Come support EFF and hear DRM-free tunes from Calabash Music on November 5 at Little Baobab in San Francisco. Calabash Music is a leading online distributor of music from around the world, providing its entire catalog in MP3 format and splitting sales revenue 50-50 with artists. Local DJ...
Engadget (via BoingBoing) reports yetanother digital media device "upgrade" that actually downgrades certain features. Creative Labs' latest firmware update to the Zen MicroPhoto and Zen Vision:M portable media players removes the ability to record FM radio. None of Creative's customers asked for this misfeature...
Today, Universal Music Group sued Grouper and Bolt.com for hosting copyrighted music videos uploaded by individual users. According to Reuters, Universal "made clear that ... [it] retain[ed] the right to add" to the lawsuit Sony Pictures, which recently bought Grouper. And thus the record industry lawsuits roll on...
Today, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IPFI), which represents record labels around the world, announced 8,000 lawsuits against P2P users in 17 countries. Over 31,000 lawsuits have now been filed worldwide against P2P users, including over 18,000 in the US. The Center for Technology and Society at...
A recent report from the House Committee on Government Reform shows that sloppy handling of personal data is rampant across the federal government, with 19 agencies self-reporting at least one leak of personally identifiable information since 2003. According to the report: Taken as a whole, the agency reports...
In a Reuters article published yesterday, Yahoo Music general manager David Goldberg offers this choice quote: "The notion that a track I buy in DRM is protected and one without DRM isn't is a fallacy.... It's all nonsense. Music is never going to be protected, and anybody who tells...
Lost in the GooTube shuffle last week was some even bigger news for the scores of YouTube users who already enjoyed lip syncing (and hip shaking) to their favorite songs and posting home videos to the site. Deals worked out with Sony BMG, Universal, and ...
Today Judge Walker issued an order in our case against AT&T setting a case management conference on November 14, 2006. The case management conference is an important step towards opening up discovery and moving the litigation forward. Previously, Judge Walker had placed the case on hold. Case management...
Bloggers in California have scored another victory against baseless legal threats intended to chill free speech. In Tendler v. Does, Mordecai Tendler had tried and failed to unmask several anonymous bloggers who had written about his alleged sexual misconduct. Yesterday, a California State Superior Court judge ruled that he...
This week, the FTC released a report about municipal wireless broadband projects. Rather than taking a particular stance on the matter, "[i]t sets forth a framework that recognizes that the relevance of arguments for and against municipal involvement may vary depending on the particular factual circumstances." As Harold Feld...
Last year, TiVo users experienced glitches that auto-erased recorded content. The culprit was Macrovision DRM, and it's back and as bad as ever in TiVo Series 3 for HD. CNet documents brand new errors that prevented viewing and recording content. (Link via BoingBoing.) Unfortunately, glitches like this...
John Batelle over at SearchBlog was kind enough to invite me to do a short interview about a variety of Google and YouTube copyright questions. Among other subjects touched on, I opine that all the hand-wringing analysts fretting about the copyright implications of GooTube may have it backwards...
