Righthaven LLC -- a bottom feeding legal outfit -- has teamed up with the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Denver Post to sue mom and pop websites, advocacy and public interest groups and forum board operators for copyright infringement. The strategy of Righthaven is to sue thousands of these website owners, who are primarily unfunded and will be forced to settle out of court.
Righthaven lawsuitsTo date Righthaven has been ordered to pay $323,138 in legal fees and sanctions.Righthaven lawsuits

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Today is Internet Censorship Day: Join the Urgent Fight Against SOPA Now!

Posted by fairuser
Contact Congress: Quickly send a letter right now! | Sign the petition at Whitehouse.gov.

Hundreds of web sites are participating in American Censorship Day, taking place today, November 16, including the EFF, Boing Boing, Reddit, Creative Commons, Hype Machine and many more.

Righthaven Observer Offers Insights Into SOPA

Why I Oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)/E-PARASITES Act
By Eric Goldman
The Stop Online Piracy Act, with its ridiculously named subpart the "E-PARASITE Act," doesn't expressly modify 17 USC 512. Nevertheless, it is a full-fledged assault on the safe harbor's scheme. It employs the same basic notice-and-takedown structure of 512, but it applies the cutoff obligations to payment processors and ad networks ... expands--for the first time--the takedown obligations to trademarks ... expands the takedown obligations to cover anti-circumvention in addition to the 17 USC 106 rights, expands the reasons why a rightsowner can complain, and does not give the governed intermediaries any business incentive to stand up for user content. On the latter point, because SOPA is designed to cut off the cash, each and every UGC item potentially jeopardizes its entire economic enterprise of a website hosting it. In other words, if the website goes offline because of cash flow problems caused by the cutoff attributable to a single UGC content item, all of the UGC on that website goes dark because of a single content item. Talk about collateral damage.
See: Eric Goldman's blog post in full


Technology Companies that Support SOPA

Business Software Alliance (BSA) is a trade group that supports SOPA. Some of its members are listed below and are complicit in supporting SOPA. See full list of BSA members.

Adobe
Apple
Dell
Intel
Intuit
McAfee
Microsoft
Quark
Rosetta Stone
Symantec
Posted by fairuser at 12:02 AM

1 comment:

  1. KenNovember 19, 2011 at 12:53 PM

    Warner Brothers admitted in court they have software that searches key words, such as movie titles, then once found a DMCA take-down notice is automatically issued and the work is taken down. Problem is this dragnet approach has taken down hundreds if not thousands of works that do not belong to Warner Brothers. Now if Warner Brothers is doing this it makes you wonder how many others are doing the same?

    This action is out and out theft and should be considered in the same realm of Denial of Service attacks because those effected lose money, time, and exposure by having their works taken down and having to challenge the take-downs to get them put back. This is real theft folks, not the theoretical type the movie and music industries likes to bandy about.

    How can the movie and music industries demand their copyrights be respected when they so brazenly disrespect others? It is the ultimate in hypocrisy.

    The backlash against copyrights is growing stronger and copyright owners outrageous over-reaching is going to end up hurting them the most.

    http://www.geekosystem.com/warner-admits-false-takedowns/

    ReplyDelete

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