copyright infringement

The US Senate is about to consider a new legislation aimed to decrease copyright piracy on the Internet by allowing copyright owners to get court orders requiring Internet service providers and search engines to stop sending traffic to websites accused of trafficking in infringing goods.

Sony Ericsson is suing Clearwire over copyright infringement on allegations the US WiMax operator copied the logo of the phone maker. The Sweden-based company and its U.S. counterpart filed suit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, seeking Clearwire's profits along with damages and an order to stop the use of Clearwire's current logo.

This week a senior government official reported that China has arrested over 4,000 people for violating intellectual property rights (IPR) since November and will enforce tougher punishments to combat the "rampant" problem.

At a news conference Tuesday, Gao Feng, deputy director of the Ministry of Public Security's Economic Crimes Investigation Bureau, said that his agency had uncovered more than 2,000 cases since China launched a six-month campaign to beef up enforcement of intellectual property rights last November.

Apple generously continues to keep us absolutely calm about its irrevocable Big Brother position. This time in line with its usual “shut up, I ban this” policy the Cupertino dictator sent a frightening and threatening letter to a firm selling an action figure doll of its CEO Steve Jobs just after the company announced a new batch of Steve Jobs dolls following the fast sell-out of the first 300.

Last week a lawsuit against Apple was filed with the Manhattan federal court over the allegations the company infringed copyright of a young top model. Aspiring model Rebecca Battino seeks $1 million in damages for her photos appearing on an iTunes App Store application.

Rebecca, a 19 year-old New Yorker, alleges someone copied the photographs from her computer and used them in the application eXtreme Cam Girls, which had now been removed from the iTunes App Store.

Sunday, Perfect 10, the former publisher of Perfect 10 Magazine closed in 2007, made known the Canadian Federal Court has denied Google’s attempt to dismiss Perfect 10’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Google in Canada. 

Seven websites were shut down by US feds and customs officials this week on the ground of their illegal hosting of pirated copies of popular Hollywood films and TV shows. A weak earlier the White House unveiled its enforcement plan for confronting theft of intellectual property.

A Manhattan federal judge brought an acquittal judgment this week in a Viacom case launched against Google and YouTube on allegations of copyright infringement marking a major victory for Mountain View.

In its lawsuit Viacom alleged "tens of thousands of videos on YouTube, resulting in hundreds of millions of views," had been posted based on its copyrighted works, and that the defendants knew about it but did nothing to stop illegal uploads.

This week German authorities introduced a new regulation that users of Wi-Fi connections are liable for illegal downloading of copyrighted material even if they themselves do not directly commit the crime. The regulation comes after a ruling made by the German top criminal court which ruled that Wi-Fi owners are liable for abuse by a third party in cases where they fail to password-protect their internet connections.

Ipreo Holdings, which operates the bigdough institutional investor database, is suing Goldman Sachs accusing the company of infringing the copyright and stealing the company data. The suit submitted with the US District Court in New York with the accusations that at least two unidentified Goldman employees of 264 incidents of unauthorised access to the computer database in 2008 and 2009.

The filing alleges that that the Goldman staffers used Ipreo passwords without authorisation to steal confidential data from the site, which claims some 16,000 subscribers.

Google, the $167bn internet company, has launched a lawsuit against a tiny Florida-based company Blue Destiny Records, who sued Microsoft, Google and porn hounds' favourite cyberlocker Rapidshare last December.

At that time Blue Destiny claimed Rapidshare provided "a distribution centre for unlawful copies of copyrighted works", and that the search engines were benefitting from the infringement. The lawsuit was withdrawn by the company later in March.

An independent study by an American undergraduate showed that 99% of all files accessed through a Torrent network are unlicensed copyright material. Only 10 of the 1021 files in the survey could be distributed over the Mainline network without infringing copyright. Only 1 of the 145 pornographic files was considered non-infringing, student Sauhard Sahi found.

However, the study considered files, not bytes transferred: so the complete works of Led Zepp or a bonus DVD counts as one file, as does one 20kb eBook or a pack of Photoshop plug-ins.

As the Italian government pushes a new legislation to make online service providers responsible for their audiovisual content and copyright infringements by users, many Internet companies and civil liberty groups are raising their voice to express their explicit protest against such interference.

Under the draft legislation, which is scheduled to be approved next month, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Fastweb and Telecom Italia, and Web sites like Google's YouTube will be responsible for monitoring TV content on their pages, industry experts say.

As expected Chinese court supported their local company Baidu in a copyright infringement case launched against the largest search engine in the Celestial Empire by Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Hong Kong and Warner Music Hong Kong in early 2008.

The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court cleared Baidu of piracy ruling that the search engine had not broken rules by linking to music downloads that infringe copyright.

The IFPI said it was very disappointed with the ruling. Another site called Sohu was also cleared, the IFPI said.

 A citizen of Denmark Henrik Anderson decided to check the force of the copyright laws in the country and copied some DVDs anyway, a whole bunch of them. Having uploaded the contents of 100 discs to his computer (for personal use), he's asking to be arrested.