Category: Copyright
The television industry should embrace technology companies and the open spirit of the Internet, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told a gathering of TV executives in Edinburgh, Scotland today.
"We are not your enemy and we want to help," said Schmidt, who delivered the annual MacTaggart address at the Edinburgh Television Festival. He stressed the need for cooperation between Google and the TV industry and refuted claims that Google works against the interest of content owners. Continue
Zediva, a startup with a unique approach to online movie streaming, was ordered to shut down its service by a U.S. federal judge for running afoul of copyright law. Continue
Twitter photo-sharing service TwitPic has updated its terms of service to clear up any misunderstanding of who owns the pictures uploaded to the service. There have been controversies in the past year about media organizations using photos posted on TwitPic and not giving proper attribution or compensation to the original photographer. Continue
Recently, Facebook has removed several Pages of well-known organizations in response to copyright infringement claims that have turned out to be bogus. Facebook is experiencing the same problem with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act as other user generated content sites such as YouTube and Google’s blogging platform Blogger — namely that if it doesn’t work to ”expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing upon” copyright, it can lose its safe harbor status offered by the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act and can itself become financially liable for the copyright infringement.Continue
YouTube has long had to battle complaints and lawsuits - most often from record labels and film studios - that the video-sharing site is awash in copyright infringements. YouTube does take measures to pull content when an infringement claim is made, and it has had a longstanding policy to ban users who repeatedly post videos that violate copyright.Continue
The European Union says its member states must do more to digitize Europe's cultural heritage and not simply leave that work to the private sector. To do otherwise, suggests a recently commissioned report, could steer Europe away from a digital Renaissance and "into a digital dark age." Continue
Ah, Terms of Service - the legally-binding document we never read before clicking "accept." So when Agence France-Presse argued this fall that Twitter's ToS granted it free access to photos shared on the microblogging service, there was a veritable shitstorm of people saying, "Wait, what did I agree to?"
Well, rest easy. A U.S. District Court has decided that the AFP (and anyone else for that matter) does not have open rights to content you post to Twitter or photos to you post to Twitpic.Continue
