Google's lawyers suggest that Viacom's strategy in its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube is to subvert the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's protection of websites and Internet service providers and "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression." The argument is set forth in a response to Viacom's amended complaint filed in April, which cited 150,000 examples of infringing content, which together had been viewed 1.5 billion times.

RedLasso, a Philadelphia-based startup which serves as kind of a universal TiVo for embeddable clips, was issued a cease and desist letter by multiple networks today. The company, which has been cagey about the obvious copyright issues since I first ran into the startup at PodCamp Philly last year, even managed to pull a fast one on TechCrunch — Reuters ran the report of the legal issues before TechCrunch's post about the company went live this afternoon, prompting a half-hearted update. (C'mon, where's Michael Arrington's temper when it's actually appropriate?) If I were RedLasso, I would have made friendly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation before making nice with the Huffington Post and other publishers (including Gawker Media), which now face scads of dead-embed posts in their archives.

The fight for free culture rages on at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they've built YouTomb, a site that scans YouTube for metadata on videos pulled because of copyright complaints and posts screenshots and information such as time online before takedown. Sadly, what they don't do is archive the pulled videos so that bloggers with archives full of dead embeds can make their own fair-use stands. [News.com]

Users of Microsoft's Windows Media Center began having trouble using the software to copy NBC shows for later viewing like any DVR would. The reason? The network had marked copying the show as verboten under the terms of the FCC's proposed, but never implemented, broadcast-flag rules. In other words, Microsoft is enforcing a law that does not exist. (An EFF video, "The Corruptibles," provides a good, if activist-biased, explanation of the broadcast-flag controversy.) [News.com]

An eagle-eyed Valleywag tipster with a taste for Modest Mouse spotted an interesting new feature on YouTube. Uploads of music videos from the band by non-official sources now carry a link reading "Contains content from Sony BMG," which leads users to the official Modest Mouse page on the site. The unofficial version of the video "Float On" has over a million views — the official version only 235,000. Also, both the official and unofficial versions have had the embed codes which allow users to post the video on third-party sites removed. My question? Whether this is automated by YouTube or if Sony BMG is flagging their videos by hand.

After news that NBC had asked Microsoft to develop content filtering technology to keep infringing files off the Zune spread like wildfire, Cesar Menendez, a Microsoft employee working on the Zune, said there was no agreement between the television network and the technology company to implement any such plan.

Intellectual property is, in many ways, my family's business. And over the years my mother Mary Deaton and I have had more than a few heated arguments about copyright reform. That said, my mom has been using Microsoft Windows since before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shed his diapers, and was ripping CDs to MP3 since I bought her a Rio MP3 player for Christmas with my dot-boom winnings. Since then, she bought into the system and signed up with MTV's now defunct Urge digital music service. But thanks to digital rights management, or DRM, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser is punishing her for such law-abiding ways — and charging her $14.99 a month for these "feature." Seems that in being migrated, like other Urge users, to Real's Rhapsody service, my mom lost the ability to transfer her music to her MP3 player or burn it to CD as promised. What ensued is a case study in bad customer service and the consumer-punishing idiocy that is DRM, and it's all after the jump.

Part of the deal between NBC and Microsoft to sell television shows to Zune owners is that Microsoft will attempt to build in antipiracy technology that keeps anything you might have downloaded through less than legitimate means off the device. In other words, you can say goodbye to trading MP3 files or videos with your friends on the Zune — instead, you'll have to use officially authorized sources to charge it up with content. How will the Zune know if the video you're trying to download to the device was downloaded illegally or, say, created by you? Until digital watermarking technology improves significantly, it won't, and even then, who knows. So for you lonely Zune owners, prepare to get even lonelier, because the second the company implements this "feature," it can kiss goodbye to what little market share it now enjoys. (Photo by AP/Ted S. Warren)

Do Google lawyers plan to settle with Viacom over its $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google and it's video-sharing site YouTube? "Nope," says grandiloquent dealmaker David Eun, VP of content partnerships at Google. "We're going all the way to the Supreme Court," Eun said. "We're very clear about it." With brass-balled talk like that, you'd think Eun hasn't seen Viacom's thinly-veiled threats of violence against YouTube. (Photo by James Gordon)

While Republicans did what they could to paint Lawrence Lessig — and, by extension, Barack Obama — as an anti-Christian elitist, they couldn't raise the stink enough. So instead think-tanker Tom Sydnor of the Progress and Freedom Foundation has attacked copylefters as "quasi-socialist utopianism" in a review of Lessig's book Free Culture. There's just one small problem.

BayWords is the new blog host from those lovable Swedish outlaws at The Pirate Bay. The blogging platform is built atop open-source WordPress code. Which is a little ironic, since TorrentFreak reports that the project was started after a WordPress.com user who linked to copyrighted material lost his account. As for the new site, almost anything goes. "As long as you don't break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it," says The Pirate Bay's Peter "Brokep" Sunde. Looks I'll be spending the weekend reading up on Sweden's legal code.

Bell Canada, the largest Internet service provider for our neighbors to the north, has admitted to using "deep packet sniffers" [Ed's note: Sounds intriguing, am assigning Melissa to look into these people] to throttle peer-to-peer protocol transfers such as BitTorrent downloads. Executives there obviously hadn't spoken to peers at national broadcaster CBC, which recently started legitimately distributing shows via P2P, as has American network NBC and musicians like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. The company also throttled traffic from ISPs that buy bandwidth wholesale from the company. Net neutrality groups are lobbying Canadian officials to regulate Bell Canada into submission. But Minister of Industry Jim Prentice is opposed to any further regulation, and the Conservative Party-led government has been in favor or easing current regulations on telcos. Meanwhile, here in the states, Comcast has cozied up to BitTorrent and the FCC has proven more amenable to arguments in favor of net neutrality.

Getting a little taste of their own doubloon-looting medicine, the Society of Authors in the U.K. has determined that piracy will do to book publishing what it did to the music business. If that means fewer parking permits for glistening pec caresser Danielle Steel here in San Francisco, excuse me if I don't shake my fists at the thunderheads and wail unto the storm. Seriously, what's the real issue here?

YouTube's profitability or lack thereof has long been debated in the absence of facts. In announcing a mildy high six-figure deal for YouTube, VentureBeat's MG Siegler quotes Forbes numbers that aren't much higher than previous arbitrary estimates. From what I hear, Google has sent engineer after engineer to solve a problem that seems intractible — how to guarantee the site's content is kosher. It's become a point of fail in Google business culture, and the solution lays beyond the company's algorithm-worshipping, individualist ken: aggregating human effort.

Lifecasting site Justin.tv has come a long way since banning a broadcaster for one night of indecent exposure — that is, sexual acts. There may be less porn now, but other illegal content now graces Justin.tv's servers. Right now I'm watching a stream of Fox Sports Net West's broadcast of the San Diego Padres playing the Los Angeles Angels. Last night, more than 2,000 people watched the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers play. Given Major League Baseball's draconian online reporting rules — no more than seven photos from any game; audio and video clips can be a maximum of two minutes and can't be streamed live — we doubt the MLB is happy about this.

Antigua has fired a salvo against the United States in a long-simmering dispute over trade regulations, promising to give free reign to intellectual property piracy if the US doesn't allow Americans to access Antigua's lucrative online gambling businesses. The World Trade Organization awarded the tiny island nation the right to ignore American copyright laws last December if negotations fail. Antigua's hope is that the Motion Picture Association of America and software companies like Microsoft will pressure the US government to come to terms — after all, The Pirate Bay has been looking for an island paradise. Why doesn't Antigua threaten to publish details of the local tax shelters used by studio and tech executives and their financiers? That seems easier. (Photo by AP/Johnny Jno-Baptiste)

When Viacom sued Google for $1 billion over copyright infringement on YouTube last year, it seemed unlikely Viacom lawyers would ever win that much. Now it will be that much harder. Judge Louis Stanton ruled that Viacom will not be awarded "punitive damages." If Viacom wins the case, any money it gets from Google will be a sum determined only by how much the alleged copyright infringement cost Viacom. Since Viacom executives argued during the writers' strike that they weren't making any money online, they may have a tough case getting anything.

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has made the first section of a four-part album available as a BitTorrent download. The rest of the 36-track album is available on the band's website or on Amazon.com, without copying restrictions, for $5. Reznor has been a constant critic of record labels and the music industry for years. Last year he admitted that he frequently pirated music himself. He included this statement in the upload notes for the album, Ghosts I:

The Motion Picture Association of America lifted the veil off its clever prank today. Since 2005 it's been labeling college students with their fancy high-speed networks as thieving music pirates. It commissioned a study that blamed undergrads for 44 percent of the industry's claimed losses due to file sharing. Turns out the number's a lot closer to 15 percent. Too bad they didn't catch that prior to crafting the "keep Napster on life-support" education bill that would force universities to police their networks and buy paid subscriptions for their students. (Photo by Kris Krüg)

Google has hired new lawyers to defend itself against Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit, the WSJ reports. Out with Phil Beck of Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP, in with a new team from Mayer Brown LLP. Google told us the move had to do with scheduling and Mayer Brown's New York legal expertise. You'd think almost a year in would be an odd time for such a change, but today's move is in keeping with the confusion to surrounding Google's defense team from the beginning.