A certain portion of the internet is freaking out over a change to an important list used by ad blockers that facilitates their function. Popular coding repository GitHub received a DMCA request (the same tool copyright holders use to remove links to pirated music and movies online) to remove a domain name from the ad…
On Tuesday March 14th, a group of former and inactive Mormons—who have leaked dozens of internal documents exposing the inner workings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—sent a legal letter to the LDS Church warning that MormonLeaks has no intention of ending their crusade for transparency.
An article in Modern Farmer yesterday (I like to keep up on farming, since I have a small plot of sorghum growing in my shower) reminded me of the plight of farmers to keep the right to fix their own machinery. Gearheads managed to get this right protected last year, but, right now, farmers are still under John…
Game of Thrones is known in equal measure for its densely interwoven plot and its many, many, many nude scenes. But recently, lusty clips and compilations from HBO’s biggest cash cow have slowly started disappearing from Pornhub, one of the internet’s biggest porn sites. Suffice it to say this will be an exercise in…
Last Sunday’s episode of Family Guy used an old YouTube clip of NES classic Double Dribble to simulate two characters playing the game. Shortly after the episode aired the original video was taken down by Fox on copyright grounds, because YouTube is stupid.
There are ways to get in trouble with the law for just about everything: smoking weed, theft, horse theft, stealing a horse and teaching it to smoke weed, and even shouting “fire” in a crowded not-on-fire stable full of stoned horses. But numbers are pure and theoretical and definitely exempt from legal action, right?
As a sizeable hoster of things and collector of links, Google receives its fair share of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices. Only, that fair share has increased by around a billion percent since 2006.
The DMCA takedown and counter-takedown procedures has been a mess for a while now. And it didn’t look like anyone who could fix it cared to. Which made it a surprise when the Copyright Office asked for public comment on the issue on New Year’s Eve.
So your mom bought you a copy of Mad Max: Fury Road on Ultra HD Blu-ray for Christmas and you want to play it on your old ass non-4K TV? A line of devices from HDfury makes it possible. Or at least, it used to.
YouTube announced today that it’s going to cover the legal costs of copyright lawsuits facing a few videos that they believe are strong examples of fair use. This is one of those situations where good PR and good work actually coincide.
Decrypting copyrighted materials is, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an illegal act. Yesterday, the Library of Congress issued a set of exemptions to the DMCA’s decryption ban, which many outlets, including Gizmodo, hailed as “victories” and “big wins.” They’re not. At best, the new rules allow…
Copyright law (and therefore DRM, the software companies can use to lock down their products) is controlled by the Library of Congress. Every three years, the Librarian makes decisions on certain critical exemptions. This time around, it looks like they’ve got things right.
You may have heard that Deadspin’s GIFs disappeared from Twitter. And then Deadspin disappeared from Twitter. And then Deadspin reappeared on Twitter. It all seems completely ridiculous, except all of it was a pretty standard blunt-force application of copyright law on the internet. The only unusual part was that…
In 2007, a home video of a baby dancing to Prince’s 1984 masterpiece Let’s Go Crazy was uploaded onto YouTube. Eight years and a few dozen lawyers later, a federal appeals court has ruled that uploading the video was an OK thing to do — a judgement that is of surprising importance to the rest of the internet.
Copyright law is complicated, but one thing is clear: The Digital Millennium Copyright Law was not designed to enable censorship. Unfortunately, the owners of Ashley Madison are using—and abusing—DMCA takedown notices to do just that in order to keep its hacked data off the web.
The video “Pantone Pixels,” published in 2011, was an independent art project that used a swath of colors to illustrate a picture of the creator’s parents. Last week, Vimeo took it down. Turns out it was too similar to “Pixels,” a 2015 movie starring Adam Sandler.
An Israeli company called Flash Network is fighting dirty against people who called it out for sneaky javascript injections. It’s a prime example how companies use copyright laws to threaten and intimidate anyone who criticizes them.
You know what a pain those plastic engine covers are? How they get in the way and hide your own car’s engine from you? Well, consider that black piece of molded plastic a metaphor for something much worse: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Automakers are trying to use the DMCA to say you can’t work on or modify…
The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is the most fundamental piece of US legislation underpinning digital rights. It’s also woefully broken, with its wide-reaching language being used to strong-arm researchers and make tinkering with your own smartphone illegal. The latest trick? Screwing over anyone who wants to…
Copyright law is a bitch. Just ask Rand Paul’s newly launched presidential campaign whose video “Stand With Rand: Kentucky” just got pulled from YouTube on copyright grounds. YouTube’s Content ID system flagged a song in the video by country singer John Rich. “Sorry about that,” says the YouTube page now.
