Google, along with the publishing consortium Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, a writers' group, announced a settlement Tuesday regarding the use of copyrighted book material in Google's Book Search program...

Not every observer heralded the settlement. San Francisco Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Corynne McSherry said she is "still digesting" the agreement but had some early thoughts:

"I will tell you, frankly, that I kind of wish this case had gone to litigation. I think Google had a great fair-use defense," she said. "A ruling from the court would have been good for everyone. It potentially could have fostered other offerings, based on that legal certainty" if Google had won.

The House of Representatives on Sunday cleared the intellectual property enforcement bill that would create an "IP coordinator" position in the White House...

The measure has received wide support from the business community, including from groups like the Recording Industry Association of America and the AFL-CIO, but it is opposed by public interest groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge.

James Cicconi, AT&T's senior vice president for external & legal affairs, set off a firestorm last week after The New York Times reported that he said his company was working with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America to implement a digital-fingerprinting scheme and would detect and filter out copyrighted material from its network.

"Everyone who understands the technology agrees that most simple filtering efforts are doomed to fail, since all the file-sharing applications will simply encrypt the traffic, [thus] necessitating more complex deep-packet protocol analysis, at a minimum," says Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation "I'm told that 20% of Bit Torrent traffic is already encrypted."

When college kids make mashups of Hollywood movies, do they violate the law? Not necessarily, according to a study Peter Jaszi and I completed at American University. In fact, those funny little videos you watch when you’re supposed to be working—if you’ve missed “Dramatic Chipmunk,” the best five seconds on the Internet ever (Yes, Google it now)—are important harbingers of a more participatory media culture. Defending the rights of their creators to use copyrighted material without permission may be defending the future of media for political and social action, as well.

Content providers worried about piracy and theft, like NBC Universal and Viacom, are working out deals with online video providers like Veoh and MySpace, for specialized filters and software to identify copyrighted material. These filters will “take down” videos that are copies of copyrighted material. The trouble is, nobody has figured out how to protect online videos that use copyrighted material under fair use. As Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says, it’s like going tuna fishing without a dolphin-safe net.

With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute.

Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual.

Still, privacy advocates were quick to point out that the watermarking is likely to produce fresh, empirical data that copyright material is ping-ponging across peer-to-peer sites -- data the industry would use in its ongoing bid to tighten copyright controls, and to browbeat internet service providers to implement large-scale copyright-filtering operations.

"It gives them the ability to put pressure on policy makers and ISPs to do filtering," said Fred Von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney.

A Scottsdale cab driver is set to fight what he calls the “conglomerate of conglomerates” in federal court this month in a recording industry lawsuit accusing him of copyright infringement.

With little savings, not much in assets and no attorney, Jeffery Howell, 46, has been fighting a civil lawsuit the Recording Industry Association of America leveled against him in 2006 alleging he made 11 songs available through his computer.

If Howell loses the lawsuit he could face a $40,000 fine, according to court documents.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group defending peoples’ rights in the digital world, opposes such lawsuits against music fans.

“These lawsuits are a bad idea,” said Rebecca Jeschke, a foundation spokeswoman. “They clearly aren’t working, because artists aren’t getting paid and it’s singling out people who download and share music. It’s time for the record industry to look past the lawsuits and come up with a solution that would get artists paid and consumers what they want without digital-rights management on it.”

Apple, Inc. settled a lawsuit out of court on Dec. 20 against Nicholas M. Ciarelli ’08 over leaks about its product plans on Ciarelli’s Web site, “Think Secret.”

The lawsuit ended a drawn-out effort by Apple to better control its product launches by targeting sites that published product information prior to official releases, as Think Secret has done on numerous occasions.

“[Although] the court never ruled on that motion, I think that if the case had gone to court, Think Secret would have won,” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Apple, Inc. settled a lawsuit out of court on Dec. 20 against Nicholas M. Ciarelli ’08 over leaks about its product plans on Ciarelli’s Web site, “Think Secret.”

The lawsuit ended a drawn-out effort by Apple to better control its product launches by targeting sites that published product information prior to official releases, as Think Secret has done on numerous occasions.

“[Although] the court never ruled on that motion, I think that if the case had gone to court, Think Secret would have won,” said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The record industry got a surprise when it subpoenaed the University of Oregon in September, asking it to identify 17 students who had made available songs from Journey, the Cars, Dire Straits, Sting and Madonna on a file-sharing network...

"People get pushed into settlements," said Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. "The Oregon attorney general is showing what a real fight among equals would look like."

In an effort to stymie Internet pirates, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a music industry group, is asking European lawmakers to require Internet service providers to use filters to block the illicit transfer of copyrighted material.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a privacy advocate, responded by sending a letter to the European Parliament arguing that such filters would be an “ineffective measure that will do little to practically address the concerns of major rights holders while imposing serious costs on the individual rights of European citizens.”

The filtering technology would not be effective, according to the foundation, because pirates would simply encrypt files to bypass it in the same way that banks encrypt credit card information. Meanwhile, legitimate users of copyrighted material would be hampered in their ability to post video and music clips. And the costs would most likely be borne by service providers, and, by extension, their customers, the foundation said.