copyfight

Wacky Discovery Founder Sues Amazon.com over Kindle

Owen Thomas · 03/18/09 12:26PM

Discovery Communications, the owner of cable channels like FitTV and Animal Planet, is suing Amazon.com, maker of the Kindle, over an electronic-books patent taken out by its founder and CEO, John Hendricks, years ago.

TMZ Fights for Its Right to Give Away Octo-Mom Pics

Owen Thomas · 02/13/09 02:07PM

So, how did those photos of Nadya Suleman's horribly distended, octuplet-carrying belly get out into the world? They were licensed to TMZ (presumably by Octo-mom herself), which wants to drum up publicity and traffic.

Shepard Fairey's Monday Is Worse Than Yours

Owen Thomas · 02/09/09 04:47PM

Let's count Obama poster-boy Shepard Fairey's current skirmishes: he's preemptively sued the AP over its copyright claims; he pleaded not guilty to Boston graffiti charges; and hipster literary journal N+1 thinks he's a sell-out.

Why Disney's funding Chinese pirates

Owen Thomas · 11/21/08 01:00AM

If Chinese viewers want to watch Disney's Hannah Montana — no accounting for global tastes — they can do so on 56.com, an online-video site akin to YouTube. The show is pirated. But does Disney really mind? Its startup-investment arm, Steamboat Ventures, put money into 56.com two years ago.Eric Garland, CEO of an online piracy research firm, told the Wall Street Journal Disney's investment in 56.com is "ironic" and "shocking." John Ball, Steamboat's managing director, says the company invested in part to help 56.com curb pirated videos. But 56.com is just one of six Chinese companies in Steamboat's portfolio, all of which aim to distribute movies and videogames online. And that's the dirty secret of Disney and other media companies. They don't ultimately care about shows like Hannah Montana. What matters is their channels of distribution, through which such evanescent fare courses — and 56.com promises to be another one. Viacom isn't suing YouTube for $1 billion because it's upset about piracy. It's upset about piracy happening on a channel it doesn't own.

Guy who screwed up BitTorrent leaves BitTorrent

Owen Thomas · 11/06/08 02:20PM

BitTorrent cofounder and president Ashwin Navin is leaving the company. He has plans for a startup incubator in San Francisco's Mission District. Good! That means he'll be screwing up far less consequential companies from here on out. Navin deserves credit for persuading Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, for building a company around it. But that's about it.Navin wasted years and millions of dollars trying to turn BitTorrent Inc. into a competitor to Apple's iTunes store. He struck splashy deals with Hollywood studios by paying them large upfront guarantees, which depleted BitTorrent's bank account but got Navin into the right parties. Meanwhile, BitTorrent's other line of business, which used file-sharing technologies to deliver content more efficiently for corporate customers, suffered from lack of focus, and more established competitors like Akamai moved in. Sometimes losing a founder is bad for a company. In this case, it's nothing but good.

Viacom turns MySpace bootlegs into an advertunity

Paul Boutin · 11/03/08 01:40PM

A year ago, Viacom sued YouTube for one billion dollars, claiming YouTube was not blocking uploads of copyrighted Viacom material from Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1 and others. Today, MySpace will join YouTube in running ads targeted to Viacom-owned clips, instead of deleting them. Auditude, a Palo Alto startup, provides the software that identifies Viacom-owned content. Remember when musicians believed all advertising was evil? Now, I'm looking forward to seeing a Big & Rich ad targeted against another Big & Rich ad, overlaid by another Big & Rich ad for a Big & Rich ad I haven't seen yet. Collect them all!

Muxtape creator explains how to be an overnight failure

Alaska Miller · 10/24/08 03:20PM

Justin Ouellette's music trading site Muxtape, shut down after failed talks with the RIAA, the music labels' copyright cops, may not have earned him a fortune. But it has secured him a modicum of infamy. He got invited to speak earlier this week at the WebbyConnect Summit in Laguna Niguel, explaining to others on how to replicate his overnight success with making a website deeply popular with Brooklyn's most outspoken Internet users. As Ouellette elaborates in this interview, the key is to just make up something that people want. Guess what? Just because people want free music doesn't mean you can give it to them. Ouellette never figured that part out.

YouTube tells McCain where to put DMCA

Paul Boutin · 10/15/08 02:00PM

YouTube has told the McCain campaign they will not reconsider the site's standard ten-day ban on clips that draw DMCA complaints from copyright holders. D.C. insider Declan McCullagh has a copy of YouTube's reply to Monday's letter from a McCain lawyer. Recently, both Fox and CBS got YouTube to yank McCain campaign videos that remixed TV news clips. Question for Daily Kos: Why is Fox News clubbing a Republican presidential candidate? For everyone else, here's the 100-word version:

Fox News makes McCain a fair-use believer

Paul Boutin · 10/14/08 04:20PM

"Overreaching copyright claims have resulted in the removal of noninfringing campaign videos from YouTube." That's the gist of a complaint from the McCain-Palin campaign's general counsel to YouTube management. The letter says YouTube's 10-day review policy hurts America, because "10 days can be a lifetime in a political campaign." It's never been proven that anyone at McCain/Palin headquarters used the DMCA to take down Sarah's swimsuit video. But no doubt being DMCA'd by Fox News for using a news clip in a campaign video has given John McCain a more personal view of how copyright laws can backfire.

Apple and other online music retailers get their way

Jackson West · 10/02/08 05:20PM

The Copyright Royalty Board, an obscure agency which has been thrust into the spotlight thanks to its role in arbitrating rates for digital music distribution, has frozen the price online music stores have to pay to artists and labels at a little over nine cents. The music industry had been lobbying for an increase to around fifteen cents, would likely have erased the notoriously slim margins Apple enjoys at the iTunes Music Store. Not that Apple would have cared, since it's all about the iPod business anyway and the company was ostensibly willing to shut down digital download sales if it didn't get its way.

Wilson Sonsini diversifies into Marissa Mayer's favorite pastry

Owen Thomas · 10/02/08 12:40PM

When a history of the decline and fall of Wilson Sonsini, Silicon Valley's preeminent law firm, is written, this will surely deserve a paragraph: The lawyers there are now defending cupcakes. Sprinkles Cupcakes, the Los Angeles bakery made notable by HBO's Entourage, is seeking to defend its trademarked dot patterns against imitators; the concentric circles denote flavors. (Shown here: a red velvet cupcake.) It is, I suppose, a question of intellectual property. And a client is a client. But taking on this case just illustrates how far Wilson Sonsini has fallen since the '90s, when IPO fees fattened its partners' wallets, and before it got wrapped up in stock-options scandals. The silver icing: This may lead to work representing Google executive Marissa Mayer, should an interloper ever trespass on the ideas contained in her spreadsheet of cupcake recipes.