Items tagged with Copyright
A new bill proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), aims to grant rights-holders the power to obtain court orders that block access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. The bill, introduced by Representative Zoe Lofgren of California (D-18), amends...
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Japan is a staunch ally of the United States and the two countries share many values. They don't agree on everything, though, and one of the most contentious areas between Japanese and American businesses is the matter of copyright. It may be hard to believe, but copyright law is much stricter in Japan than it is in...
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It's no secret that we love video games. Not only do we love video games, many of us lived through significant heydays of gaming eras. From the 1970s and 80s arcade boom and then video game market crash in the US, all the way to today. Within those last five decades there have been many successes, failures, and...
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If you are looking to copyright artwork created by artificial intelligence (AI), you may be out of luck. Steven Thaler has attempted to copyright a two-dimensional piece of artwork created by a computer algorithm twice, and has been denied both times.
The world of art has taken on a new life with the introduction of...
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Nintendo, known primarily for games, game consoles, and its iconic characters has become so ubiquitous in our worldwide culture that you can barely go into any store without seeing something it has had its hands in.
For Nintendo music is no different, being the place many of the best composers in gaming have had...
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If you're not a video game pirate—or not a regular reader of HotHardware—you might be confused by that headline. It's completely true, though "Bowser" in this case refers not to the giant, spikey, fire-breathing turtle above, but instead to Canadian web developer Doug Bowser. Mr. Bowser pled guilty last month to...
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In 2014, it was established that the U.S. Copyright Office would "not register works produced by nature, animals, plants, or through divine or supernatural spirits." This declaration stemmed from a monkey who took a selfie and a photographer who thought they had the rights to the image. We are now facing a similar...
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Last July, Nintendo went nuclear over ROM sites that were giving people access to pirated versions of classic Nintendo games. The first two sites that Nintendo took legal action against were LoveROMS.com and LoveRetro.com; both owned by the same people. The legal action against the two websites resulted in smaller ROM...
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In a groundbreaking move, the Library of Congress and US Copyright Office have proposed new rules that will give consumers the ability to legally hack the DRM of electronic devices to repair or maintain those devices. The devices these proposed rules would cover and legalize the hacking of include smartphones, voice...
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Last month the EU tried to overhaul its old copyright law and step into the modern age. The problem was that the law as crafted and supported by many musicians was very overreaching to most. The copyright rules would have placed the responsibility on websites for checking for copyright infringements and forced those...
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The European Union's Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) voted in favor of draft legislation that would overhaul Europe's copyright rules. However, the concern from several Internet pioneers, civil liberties groups, and others who oppose the legislation fear that it will ultimately be a tool for surveillance and...
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If you're a devout Google Images user, you may have already noticed a subtle, but very obvious change made over the past day. It used to be that when you found an image you liked, you could click on it, and then use the "View Image" option to see only that image. If you wanted to see the rest of the website, you had...
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The developers behind Star Citizen, the much hyped and still unreleased space trading and combat video game, are facing a lawsuit filed by Crytek over the use of its CryEngine game engine. Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and Roberts Space Industries (RIS), both of which were co-founded by Chris Roberts, creator of the Wing...
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Movie studios and content creators have taken a step towards crushing the add-on scene (or at least the illegal aspect of it) surrounding Kodi, a free and open-source media player developed by the XBMC Foundation. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, which is led by the MPAA and includes Netflix, Amazon...
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Sony has a reputation for being feisty when it comes to its PlayStation hardware, especially when users try to mod things. Nobody knows that better than George Hotz, the infamous PlayStation 3 modder who was sued by Sony for jailbreaking the console (the two reached a settlement in 2011). Fast forward to today and...
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The way we rent, purchase, and watch movies at home is constantly changing. More recently, the shift has been from physical media to online streaming, and before that the market transitioned from video rental stores to kiosks like Redbox. Those still exist and are legal, unlike the crop of movie kiosks that have...
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A jury decided that Cox Communications should have to pay BMG $25 million for not doing more to prevent its subscribers from illegally downloading and sharing copyrighted music files. The award is less than a quarter of the maximum amount Cox could have been fined, though it's a huge blow to the ISP...
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Internet service providers (ISPs) and music labels alike are keeping a close eye on the outcome of a lawsuit BMG filed against Cox Communications. Following a week of trial hearings, BMG has asked the court to confirm that Cox failed to disprove that it's responsible for illegal sharing of copyrighted music that...
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YouTube is an amazing service for a huge number of reasons, but if there's one thing that's not fun about it, it's the ever-existing threat of a company taking legal action against you because of a video upload. We see this happen all of the time, and often, users don't even know what they're actually allowed to...
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The line couldn't be any more divided between politicians and consumer groups over a controversial anti-piracy bill passed in Australia. Called the Copyright Amendment (Online Infringement) Bill of 2015, the measure is intended to thwart illegally downloading and sharing copyrighted film and TV shows by requiring ISPs...
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HBO has in the past taken a rather nonchalant approach to piracy, even at times taking the surprisingly refreshing viewpoint that millions of illegal downloads can be viewed as a "compliment of sorts" and that it comes with the territory of "having a wildly successful show on a subscription network." The thing is, if...
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Just like nearly every other site on the web, piracy portals survive on advertising revenue -- the people running these sites have bills to pay too. With that in mind, entertainment conglomerates have figured out it might be easier to cut so-called "rogue" sites off at the knees rather than chase after individual file...
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