Items tagged with DMCA
Spoiler alert—spoilers may be considered copyright infringement. A Reddit post that contained spoilers about the delayed Super Mario Bros. movie was taken down due to “copyright claims.” The removal of the Super Mario Bros. film spoilers has sparked debate about whether or not spoilers should be considered “fair...
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The legal hounds representing publisher Take-Two Interactive have been on the scent of Grand Theft Auto modders, barking at them with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take down notices. As a result, several mods hosted at Liberty City were recently yanked offline, to comply with the demand. This raises the...
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There are some games like Skyrim that have lived on thanks largely to a robust modding community. However, there is always a risk that one’s video game mods will be targeted by the original developers. Fans of the Grand Theft Auto series particularly run this risk. Several GTA mods were recently hit with a Digital...
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Back in early February, CD Projekt Red was the unfortunate victim of a network breach, which allowed hackers to make off with source code for some of its most popular games -- including the recently released Cyberpunk 2077. The perpetrators of the heist reportedly sold the source code for Cyberpunk 2077 and The...
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Streamers and YouTubers have recently come under the microscope of both the U.S government and music copyright holders. The popular streaming platform Twitch wrote that thousands of DMCA notifications have been pouring in since May. This has sparked a mass movement on the platform to stop playing copyrighted music...
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Apple created a bit of ill-will for itself after it leveraged the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to compel Twitter to take down a tweet of an encryption key for its iPhone handsets. Around the same time, several DMCA take down requests were also sent to Reddit for posts on r/jailbreak, though it has not been...
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The jailbreaking community is alive and well, and people frequently install "unauthorized" software on their smartphones and tablets once they’ve cracked the bootloader. This practice is often frowned upon by device OEMs (especially Apple), but it is legal to do so under an exemption in Section 1201 of the Digital...
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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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Woe is the gamer who suddenly can't play a particular title because a developer or publisher pulled the plug on an authentication server without releasing a patch to remove the requirement of checking in with the defunct mothership. About the only thing you can do at that point is pound sand or brave the shady side of...
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Hulu has already admitted to an evil plot to destroy the world when it ran commercials with Alec Baldwin (as an alien) saying that once our brains are reduced to a cottage cheese like mush, they'll scoop them out with a melon baler and gobble them right on up. Sound pretty insidious, and while Hulu was obviously...
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Yesterday, we covered comments from the RIAA on how it believes courts have weakened the DMCA to the point of uselessness and why the organization supports the highly controversial E-PARASITE Act. It's not the first time we've covered the controversial legislation, but the leader of the RIAA, Cary Sherman, has weighed in with his own personal...
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It's no surprise that the RIAA is unhappy with the DMCA, given how fervently the organization supports the beautifully named E-PARASITE Act. However, a lawyer from the organization has shed new light on exactly why the recording industry (and presumably the MPAA as well) thinks the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is...
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Taxpayers in the United States could soon be stuck footing the bill for some very costly copyright infringement enforcement. For those that don't know, the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 or Senate Bill S.968) is a piece of...
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Britain's business secretary, Vince Cable, announced today that the government plans to pass legislation allowing citizens to make legal copies of CDs and DVDs they own. The new law will also allow UK citizens to engage in "form shifting;" the term refers to the right to burn legally downloaded materials to physical media. (This last right...
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A number of venture capital firms and individuals have sent an open letter to Congress, asking the legislative body not to support the PROTECT IP (aka Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, aka PIPA) bill. PIPA is a re-write of an earier bill, COICA, and is designed to give the...
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Do you own a PlayStation 3 console? If so, shut up, sit down, and do what you're told! Before you fire off an angry email, understand that directive's not coming from us -- we're just the messenger here, so please don't shoot -- but Sony, who admittedly didn't word things that way. What the company did do, however, was threaten PS3 hackers...
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A patent application doesn't necessarily mean such an idea will ever see the light of day, but iPhone jailbreakers should take note of this news, anyway. Apple has reportedly applied for patent for methodology of not just detecting jailbroken or unlocked iPhones, but also killing them, if necessary. It's true that if...
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Every three years, the U.S. Copyright Office convenes to consider exemptions to the DMCA's ban on circumvention of "technical protection measures." On Monday, the EFF, which had submitted three such exemptions for this go-round of the triennial process, announced that all three exemptions had been granted, meaning for one thing, that jailbreaking...
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In the United States, discussions of copyright protection and infringement inevitably revolve around the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. Since it passed twelve years ago, the DMCA has become the weapon of choice for US companies seeking to fairly protect their property as well as institutions attempting to unfairly silence criticism...
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As you may know if you've been reading this site for a while, the U.S. Copyright Office is holding its triennial hearings on exemptions to the DMCA. One of the exemptions being sought would broaden one granted film and media professors in 2006 to rip DVDs (so they could use the clips in teaching) to other teachers as well. Naturally, there's...
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AP recently announced that it was going to "develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used." As we know from last year's dust-up over fair use of AP articles, AP doesn't really understand the word fair. And it appears, AP doesn't understand the word affiliate, either (or YouTube, for that matter)....
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