Late yesterday, Facebook was hit by a lawsuit from Eight Mile Style, the publisher that controls rapper Eminem’s music, including licensing rights, and, if necessary, legal action when someone infringes on those rights. Such is the nature of the allegations being made against the social network, which is said to have used music from Eminem’s
Google’s lawyers visited the Second Circuit Court of Appeals last week for a polite conversation with three judges and attorneys from the Authors Guild. You remember — the book-scanning thing? Yes, the case is 7 years old and still unresolved. The Circuit Court is just a way station in a longer journey — at issue is whether the Authors Guild’s class action suit should be broken apart, forcing authors and publishers to confront Google individually.
Google is going to win this thing eventually. If that makes Google evil, it is a necessary evil.
The bigger question is about the lawfulness of Google’s digital library quest, and the legitimacy of the Guild’s copyright charges and request for damages. There are points of similarity to the music industry’s litigation saga. And major differences. Google is going to win this thing eventually. If that makes Google evil, it is a necessary evil.
In an effort to slowly cut ties with various gun and weapon manufacturers, it’s reported that Electronic Arts will stop paying gun makers for the privilege of using real gun names in their video games, but will still continue to use real names without paying for the naming rights, saying that they retain the right to depict real guns without a license.
The ongoing national debate over gun violence and gun control has made a lot of companies rethink the relationships they have with gun makers, including video game developers and publishers. Electronic Arts is one publisher who will be distancing themselves from relationships with gun makers, but will still continue to use real gun names in future games.
EA president of labels Frank Gibeau says that video game developers share the same rights of free speech as authors do, noting that novel writers don’t pay gun makers to use real gun names in their books. Video games are the same way, saying that Electronic Arts is “telling a story” through a point of view.
Video games have been at the forefront of the gun control debate for a while now, and it seems that video game publishers are finally buckling under the pressure and severing ties with gun manufacturers. However, none of that looks to change the ways that violent video games are made, and we’re guessing that war games like Call of Duty and Battlefield will continue on as normal.
[via Reuters]
EA no longer paying gun makers for naming rights is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
If you’ve never seen Keyboard Cat or Nyan Cat, welcome to your first day on the Internet. That aside, both videos, one lovable and the other maddening in a good way, are the source of a lawsuit against Warner Brothers due to its use of them without permission, credit, or compensation to their creators. Game developer 5th Cell was also tagged in the lawsuit.
If you’ve never seen Nyan Cat, prepare to have the 3-minute video stuck in your head for the next ten or so hours. As the lawsuit specifies, the video features a cat-faced character with “a body resembling a horizontal breakfast bar with pink frosting sprinkled with light red dots” (aka, a cat stuck in a Poptart) soaring through the air beyond a tail of rainbows colors. Without further ado, check it out in the video below.
Keyboard Cat, meanwhile, is cute in direct proportion to Nyan Cat’s annoyance factor, featuring a cat wearing a tiny suit jacket in front of a keyboard, jamming away at the keys with a half-asleep look on his face that says, “Charlie Schmidt has made me do this a million times.” You can check it out in its full 55-seconds of 480p awesomeness in the video below.
If you liked those two videos, you’re not the only one – Warner Bros. published a a video game called Scribblenauts that features them, which was developed by 5th Cell. Perhaps unbeknownst to the developer, both videos have been trademarked by their respective video creators. Adding insult to injury, the two characters were used to market the game, a transgression for which Warner Bros. has not yet made a comment. The case is being handled in California.
[via ars technica]
Warner Bros. hit with lawsuit over Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat use is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
On February 25th, several United States ISPs got together and decided to launch the Copyright Alert System (CAS) in order to stop online piracy. With the CAS, ISPs would be able to detect when one of their users downloaded files illegally, and they would issue a warning to the user. The ISPs call it the “6 strikes” program, where the user would be warned up to 6 times, with each consecutive warning being more aggressive than the previous. Pirates from all around wanted to test out just how efficient the new CAS system was.
The pirates began testing out the Copyright Alert System shortly after it launched in late February. They proceeded to download many popular files illegally using Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. They downloaded popular movies, TV shows, music albums, and even uploaded each file back into The Pirate Bay. These pirates made no attempts to mask their IPs and were intending to get caught.
But after quite a while, not a single warning was issued. Granted, these pirates were all using Verizon as their ISP, so we don’t really know just how efficient AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, or Cablevision’s system is. The pirates intentionally went after torrents that have been proven to trigger CAS alerts in countries like France and New Zealand, but apparently in the United States, they aren’t so heavily tracked.
The study lasted 3 weeks long, with the pirates downloading popular files and seeding them every day. But no warning was ever issued. A Verizon executive defended the company’s position, saying that despite the study performed by these pirates, they have been issuing copyright warnings frequently. While we know that Verizon’s Copyright Alert System needs a bit more tuning, we still don’t know yet how efficient the other ISPs are.
[via Daily Dot]
Pirates suggest Copyright Alert System inefficient with crowdsource tests is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Game piracy isn’t just something that affects big studios, and it can have a huge impact on smaller teams; that’s why the coders behind Game Dev Tycoon decided to release their own cracked version, albeit with a moral lesson hardcoded for pirates. Fully expecting a cracked copy of the game to surface shortly after the $7.99 Game Dev Tycoon was released, Greenheart Games pipped the pirates to the post and added a torrent of their own. However, what downloaders didn’t realize was that the cracked version had a bug the authentic one didn’t: players would inevitably run into the effects of game theft.
After a period of play – particularly if the pirate gamer is doing well, their in-game studio creating highly-rated titles – a message from one of the virtual dev team pops up warning them that piracy has become a problem:
“Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt”
After that point, it’s pretty much game-over for the player’s studio, with their bank account shrinking and bankruptcy the only result. Unsurprisingly, the clueless pirates weren’t too keen on a game that seemingly had no outcome but failure, missing the irony of their own behaviors in the process.
“Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! I had like 5m and then people suddenly started pirating everything I made, even if I got really good ratings (that I usually get). Not fair” Anonymous complaint
After a single day out in the wild, over 90-percent of those playing Game Dev Tycoon were using the cracked version, Greenheart Games discovered, thanks to some phone-home anonymous usage code built into both versions. Unfortunately, attempts to actually encourage those who might be tempted to pirate the game to instead pay for a legitimate copy have floundered, the developers say.
Whereas Greenheart Games says it will still continue with non-DRM on its titles, that isn’t the approach some teams have decided to take. Notably, Microsoft is believed to be adding a mandatory internet connection requirement to its next-gen “Xbox 720” which would require titles be installed to the console’s hard-drive, and then connect to a server to be validated before play can take place.
Greenheart’s site is currently up and down, probably due to interest in this little life-lesson, but you can find the Google cache here.
Game dev releases sabotaged torrent to teach pirates with irony is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Apple has been ordered by a Chinese court to compensate three Chinese writers for infringing their copyrights. Apple made the authors’ books available in iBooks without first seeking their permission. The Cupertino-based company will have to pay up 730,000 Yuan ($118,000) to the three writers for copyright infringement.
While the situation doesn’t quite seem to add up, it’s said that the books were uploaded by third-parties rather than by Apple themselves, and it’s unclear exactly who uploaded them in the first place, but in any case, the court ruled that Apple had a duty to make sure that the uploads didn’t breach copyright, whether or not they were the ones who uploaded the content.
Of course, this is nothing but pocket change to Apple, so it doesn’t affect them financially by any means, but it further develops bad PR for the company in China, where they’ve already been in hot water recently — most notably for the iPhone warranty debacle, but Apple ended up apologizing and is working to improve customer satisfaction in that area.
One of the writers involved in the lawsuit was Mai Jia, whose books are often on multiple best-seller lists across China. The judge took the time during the court case to also warn other tech companies running an online store that they should learn from this lawsuit and be make sure that their uploading processes won’t create similar disputes.
[via ZDNet]
Apple fined $118,000 for China copyright infringement is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Apple will have to pay three Chinese authors a total of $118,000 for stocking their books in its App Store without a proper say-so, according to China Daily. A court ruled that it was Apple’s job to verify that third-party uploads met copyright requirements and that it had the means to do so since all the books in question were best-sellers. Apple’s attorney declined to comment, but the court also suggested that similar online retailers should learn from the case “and improve their verification system” — bringing perhaps another headache to would-be e-book stores in that nation.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Internet, Software, Apple
Via: ZDNet
Source: China Daily
Verizon, which just recently finished its acquisition of Mohave Wireless, has been pulled into a copyright legal spat, with a studio that produces adult films having subpoenaed the ISP for copies of its six-strike alerts against the individual being sued. That’s not all the information the studio wants, however, with it prying farther into the subscriber’s Internet usage.
We knew the six-strikes system was coming for quite some time, with it suffering a delay before its targeted roll-out date last year, finally going into effect on February 25 of this year. The system is being utilized by the big-name ISPs – Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and Cablevision – to curbstomp piracy via education using a variety of punitive methods often decried as draconian in nature.
While leaked memos and such had revealed ahead of time the various punishments subscribers would face under the six-strikes system, they were officially revealed a couple days after the system went live. You can read a detailed write-up of each ISP’s six-strike system here, but the basic idea is that when a copyright alert is triggered, the subscriber will face throttled speeds, an educational session, limited website access, or other similar effects.
Now, a little over a month after the system went into effect, a Verizon subscriber is facing legal action from Malibu Media, producer of adult entertainment, over alleged sharing of copyrighted materials. Malibu Media has subpoenaed Verizon for copies of the six-strike notices the subscriber received under the new system, as well as information on how much bandwidth he used and a list of viewed pay-per-view films he watched.
The twist in the case is that Verizon said “No.” It says that in addition to Malibu having harassed it in the past, the ISP wishes to protect its subscribers from “shakedown tactics against Doe defendants.” The studio has pushed back and is trying to force Verizon’s hand, but that issue aside, there’s a larger one at play: will the six-strikes system, which was designed and intended to serve merely as an educational tool on the realities of copyright and infringement, be used as a weapon against the browsing public?
[via Torrent Freak]
Lawsuit attempts to use six-strikes copyright system in case against Verizon subscriber is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
ReDigi took a gamble that it could resell legally purchased song downloads, much as you would that one-hit wonder CD you bought in high school. Unfortunately for ReDigi, the odds weren’t ultimately in its favor: a Southern District of New York court has shot down ReDigi’s appeal against a Capitol Records lawsuit accusing it of copyright infringement. The court didn’t accept ReDigi’s view that first sale principles apply to strictly digital music, at least as its service implements the technology. While the startup tries to keep traders honest by making them delete originals after a resale, the process by its digital nature still involves making a copy of the track without Capitol’s permission, according to the court. We’ll have to wait to know what penalties ReDigi might pay, but there’s enough legal precedent in the case that it’s doubtful others will follow in the service’s experimental footsteps.
Filed under: Internet
Via: The Verge
Source: Santa Clara Law (PDF)
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