were returned and, in fact, believed that they could be destroyed .

The good news is that the court ordered all the parties – Megaupload, EFF, Carpathia (the service provider), the MPAA, and the government – to work together to devise a plan that protects everyone’s interests. The court plainly did not adopt the government’s troubling view and ultimately everyone else in the hearing, including the MPAA, seemed to agree that destruction of the files would be problematic (you can read more about the hearing here and here ).

Of course, the situation poses some big logistical hurdles. First, there is a huge amount of data here – more than 25 petabytes. Second, the parties have diverging views on what should be done even if they agree on preserving the data. Who should store the data? Where should it be stored? And of course, who will pay for that storage and any plan to allow users to retrieve their files?

But we are encouraged by the seeming consensus that it’s only right that innocent users like Mr. Goodwin get their property back. We’ll continue to do our best to make sure that happens.

Last week the Dutch Pirate Party refused to cave in to the demands of Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group BREIN, who ordered the political party to take their Pirate Bay proxy offline. As expected, BREIN didn’t let the case rest.The group obtained an injunction from the Court of The Hague which ordered the Pirates to shutter the proxy within 6 hours, or face a fine of 10,000 euros per day.

Nearly two years ago, Oracle went to court and accused Google’s Android team of infringing patents and copyrights related to the Java programming language. After about 900 motions and filings, and legal fees that are undoubtedly mind-boggling, the trial will finally get started this week. Android has faced many legal challenges, but this is easily one of the most significant, and one of the only ones targeting Google itself rather than the company’s hardware partners.

With Oracle demanding royalties from Android revenue, a ruling in its favor could raise the price consumers have to pay for Android devices. An Oracle win could also force Google to design around the patents asserted by Oracle, perhaps limiting Android’s functionality.

Jury selection will take place Monday, and the trial proper is scheduled to begin later in the day Monday, or Tuesday. Let’s take a look at what’s happened so far, and what’s next in this crucial trial for Android, the world’s largest-selling smartphone operating system.

Hotfile is determined to outlast Hollywood’s ongoing crusade against file locker services. The company is defending itself against an aggressive litigation campaign that movie studios first brought against it over a year ago. Hotfile’s case may be bolstered by a recent report which shows that the two most widely-downloaded files distributed through the popular file locker service are open source software applications.

Charges against Hotfile that alleged direct copyright infringement were thrown out last year by a federal court judge. The remaining charges allege that the company is liable for inducing its users to infringe copyright. The answer to that question will hinge on whether the courts find that Hotfile has substantial non-infringing uses.

A study commissioned by the MPAA, which was based on a sampling of Hotfile downloads, seemingly showed that a majority of the site’s content was infringing. Duke University law professor James Boyle, expert witness for the defense, issued a rebuttal demonstrating the flaws in the methodology used by the Hollywood study.

Professor Boyle’s statement, which cites the results of a more comprehensive statistical analysis of the content stored on Hotfile, was included in a sealed filing that was leaked this week by TorrentFreak. Boyle’s research highlighted an extensive volume of non-infringing Hotfile usage that had been overlooked by the plaintiff’s study.

Perry’s remarks focused on the shift from peer-to-peer file-sharing to file-sharing websites. “Cyberlockers” such as Megaupload are one example. But Perry also pointed to MovieBerry as an example of an infringing site that looks legitimate to many consumers and has even convinced legitimate companies to buy advertising.

Perry conceded that “cyberlocker” sites were not inherently illegal, but he said sites like Megaupload have crossed the line because their business model was supported by “not much else other than copyright infringement.” He claimed that the top five cyberlockers get tens of billions of page views per year, generating millions of dollars in profits.

Perry emphasized the large number of jobs supported by Hollywood movies. Hollywood employs more than just actors and directors, he said. “We have drivers, florists, people moving things around.” Yet thanks to online file-sharing, he claimed, Hollywood is making fewer movies, and spending less on each one. That means fewer jobs.

Perry stressed the need for additional legislation to crack down on “rogue sites.” He argued that the new domain seizure powers created by the 2008 Pro-IP Act were insufficient to deal with the problem. And he denounced the OPEN Act, sometimes touted as a SOPA alternative, as “unworkable.”

At the Brooklyn event, Perry’s comments were followed by a rebuttal from Brooklyn Law School Professor Jason Mazzone, who pointed out that Perry’s remarks had completely ignored limitations on copyright such as fair use. According to an account by Mazzone’s colleague Derek Bambauer, Perry responded by saying that Paramount “wants to give fair use ‘a wide berth,’ and that their core concerns are about full downloads of their films, not uses of clips and such.” But he conceded that SOPA had not made such allowances for fair use.

At the University of Virginia, Perry’s remarks were followed by a rebuttal by Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge, who argued that Hollywood’s failing profits had less to do with Internet file-sharing than with the industry’s failure to produce good movies and come up with innovative business models.

Paul Brigner, whom the MPAA hired in January 2011 as its chief technology officer, has left the industry’s trade and lobbying organization, CNET reports. He’s now a major critic of legislation championed by the MPAA such as the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act that stalled in Congress earlier this year because of swelling opposition to bills that initially looked like sure bets. “I firmly believe that we should not be legislating technological mandates to protect copyright — including SOPA and Protect IP,” Brigner says. “Did my position on this issue evolve over the last 12 months? I am not ashamed to admit that it certainly did,” Brigner writes in a statement on CNET. “The more I became educated on the realities of these issues, the more I came to the realization that a mandated technical solution just isn’t mutually compatible with the health of the Internet.” An MPAA spokesman had no comment for CNET on Brigner’s about-face. Last month Brigner became director of the North American Regional Bureau of the Internet Society, an organization whose stated goals include “the continued evolution and growth of the Internet for everyone.”

Megaupload.com’s servers aren’t the only ones being held in limbo by government authorities in the early stages of the prosecution of Kim Dotcom. Now it seems a single personal server storing extensive CCTV footage of the Dotcom mansion—including video documenting the police raid of the Megaupload CEO’s sprawling estate—is being held by authorities with no intention of handing it over.

While courts have declared Kim Dotcom a flight risk, leveled firearms charges at Dotcom’s head of security, and seized $50 million in Megaupload assets, some have wondered if it all seems a little much for someone embroiled in what is essentially nothing more than a copyright infringement case. And reporter John Campbell of New Zealand’s 3 News channel says despite the fact that “security camera footage was not on any seizure warrant and had no bearing whatsoever on any charges laid against Kim Dotcom,” the public in general and the Dotcom defense specifically are not being allowed access to the only record of what happened during the raid.

Without the videos, it’s unclear whether the FBI was at the house, what guns were carried, and whether they were pointed at anyone. In Campbell’s report, Dotcom family Security Chief Wayne Tempero said on the day of the raid he was confronted on the grounds by men who did not identify themselves as police. According to 3 News’ report, Dotcom’s legal team wants the footage to file a “Complaint to the Independent Police Conduct Authority about the police raid that day,” which “was excessive and heavy handed.”

In a February interview with 3 News, Deputy Police Commissioner Malcom Burgess said of the video footage, “I’m not sure whether we have that footage…we are reasonably satisfied that we were upright in an environment that had multiple cameras.”

Since January, the Dotcom legal team has asked for the footage, but police refused, until finally the agency agreed that an IT expert for DotCom could come and collect a copy of the footage. When the IT expert arrived at the police station, he found the server completely disassembled, and authorities said they could not reassemble it or give him any footage. Now, no one outside the police agency is sure the footage still exists.

The New Zealand police declined to give an interview to Campbell, but sent an e-mail stating, “Police would happily release the footage in question but currently have no authority to do so. The footage is contained on a hard drive lawfully seized on a warrant obtained by police at the direction of Crown Law following a properly formulated mutual legal assistance request from the United States.” Still, as long as the footage remains unavailable, it is impossible to know whether Dotcom’s story or the police’s story is true.

Does the government have a responsibility to protect innocent third parties from collateral damage when it seizes their property in the course of prosecuting alleged copyright infringement? That is the question a federal district court will consider next week in the latest skirmish in the legal battle between the U.S. government and Megaupload.

When the government shut down Megaupload three months ago, it made it impossible for innocent third parties, like our client Kyle Goodwin, to access their data stored on that site. Others—like service provider Carpathia—have also voiced legitimate complaints about their property getting caught up in the government’s dragnet. But the government has tried to wash its hands of all responsibility, insisting it doesn’t control the property anymore and that the court has no authority to intervene. On April 13, a judge in the Eastern District of Virginia will hear arguments concerning what should happen with Mr. Goodwin’s data and Carpathia’s servers. Ahead of that hearing, here are some specifics on who will be there and what they will argue:

Last month we reported on allegations that the plaintiff in several copyright trolling cases was represented by an attorney who was not licensed to practice law in Florida. The judge, Robert Hinkle of the Northern District of Florida, put the cases on hold and ordered the attorney, Terik Hashmi, to explain himself in February.

In his reply, Hashmi conceded that he had been practicing law without a license and asked Hinkle for permission to substitute another attorney in his place. Hinkle allowed the substitution, but on Monday he ruled that it wasn’t sufficient to save the lawsuits. He dismissed all 27 copyright lawsuits Hashmi had initiated. The plaintiffs, mostly producers of pornographic films, will need to start over with new attorneys if they want to continue the lawsuits.

Judge Hinkle’s order dismissing the cases was scathing. He noted that Hashmi had previously signed an affidavit with the Florida bar in which he “swore that he understood that holding himself out as authorized to practice law in Florida would constitute contempt of the Florida Supreme Court and a third-degree felony.”

Hinkle also said that Hashmi “swore that he understood that it would constitute the unlicensed practice of law to hold himself out as an attorney or as able to render legal advice or services; to offer legal services to others; or to collect fees for legal services. The assertion that Mr. Hashmi thought he could properly undertake to represent these plaintiffs in these cases…is plainly unfounded.”

Between them, the 27 lawsuits targeted several thousand Internet users, all of whom will get a reprieve as a result of Hashmi’s unlicensed practice of law.

The Center for Copyright Information, the organization tasked with overseeing a new anti-piracy scheme negotiated by the nation’s leading content companies and ISPs last summer, began to take shape Monday as the organization announced its executive director and several members of its advisory board. The picks suggest that the architects of the “Copyright Alert” system may be making a serious effort to strike a balance between the interests of copyright holders and the rights of users.

Leading the organization as its executive director will be Jill Lesser, whose résumé includes a stint at the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way and time as an executive at AOL Time Warner. In a statement, she pledged to focus on “education and deterrence, not punishment.”

CCI also named several people for its advisory board. Jerry Berman, founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology (where Lesser serves as a board member) will advise the organization. So will Marsali Hancock of iKeepSafe.org and Jules Polenetsky of the Future of Privacy Forum.

The most surprising choice for the advisory board is Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge, who has been one of the most persistent critics of major content companies and their campaign for ever-harsher copyright laws. In an emailed statement, Sohn said that she still had some concerns about the way the “Copyright Alert” system works, but she hopes that serving on the CCI’s advisory board will allow her to “advocate for the rights of Internet users and to provide transparency.”

“If implemented reasonably, the Copyright Alert System should alleviate the push for government intervention and excessive litigation and ultimately be a net positive,” Sohn said. Sohn praised Lesser as “a person of great intelligence and integrity.”

Of course, the advisory board has little direct authority over the Copyright Alerts system. The real power lies in the hands of the CCI’s executive board, which is stocked with content companies and ISPs. Still, a seat on CCI’s advisory board gives public interest advocates like Berman and Sohn some leverage. Presumably, they would not have joined without assurances that their input would be taken seriously, and if they start to feel ignored, they can always resign in protest, giving the CCI a black eye in the press.

The Copyright Alerts system will provide users with an opportunity to appeal “alerts” to an independent entity. That independent review process will be overseen by the American Arbitration Association. The AAA will train independent reviewers who will, in turn, hear appeals by individual users.

Last week, the New York Times ran an interesting and important op-ed by Stuart Green , a law professor, who argues that although illegal downloading of songs or videos from the Internet may be wrong, it’s not really “theft” in the sense that the term has been understood historically in the law. Nor is it theft according to the moral intuitions of ordinary people (as Green’s own research with psychologist Matthew Kugler shows), who draw a sharp distinction between online file sharing and ordinary theft, even when the economic value of the property taken is the same.

That’s not to say that record companies and movie studios are not hurt by online piracy. But as Green points out, they’re really not hurt in the same way that victims of theft typically are. If a thief steals your car, he has it, and you don’t. But if someone illegally downloads your song, he has it — but so do you.

In economic terms, intellectual property is non-rival, whereas tangible property is rival. As a result, the “piracy” of intellectual property is simply not the same sort of zero-sum game that car theft — or theft of any tangible property — is. And that means that when Hollywood or the U.S. government says that music or movie downloaders are “pirates” or “thieves,” they are indulging in a bit of loose rhetoric. There are, in general, good moral reasons not to take what doesn’t belong to you. But as this video by filmmaker Nina Paley so beautifully illustrates, copying is not theft.

NBC plays the sympathy card, saying that ‘theft’ is a major threat to its business and the jobs that it supports. But the moment that it is more expedient for it to just swipe a graphic from the internet to use on a public facing page that may be seen my many thousands of applicants and visitors, all of that goes out of the window.

The thing is, there is likely nothing malicious about NBC using the Xcode icon. It’s probably a casual thing that isn’t representative of its overall web design policies. But it is being used in a context where it is aiding NBC in making money for itself by starting up a new property.

This kind of casual copyright infringement, with no malicious intent, is exactly the kind of thing that SOPA was after. If people are outright stealing from content providers and selling their wares elsewhere, hey, that’s wrong. But SOPA covered so many cases of fair use, remixing, commentary and satire that it would have made a good number of the websites in the world immediately vulnerable to being taken down at the whim of ‘content creators’ like NBC.

People that weren’t trying to make money. Just having a little fun with, say, a 30 second clip of Jersey Shore inserted into a Rainbowstep video. Those people would be subject to the whims of this giant corporation. A corporation which can absolutely afford to pay for the licensing of a tiny hammer or blueprint graphic on a casting page.

This kind of hypocrisy isn’t an isolated incident either. Earlier this year, Jason Kincaid pointed out the same kind of casual disregard for copyright law exhibited by VEVO, a property owned by some of the biggest labels in the world…including Universal Music.

The hubris is made even worse in that its not some artist’s logo off of Deviant Art, this is a graphic used by the biggest company in the world by market cap. If they don’t care about Apple, how much less to companies like NBC care about the rights of individual copyright holders, the same people that they profess to be out to protect.

We’ve reached out to Apple to see whether a licensing arrangement has been reached for this graphic…but we doubt it.

In the United States, books published before 1922 are in the public domain. Later ones are copyrighted. And the window no longer shifts. Congress enacts retroactive extensions of copyright terms, so the public domain never expands. The impact on book shimpments, as seen above, is dramatic.

With file sharing site Hotfile facing an attempt by film studios to shut it down, Google has argued in an amicus brief that Hotfile should be eligible for the same type of legal protection that allowed the Google-owned YouTube to fend off the famous copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom.

Google’s brief (via TorrentFreak) says the company is not taking a position on what the final outcome of the Hotfile case should be, but states that the movie studios’ interpretation of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) would significantly weaken the DMCA’s safe harbor protections that have protected many of the Internet’s most popular and vital websites.

“A wide variety of online services, including Amazon.com, eBay, and YouTube… have all been held protected by the DMCA against potentially crippling infringement claims,” Google wrote in a filing in US District Court in Southern Florida. “Other mainstays of the modern Internet, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia, likewise rely on the DMCA safe harbors in their everyday operations. Without the protections afforded by the safe harbors, those services might have been forced to fundamentally alter their operations or might never have launched in the first place.”

Film studios Disney, 20th Century Fox, Universal, Columbia, and Warner Bros. argued that Hotfile induced users to commit copyright infringement, disqualifying the site from safe harbor protections. The studios cited the MGM vs. Grokster Supreme Court decision from 2005, saying the case “holds that a defendant who operates a service with the ‘object’ that it be used to infringe is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties.” Inducement is also an important issue in the case regarding Megaupload, as we’ve explained in previous coverage.

Google objected to this argument, saying that the DMCA should protect defendants against claims of both direct infringement and “secondary infringement” such as inducement. “As in Viacom, the same facts that demonstrate a defendant’s entitlement to the safe harbors may help establish that it is not an inducer,” Google wrote. “But it would be a significant mistake to hold, as plaintiffs urge, that a finding of secondary liability [such as inducement] in and of itself disqualifies a service provider from the safe harbor.”

The Google brief seems somewhat contradictory, arguing in one part that the safe harbor question should be treated separately from the inducement question, and in another that a service provider who qualifies for DMCA safe harbor “is protected against damages liability for all forms of copyright infringement,” including inducement.

The Pirate Bay is not only the most visited BitTorrent site on the Internet, but arguably the most censored too. Many ISPs have been ordered to block their customers’ access to the website, and recently Microsoft joined in on the action by stopping people sharing its location with others. Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger (MSN) now refuses to pass on links to The Pirate Bay website, claiming they are unsafe.

Pi Day this year was special for Michael John Blake. On that day, March 14 (3/14, like the number 3.14), a judge dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against his song, which is based on the number pi.

Let’s back up: Pi is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle . Its digits go on infinitely in an apparently random fashion: 3.1415926535897932 …

And while this sounds preposterously geeky, multiple musicians have seen this as an opportunity to create songs based on these numbers. If you look at a piano and say that the musical note C is 1, D is 2, E is 3, and so on, you can create an interesting melody, and then add other elements to compose a full song with pi as the fundamental musical core.

Blake launched a musical video called “What Pi Sounds Like” based on this idea last year, quickly becoming a YouTube sensation. (The original was removed from YouTube, but New Scientist repackaged it.) But Lars Erickson had already created music based on pi decades before, called “The Pi Symphony.” Erickson sued Blake, claiming that he had taken an idea that was already copyrighted.

Erickson also used the digits of pi (as well as the constant e) as the basis for the melody of his “Pi Symphony,” which was performed by the Omaha Symphony Orchestra Chamber group and by Ruse Philharmonic of Bulgaria in 2010.

Erickson had alleged that Blake’s pi song “sounded substantially similar,” and therefore infringes the copyrighted melody that Erickson registered in 1992. He told CNN last year that “nobody can copyright pi,” but that he “copyrighted the melody of pi to protect my work, just like anybody would copyright their work.”

Judge Michael H. Simon , of the U.S. District Court, District of Oregon, agreed with the plaintiff on the point about the number itself: “Pi is a non-copyrightable fact,” Simon wrote in his legal opinion.

Still, Simon continued, “the transcription of pi to music is a non-copyrightable idea. The resulting pattern of notes is an expression that merges with the non-copyrightable idea of putting pi to music: assigning digits to musical notes and playing those notes in the sequence of pi is an idea that can only be expressed in a finite number of ways.”

That doesn’t mean Erickson’s copyright is invalid, “only that Mr. Erickson may not use his copyright to stop others from employing this particular pattern of musical notes,” Simon continued. Erickson’s work is protected from “virtually identical” copying by others, but Blake’s song is not sufficiently similar - for instance, its harmonies, structure and cadence are all different.

Erickson said in an e-mail to CNN on Tuesday that he would simply urge people to watch his video and Blake’s video and draw their own conclusions.

“I wrote ‘Pi Symphony’ 20 years ago, I am thrilled to have presented it first,” Erickson said. “It was my gift to the world, no strings attached. Life goes on.”

Blake told CNN in an e-mail that he’s happy and relieved about the outcome, but not entirely surprised.

“I have felt fairly confident of my legal position from the beginning, but to find out on Pi Day was a perfect end to all of this,” he said.

Until January, Megaupload was a major customer of Carpathia Hosting. Now Megaupload is facing a federal indictment, and its servers have become a major burden for Carpathia.

Carpathia is the proud owners of 1,103 servers with approximately 25 petabytes of Megaupload data on them. The government seized Megaupload’s assets, so the firm can’t pay its bills and Carpathia has cancelled Megaupload’s service contract. But Carpathia hasn’t been able to reuse the servers for other customers because doing so might interfere with the Megaupload court case or invite lawsuits from Megaupload customers who lose data as a result.

On Tuesday, the hosting firm filed a request with a Virginia federal court asking for relief from the financial burden of continuing to maintain the servers. The company estimates it pays $9,000 per day for rack space, power, and connectivity. In addition, the servers themselves are worth $1.25 million. Since Megaupload is no longer paying for service, Carpathia would like to re-allocate the servers for the use of other customers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has intervened in the case on behalf of Megaupload’s users, some of whom used the service for legitimate file transfers. EFF has argued that these innocent users have a right to this data, and has threatened to sue to vindicate these users’ rights.

Carpathia calls 25 petabytes an “historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data,” and argues that if that data needs to be preserved, someone else—the government, Megaupload, or an interested party such as the MPAA or EFF—should bear the costs of preserving the data. The problem is that so far no one has come up with a way to satisfy all interested parties. Megaupload is willing to take custody of the data, but the government and the MPAA have both objected, perhaps fearing that Megaupload would destroy evidence. The other parties—the government, EFF, and MPAA—have all said they’re not willing to take custody of the servers.

Carpathia suggests several possible resolutions. One would be to allow Megaupload to put its site back online for a limited period of time so that legitimate users could download their data; after that, the data would be deleted and Carpathia would be free to do what it wanted with its servers. Another option would be for the courts to order a third party—most likely the government or Megaupload—to take custody of (and pay Carpathia for) the servers. A third would be for the parties to pay Carpathia for the costs of continuing to maintain the servers. Carpathia wants the government to pick one of these options, because right now the situation is costing it thousands of dollars a day.

John Steele is one of the nation’s most prolific copyright trolls. Last year, an Illinois federal judge wrote that Steele had “abused the litigation system in more than one way.” Apparently undeterred by the thumping he received in Illinois federal courts, Steele has joined a new firm and shifted his litigation campaign to Florida state courts.

State courts don’t have jurisdiction over copyright law, but this fact didn’t deter Steele and his compatriots, who tried to use an obscure provision of Florida law called a “pure bill of discovery” to obtain subscriber information without actually filing a copyright lawsuit. As Princeton copyright scholar Bart Huffman explained last year, this ancient provision of Florida law wasn’t intended to be used this way, and the firm was forced to make a number of creative arguments to justify its request.

Florida Judge Marc Schumacher wasn’t impressed by the firm’s legal gymnastics. The phrase “copyright troll” appears in the second paragraph of Judge Schumacher’s decision, and things go downhill for Steele from there.

Google has filed a brief at a federal court in Florida defending the file-hosting site Hotfile in its case against the MPAA. The search giant accuses the movie companies of misleading the court and argues that Hotfile is protected under the DMCA’s safe harbor. Indirectly, Google is also refuting claims being made by the US government in the criminal case against Megaupload.

In the United States, most online services are spared the burden of filtering their users’ content. As long as they promptly take down files on request and follow other requirements laid out in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, online service providers don’t need to proactively monitor the files they host for infringing content.

But German law may be different. TorrentFreak reports that a court in Hamburg ruled last week that the popular file-hosting site RapidShare must proactively filter files uploaded by its users. While the full ruling has not been released, a statement says RapidShare is required to block its users from uploading a list of 4,000 files known to be infringing.

The case was brought by a group of German booksellers, who celebrated the ruling. “The judgment confirms that Rapidshare must take effective measures against the use of illegal content on its service,” said a German bookseller’s association. But a Rapidshare spokesman criticized the celebration as premature, pointing out that the decision’s implications won’t be clear until the written opinion is released.

RapidShare hasn’t said if it will appeal the ruling, but if it does the law may be on the file-sharing site’s side. Last month, an EU court ruled that the pervasive monitoring required to make such a filter effective would run afoul of Europe’s strict privacy laws.

SXSW The Napster of 13 years ago was vastly superior to any legal music service available today, including Spotify, says Sean Parker, a mover and shaker in both companies. And he’s right.

Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning were speaking at the SXSW Music Festival and Conference this week. Parker is an investor in Spotify, a legal licensed service, unlike the original pirate Napster. So you’d expect him to talk it up – and he does.

But Parker pointed out that even in its rudimentary state, Napster had a real-time chat channel built in, enabling file-sharers to communicate. It also gave you an insight into somebody’s personality by allowing you to browse their digital record collection. You can see why he thinks its important: Fanning and Parker originally met on IRC.

I found echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s notion that when people fear the government, there is oppression, and when government fears the people, there is liberty, in the opening of Kim Hart’s recent piece in Politico about the ongoing reaction in Washington to the SOPA/PiPA protests:

“In the wake of the Internet blackout that led to the dramatic death of two controversial online piracy bills, a new warning has entered the Hill vernacular: ‘Don’t get SOPA’d.’

Unfortunately, after that provocative opening, the story devolves into the familiar narrative about the competition between “Hollywood” and “Silicon Valley”, reinforcing the prevailing notion that the job of Congress is to balance the interests of two competing lobbies rather than looking after what is best for the citizens of our republic. The SOPA protests weren’t the work of some Silicon Valley lobby; as +Andrew Rasiej said to me recently, they were the work of “the Internet public.”

(Andrew noted that that lovely term, “the Internet Public,” was coined by Dave Parry in his essay “It’s not the Public Internet, It is the Internet Public.” http://profoundheterogeneity.com/2011/02/its-not-the-public-internet-it-is-the-internet-public/)

New Zealand’s High Court decreed the court order used to seize the assets of Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload in January was “null and void,” after the New Zealand police applied for the wrong kind of restraining order. Dotcom’s legal team is arguing this should result in the return of the seized property, reports TorrentFreak .

The Police Commissioner applied for a “foreign restraining order,” which limited Dotcom’s ability to defend against the seizure. The correct type was an “interim restraining order.” The error was first noted on January 30th, and the Police Commissioner since applied and received the correct restraining order type.

Justice Judith Potter in the High Court will decide soon whether this error will result in the return of the seized assets. Citing Canterbury University professor Ursula Cheer, the New Zealand Herald says this is by no means a certainty. Dotcom’s lawyers would have to prove that the error was made in bad faith.

We were down a few hours earlier today. There’s no need to worry, we haven’t been raided this time. We’re only upgrading stuff since we’re still growing.

One of the technical things we always optimize is where to put our front machines. They are the ones that re-direct your traffic to a secret location. We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary.

With the development of GPS controlled drones, far-reaching cheap radio equipment and tiny new computers like the Raspberry Pi , we’re going to experiment with sending out some small drones that will float some kilometers up in the air. This way our machines will have to be shut down with aeroplanes in order to shut down the system. A real act of war.

We’re just starting so we haven’t figured everything out yet. But we can’t limit ourselves to hosting things just on land anymore. These Low Orbit Server Stations (LOSS) are just the first attempt. With modern radio transmitters we can get over 100Mbps per node up to 50km away. For the proxy system we’re building, that’s more than enough.

But when time comes we will host in all parts of the galaxy, being true to our slogan of being the galaxy’s most resilient system. And all of the parts we’ll use to build that system on will be downloadable.

In an unexpected turn of events, one of the key committees in the European Parliament voted recently to weaken a reform of the copyright monopoly for allowing re-publication and access to orphan works, pieces of our cultural heritage where no copyright monopoly holder can be located.

When a work has gone orphan, it means that it is effectively lost until the copyright monopoly expires, 70 years after the creator’s death. You can only hope that somebody has kept a copy illegally and copied it across new forms of storage media as they go in and out of fashion as the decades come and go, or it will be lost forever.

The vote in committee on March 1 was supposed to end that (or, more technically, recommend a course of ending that to the European Parliament as a whole). However, the copyright industry lobby won key points in the voting procedure with 14 votes against reform and 12 in favor of it, according to the just-published protocol. This is according to a fresh report from our Brussels office – I cannot yet find the protocol on the EU’s web pages (which are notoriously disorganized; it may actually be published).

There’s a problem with this. There are 24 seats in the committee, and one group (non-inscrits) was absent, lacking deputies to fill that person’s vote. So, there should have been 23 votes at the most. But we just counted 12 votes for reform and 14 against. That’s 26.

Yes, your reactions are correct here – that means that voter turnout on this copyright reform issue was 113%. Also, if there were 12 reform-friendly people with actual voting rights, then there would necessarily have been 11 against – causing reform to prevail, and the copyright monopoly to be substantially weakened in the European Union in favor of preserving our cultural heritage.

This rather embarrassing issue was pointed out to the committee, the fact that there were three votes too many, and that these three votes determined the outcome. When this was done, along with formally requesting a re-vote, that re-vote on the points in question was denied.

“What can I say? There is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to democracy in the European Union”, says Christian Engström, Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party and member of the committee in question.

The final kicker here is that the 113-per-cent voter turnout happened in the Legal Affairs committee (JURI), which has the responsibility of safeguarding the integrity and trustworthiness of the legal framework as a whole in Europe. MEP Engström’s assistant, Henrik Alexandersson, called the phenomenon “a temporary form of democratic surplus” in a scathing blog post.

(Finally, in the interest of full disclosure and context, it shall be said that there’s no clear picture yet on the overall state of orphan works reform. This was about amendments to that reform in the JURI committee, where these 14-against-12 votes went in the wrong direction: against a good and useful reform. The proposal as a whole is still going to the European Parliament floor for a vote – but in what shape or form remains to be seen.)

A popular pub and music venue called The Hobbit has been threatened with legal action by US movie lawyers.

The Southampton pub has been accused of copyright infringement by lawyers representing the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) in California.

The company owns the worldwide rights to several brands associated with author JRR Tolkien, including The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings.

Landlady Stella Mary Roberts said: “I can’t fight Hollywood.”

The pub in Portswood, which is popular with students, has traded with the name for more than 20 years.

It features characters from Tolkien’s stories on its signs, has “Frodo” and “Gandalf” cocktails on the menu, and the face of Lord of the Rings film star Elijah Wood on its loyalty card.

A letter from SZC asked it to remove all references to the characters.

The company asserts it has “exclusive worldwide rights to motion picture, merchandising, stage and other rights in certain literary works of JRR Tolkien including The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit”.

Late Friday, the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that makes is harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material and burden online forums and their users with nuisance lawsuits.

The judgment – part of the nuisance lawsuit avalanche started by copyright troll Righthaven – found that Democratic Underground did not infringe the copyright in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper article when a user of the online political forum posted a five-sentence excerpt, with a link back to the newspaper’s website.

Judge Roger Hunt’s judgment confirms that an online forum is not liable for its users’ posts, even if it was not protected by the safe harbors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice and takedown provisions. The decision also clarifies that a common practice on the Internet – excerpting a few sentences and linking to interesting articles elsewhere – is a fair use , not an infringement of copyright.

The Canadian-British fiction author, blogger, journalist and activist Cory Doctorow is one of the most known personalities of the net culture. He is coauthor of the widely read blog "Boing Boing" and writes for example for the New York Times, Guardian and Wired. Doctorow is member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cofounder of the Open Rights Group. As a net activist he also deals with civil rights in the internet, freedom of information, data privacy and with the liberalization of copyrights. Under the alternative creative common licence he publishes his books as digital open source versions in the internet. Some of his highly-regarded science fiction books which got several awards and were translated in dozen languages are for example Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), Eastern Standard Tribe (2004) and "Makers" (2009), as well as the youth-adult fiction Little Brother (200ß) and For the Wind (2010). For the series From Sketch Doctorow describes the dangerous consequences of the increasing juridical usage restriction of computer technologies and the internet.

Michael Geist sez, “Last week I wrote about the astonishing demands of the Canadian music industry as it seeks a massive overhaul of Bill C-11, the copyright reform bill. The Canadian Independent Music Association is seeking changes to the enabler provision that would create liability risk for social networking sites, search engines, blogging platforms, video sites, and many other websites featuring third party contributions. If that were not enough, it is also calling for a new iPod tax, an extension in the term of copyright, a removal of protections for user generated content, parody, and satire, as well as an increase in statutory damage awards. CIMA and ADISQ, which represents the Quebec music industry, appeared before the C-11 committee last week and the demands only seemed to increase . For example, ADISQ is asking the government to add a requirement for Internet providers to disclose customer name and address information to copyright owners without court oversight . Meanwhile, CIMA wants takedown with no due process and unlimited statutory damages .” [Emphasis mine]

Lawyers for Newt Gingrich and his presidential campaign have asked a federal judge in Chicago to dismiss a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against the candidate for using “Eye of the Tiger” to pump up crowds at campaign stops and political conferences dating back to 2009, according to court documents filed on Monday.

The lawsuit was filed in January on behalf of Rude Music Inc., an Illinois-based record label owned by Frank Sullivan, who co-wrote the rock song as a member of the band Survivor. As The Times’s James C. McKinley Jr. reported earlier , Mr. Sullivan has asked a judge to issue an injunction to stop Mr. Gingrich from using the song and is seeking unspecified damages.

Responding to the lawsuit, Mr. Gingrich’s lawyers said he denied “any and all wrongdoing.”

The song had been played in a mix of background music, but its inclusion in the mix constituted fair use under federal law and is protected by the First Amendment, the lawyers said.

Mr. Gingrich’s lawyers also said the Chicago court did not have jurisdiction over the complaints against Mr. Gingrich and Newt 2012 Inc., his campaign operation, because Mr. Gingrich lives in Virginia and his campaign headquarters are in Georgia.

Reached by phone on Monday afternoon, Brian A. Rosenblatt, the attorney who filed Mr. Gingrich’s response, said he could not comment on the pending litigation.

Annette McGarry, the Chicago lawyer representing Rude Music and Mr. Sullivan, was not available for comment on Monday evening.

While it is not uncommon for political candidates and songwriters to skirmish over songs, the campaigns usually drop the songs from their playlists when threatened with a lawsuit.

From a legal standpoint, whether playing a song at a political gathering might amount to copyright infringement is still an open question.

The lawsuit said Mr. Gingrich began using the song – which was released in 1982 as a theme song for “Rocky III” – in 2009 at the Conservative Political Action Conference and other political events. Mr. Gingrich, a former House speaker, also used the song during recent campaign appearances in Pennsylvania and Iowa, the complaint said.

The battle over implementation of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement in Europe is heating up, while the war of words over the Stop Online Privacy Act is still in play . Rightsholders have called critics of these measures “demagogues” and “dirty tricksters,” but the critics show no sign of retreating from their opposition.

The fight against copyright maximalism has largely been negative. To offer something more positive, Public Knowledge (PK for short) has released an Internet Blueprint —six bills that the group says could “help make the internet a better place for everyone” and that “Congress could pass today.”

We’re not expecting Congress to pass them today (or tomorrow), but they’re at least an intriguing start point for debate. Here’s a quick version each.

This is the latest in a long series of foibles or outright abuses of YouTube’s Content ID system . Content ID was intended to help copyright holders manage the chaos of YouTube. They’d provide copies of their audio and video for analysis, which would then algorithmically match newly uploaded videos . If a match was found, rightsholders could automatically block the video or, increasingly, claim money from video advertising.

Content ID’s monetization was a huge boon for copyright holders. Uploaders could keep their videos online, while copyright holders profited from the creative reuse of their work.

But there has been a dramatic rise in Content ID abuse in the past couple of years, wielded in ways never intended. Scammers are using Content ID to steal ad revenue from YouTube video creators en masse, with some companies claiming content they don’t own deliberately or not. The inability to understand context and parody regularly leads to “fair use” videos getting blocked, muted or monetized .

If the phrase “digital pirate” conjures up a lone socially challenged male with a large collection of Manga comics and Cory Doctorow ravings, think again. Some of the biggest “pirates” in the world are nation states.

Last week France passed a law that permits the state to seize authors’ rights on books published before 2001. Scribes have just six months to opt-out, or lose their moral rights and the ability to determine a price for their work.

It’s essentially a Compulsory Purchase Order for intellectual property - the author’s work is no longer their own. Ownership is instead transferred to a quango answering to the French Ministry of Culture, which is authorised to make it digitally available. Publishers are the big beneficiaries.

The law has united copyright groups with the free software movement and Pirate Party in opposition.

Today marks the end of an era for The Pirate Bay. The largest torrent site on the Internet has just removed all popular torrent files and made the switch to magnet links. The Pirate Bay team believes the move is needed to make the site future proof, and is confident that it won’t cause much trouble among users. “Just click the red button instead of the green one and all will be fine,” they say.

With the government shutdown of Megaupload and voluntary disabling of file sharing at sites like FileSonic and FileServe , the remaining file lockers are naturally getting hit with tons of traffic. One such site—RapidShare—has decided to handle the influx by slowing download speeds for non-paying users, in an effort to drive pirates away.

After users started noticing reduced download speeds, RapidShare todayexplained its new policy in a statement to TorrentFreak . “RapidShare has been faced with a severe increase in free user traffic and unfortunately also in the amount of abuse of our service ever since, suggesting that quite a few copyright infringers have chosen RapidShare as their new hoster of choice for their illegal activities,” RapidShare said, according to the TorrentFreak article. “We have thus decided to take a painful yet effective step: to reduce the download speed for free users. We are confident that this will make RapidShare very unpopular amongst pirates and thus drive the abusive traffic away.” Different tiers of download speeds for free and fee-based services are typical, but RapidShare is apparently going beyond that with slower-than-usual speeds for free users.

The parties filed a joint update with the court regarding the pending reexaminations of the asserted Oracle patents before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (722 [PDF; Text ]) Not surprisingly, Oracle has taken yet another hit. This time it is on previously reexamined patent number RE 38,104.
On February 16 the USPTO issued a non-final rejection of all of the claims of the ‘104 patent that have been asserted by Oracle in this case. Oracle has until April 16 to file a response. Given the track record of Oracle’s responses in these reexaminations, don’t be surprised to see this reexamination result in a final rejection of all of the asserted claims of the ‘104 patent.

If that proves to be the case, then Oracle will be left with only the four claims of the ‘520 to assert at trial, and as we have pointed out before, the ‘520 claims are now facing limitation because of representations made by Oracle during the reexamination.

With these additional actions by the USPTO Google has also requested (723 [PDF; Text ]) the parties be permitted to update their expert reports on invalidity. Clearly, Google wants to incorporate the findings of the USPTO into its expert report. While Google states that the reexaminations of the ‘702 and ‘205 patents have run their course, Oracle may yet file a response in each of those cases. If Oracle opposes this Google request, expert Oracle to indeed file those responses and seek to overcome the examiner’s objections in each case.

It makes one wonder whether Oracle wouldn’t be better off withdrawing its patent infringement claims and proceeding only on the copyright claims. The court would likely insist that Oracle withdraw the patent claims with prejudice, meaning Oracle could not reassert the seven patents originally asserted in this case, but that would not preclude Oracle from bringing another patent infringement suit in the future against Google … provided it can find any of the Sun patents that are valid .

A group of nine Chinese authors operating under the name China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) has revised a lawsuit against Apple filed in December 2011, asking for double the original damages . The group contends that Apple isn’t doing what it can to fight unauthorized versions of books repackaged as apps from being sold in the App Store.

CWWCS claimed that it has complained to Apple to remove the unauthorized content from the App Store, but allegedly Apple either took too long to remove the content or, in other cases, referred the group to the book “app” developers to handle the problem. In December, the group filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in China asking for 11.9 million yuan (roughly US$1.89 million) in damages, which the Beijing Second Intermediate People’s Court agreed to hear in January. The group revised the complaint this week, asking for 23 million yuan (US$3.65 million).

The complaints in China echo those of several Japanese publishing groups, which aired similar grievances in late 2010. The Japan Book Publishers Association, the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan, and the Digital Comic Association all complained that copyrighted books from Japanese authors were being repacked as apps and sold without permission. Apple said at the time that it would “promptly and appropriately respond to complaints about violation of copyright,” but Japanese publishers and authors wanted Apple to proactively identify pirated material.

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce that a copyright lawsuit threatening an important database of time zone information has been dismissed. The astrology software company that filed the lawsuit, Astrolabe, has also apologized and agreed to a ‘covenant not to sue’ going forward, which will help protect the database from future baseless legal actions and disruptions.

File-sharing magnate Kim Dotcom was granted bail Wednesday morning New Zealand time, after the judge hearing his application ruled that the Megaupload founder has no access to funds to help him flee the country.

As part of the bail conditions, Dotcom must reside at his leased Coatesville, Auckland mansion. He cannot travel more than 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, from the Coatesville residence on which no helicopters are allowed. Earlier bail applications by Dotcom failed as he was thought to have access to helicopters and chartered private jet planes with which he could flee New Zealand.

Dotcom, who changed his last name to fit his outsize personality and online persona, is also banned from using the Internet.

Lawyers acting for the US government opposed the bail application, and claimed Dotcom has access to financial resources that make him a flight risk. However, Justice Dawson said in the North Shore District Court that as time had passed, authorities had not been able to show that Dotcom has further assets hidden, and the mere suspicion that he is very wealthy cannot be used against him.

Instead, Justice Dawson says Dotcom has “every reason to stay to be with his family and fight to keep his assets.” Justice Dawson also noted that while Dotcom has Finnish and German passports both those countries have treaties with the US that would allow for prosecution should he flee to either place.

Dotcom, who as jailed on January 20, has had his bank accounts seized , as well as his cars and the entire Coatesville mansion that he lived in. Police have allowed Dotcom’s pregnant wife Mona and three children to live in the mansion, however.

The lawyers acting for the US government wanted to ban Dotcom from using the Internet. Dotcom’s lawyer said the condition isn’t realistic, saying the Megaupload founder needs to contact his legal team in the US. to prepare his case. Justice Dawson sided with the US government, and said Dotcom shouldn’t have Internet access as he has “the ability to use it for wrong purposes.”

Dotcom is wanted by the US Justice Department, which accuses him and six Megaupload associates of copyright infringement to the tune of $500 million. US authorities are seeking to extradite Dotcom to Virginia to face trial on criminal conspiracy charges. He was arrested with four other Megaupload associates in a dawn raid by a large SWAT-style police force supported by two helicopters in January.

His associates, Bram van der Kolk, Finn Batato and Mathias Ortmann, won bail previously. All four now await a hearing to decide if they are to be extradited to the United States.

The Pirate Bay could be blocked in the UK, after a High Court judge ruled that the torrent site and its users are committing copyright infringement.

The case was brought before the court by a coalition of major record labels, including Sony, EMI and Universal. They want the court to force internet providers like Sky, BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media to block the website. No operators of the Pirate Bay were in court for the hearing.

This follows from a landmark ruling in July 2011, where BT was ordered to block access to Newzbin2—a site that aggregates links to copyrighted content. The judge ruled then that BT must use technology designed for blocking child pornography to make the site inaccessible to its customers.

Now, with the court finding that operators of The Pirate Bay “incite or persuade” users to commit copyright infringement, the record labels want the ‘Bay to succumb to the same fate. The Guardian says that the high court is expected to rule in June as to whether ISPs should prevent their customers from accessing The Pirate Bay, too.

Alot of my photos get ripped off. There are thousands of them all over the internet. I personally am a big believer in sort of letting the small stuff go you know. I’m about making art and as an artist the more people that see my work the better — you’ll hear this alot from me. I mean people *should* ask and if they do ask I say yes most of the time — unless it’s a commercial situation and then I’ll ask to get paid, but I’m a reasonable guy who likes to share.

But every so often someone steals your work and they just hit all the right hot spots for you. So I was bummed to find out the other day that one of my all rights reserved photographs (and I don’t have alot of these, almost all of my work is licensed Creative Commons non-commercial which still requires attribution though) was pilfered by Emerging Arts Professionals. Even lamer was their excuse posted above for why they posted my photo without permission, attribution or compensation as required by a license.

Apple could also make it easier to report a scam app via the App Store. You can currently report problems with apps and games you’ve purchased, but it would be great if you could flag inappropriate content right from the dropdown menu on ever app price sticker. It does take some of the shine off, and would result in a lot of noise for Apple, but huge spikes in reporting could also let them get some crowd-sourced help in finding offenders faster, ultimately letting them keep a cleaner, better store.

In any case, this week’s takeover sets a dangerous precedent for copyright enforcement measures in the UK. If the hosting provider took down this site voluntarily without any court oversight, it raises the prospects of future cases being dealt with in a similar extrajudicial manner. Though the Internet blacklist legislation which would have facilitated similar takedowns in the U.S. has been stopped for now, we must keep a close eye on these sorts of alternative methods of online censorship that are implemented in the name of copyright enforcement.

The problem here is that we’re allowing this dying industry to dictate the terms of our democracy. We allow them to dictate new laws (ACTA , SOPA, PIPA , IPRED, IPRED2, TPP, TRIPS, to name a few recent ones) that forbid evolution. If you don’t give up before you’re sued, they corrupt the legal system.

As I wrote immediately after the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear our appeal: “Today I urge everyone to make sure that the entertainment industry does not profit from them anymore. Stop seeing their movies. Stop listening to their music. Make sure that you find alternative ways to culture.

Remind me again how the patent system promotes innovation.

Torrent search engine BTjunkie is the latest file-sharing service to fall on its sword in the wake of the Megaupload sting . Junkie, one of the largest BitTorrent indexes, decided to shut down voluntarily.

A statement on the website reads, “This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

The site was never directly targeted by copyright holders, an unnamed BTJunkie founder told TorrentFreak . However, the site was reported to the US Trade Representative (USTR) in 2011, the RIAA and MPAA listed the torrent index as a ‘rogue’ site, and Google censored the search term.

Despite avoiding legal attention so far, the site’s founder told TorrentFreak that the legal action against file-sharing sites Megaupload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in its closure.

Tiny Tower maker NimbleBit and Bingo Blitz maker Buffalo Studios both took issue with overly familiar titles recently released by Zynga, making their complaints known through large infographics that show near-identical side-by-side screenshots. But Triple Town developer Spry Fox went a step further, actually filing a lawsuit (PDF ) against Yeti Town developer 6waves Lolapps, saying the latter company “unabashedly” cloned its popular social game. The lawsuit takes the matter away from the nebulous moral and ethical questions of what constitutes an “original” game idea to the codified legal realm of guilt and innocence. Yet the nature of copyright law as it applies to games, and the existing case law in the area, suggests Spry Fox has an uphill battle in protecting Triple Town in court.

Please note that the use of any recording equipment to capture this film is strictly forbidden, including: camcorders, cameras, cell phones, charcoal, ink, paint (oil or water-based), and the human brain. On leaving the theatre, you will be assaulted by baseball-bat-wielding ushers, who will pummel your skull until you forget what you have seen.

Any remaining memories are yours to keep and enjoy, provided you do not discuss them with others or make them available via mankind’s collective unconscious. In addition, your experience of this film may not be remixed in any form; dreams involving any of its characters must adhere strictly to the film’s actual plotline and running time, and must also comply with copyright laws in your state or territory. Any sexual fantasies based on it may not exceed the film’s M.P.A.A. rating.

We don’t need to be first to market. We need to be the best in market. There are genres that we’re going to enter because we know our players are interested in them and because we want and need to be where players are. We evolve genres by making games free, social, accessible and highest quality.

With regard to Dream Heights and the tower genre, it’s important to note that this category has existed since 1994 with games like Sim Tower and was more recently popularized in China with Tower of Babel in 2009 which achieved 15 million DAUs. On iOS there has been Yoot Tower, Tower Up, Tower Town, Tower Blocks and Tiny Tower. Just as our games, mechanics and social innovations have inspired and accelerated the game industry, its 30 year body of work has inspired us too.

And, this has always been the case for our company and the rest of the industry. Zynga Poker, FarmVille , CityVille and Words with Friends, none of these games were the first to market in their category but we made them the most fun and social, and the most popular. Our teams continue to build and improve these games every week which has been an important part of our success model. We run our games as a live service and we continue to iterate, innovate and improve on them to give our players the best possible experience.

The craziness comes from the most recent filing in a Hard Drive Productions case against nearly 1,500 “Doe” defendants accused of sharing one of the company’s films online. The case, filed in DC, follows the familiar pattern: sue anonymous Internet users in some random federal court, use the case to obtain subpoenas, unearth the identity of the Internet users, and send them “settlement letters” offering to save them from litigation if they would just pay a few thousand dollars.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has contributed to many of these cases, arguing—sometimes successfully, sometimes, not—that such cases are an abuse of the judicial process. Yesterday, the EFF filed a brief in the Hard Drive case; by the end of the same day, the Chicago-based lawyer handling the case had responded in amazing fashion. Rather than address any substantive arguments made by the EFF, lawyer Paul Duffy decided simply to attack the group itself.

Users affected by the closure of Megaupload have been offered legal help to retrieve their data.

A website has been set up to assist former members of the site to contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation in order to start co-ordinated action.

The EFF has criticised the US government for acting “without warning” when it closed the site this month.

It is understood that the data, which is shared across many servers globally, will be held for at least two weeks.

The support site - megaretrieval.com - has been set up by storage company Carpathia, which provides hosting services for some of Megaupload’s content.

“Although Carpathia does not have, and has never had, access to the content on Megaupload’s servers, the hosting provider wants to assist lawful users of the Megaupload service by promoting EFF and its non-profit legal services,” Carpathia said in a press release.

Chief marketing officer Brian Winter added: “We support the EFF and their efforts to help those users that stored legitimate, non-infringing files with Megaupload retrieve their data.”

Julie Andrews, staff attorney for the EFF, said it was important that Megaupload users’ voices were heard.

“EFF is troubled that so many lawful users of Megaupload.com had their property taken from them without warning and that the government has taken no steps to help them,” she said.

So if a retail game comes with online-activated DRM or some other method for preventing a second owner from playing, doesn’t that go against this longstanding legal principle? Probably not, according to Electronic Frontier Foundation Intellectual Property Director Corryne McSherry. While the first-sale doctrine says a company can’t stop you from selling, giving away or even breaking your legally purchased software, “I don’t think it is binding on others to assist you in doing all of those things,” she says.

“I think the first-sale doctrine… would say you have a right to sell your old game… and you have the right to purchase a used game… but the first-sale doctrine doesn’t require somebody to build a used book store, if you know what I mean,” she continued. In other words, just because you can sell a used game doesn’t mean the platform maker has to make it easy, or even possible, for the new owner to play it.

US prosecutors have said that data belonging to Megaupload users and stored by third parties could be deleted as soon as Thursday.

Users have been unable to access data since the file-sharing service was raided.

The warning was made in a letter filed by the US Attorney’s Office, the Associated Press news agency reported.

Megaupload’s lawyer Ira Rothken told the agency that at least 50 million users had data which could be deleted.

Mr Rothken said that freezing of Megaupload’s funds meant it was unable to pay those who were storing its data.

In the letter prosecutors said that the data which might be deleted was being held by the storage companies Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications Group.

Neither they nor the US Attorney’s Office have responded to emails from the BBC.

Mr Rothken told the agency that he was “cautiously optimistic” that a deal could be done to save the data from being wiped.

He said that the data would be needed by the defence.

One of the fun examples among all the copyright fuss is the extreme example of copyright claims made by AT&T some time in the 1980s. It’s the /bin/true program. This is a “dummy” library program whose main function is to make it easy to write infinite loops (while true do …) in shells scripts. The “true” program does nothing; it merely exits with a zero exit status. This can be done with an empty file that’s marked executable, and that’s what it was in the earliest unix system libraries. Such an empty file will be interpreted as a shell script that does nothing, and since it does this successfully, the shell exits with a zero exit status. But AT&T’s lawyers decided that this was worthy of copyright protection. The earliest copyrighted version of /bin/true that I’ve found so far dates from 1984:

In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven.

However, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people used the site to share research data, work documents, personal video collections.

As of today, these people are still unsure whether they will ever get their personal belongings back.

In a response, Pirate Parties worldwide have started to make a list of all the people affected by the raids, and they are planning to file an official complaint against the US authorities.

“The widespread damage caused by the sudden closure of Megaupload is unjustified and completely disproportionate to the aim intended,” they announce.

For this reason Pirates of Catalonia, in collaboration with Pirate Parties International and other Pirate Parties, have begun investigating these potential breaches of law and will facilitate submission of complaints against the US authorities in as many countries as possible, to ensure a positive and just result.”

“This initiative is a starting point for legitimate internet users to help defend themselves from the legal abuses promoted by those wishing to aggressively lock away cultural materials for their own financial gain.”

Hollywood continues to completely ignore that lesson. It continues to punish the people who play by the rules with an insufferable customer experience. This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks . And that’s apparently how the studios want it.

The founder of file-sharing website Megaupload has been denied bail by a New Zealand court.

German national Kim Dotcom - also known as Kim Schmitz - was arrested with three others in Auckland on 20 January in a raid requested by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He has been accused of internet piracy and money laundering.

Mr Dotcom’s lawyers have said his company simply offered online storage, and that their client is innocent.

Judge David McNaughton said that Mr Dotcom posed a flight risk and remanded him in custody until 22 February, when US authorities’ application for Mr Dotcom’s extradition will be heard.

Prosecutor Anne Toohey had previously argued that there was a danger Mr Dotcom would try to flee the country, citing his multiple passports, financial resources and previous criminal convictions for hacking and insider trading.

Judge McNaughton also pointed to the discovery of a gun in the raid in which Mr Dotcom was arrested as a factor in denying bail.

“The applicant’s unlawful possession of the firearm is another factor which weighs in the balance,” he said, according to Fairfax News.

“It suggests a level of criminality which to my mind could easily extend to exploiting criminal connections to obtain false travel documents and leave the country undetected,” he added.

Mr Dotcom holds German and Finnish passports, and is a resident of Hong Kong and New Zealand.

US federal prosecutors have accused Megaupload - one of the internet’s largest file-sharing sites before it was shut down last week - of costing copyright holders more than $500m (£320m) in lost revenue.

Megaupload, on the other hand, said it was diligent in responding to complaints about pirated material.