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Over the last year, alleged psychic Uri Geller and his business associate have successfully removed many of these clips from the Web by charging that they violate his copyrights. In the 13-minute NOVA program, Geller only claims ownership of eight seconds, yet that was enough for him to file a "takedown" demand with YouTube, using ...the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
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As the school year approaches, several Boston-area colleges are intensifying efforts to prevent illegal downloading on campus, including hosting sessions on the perils of pirating and offering students free, legal means of getting songs.
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A survey in the United Kingdom has shown a 7 percent increase in the number of people downloading music illegally online, while the legal music download market is slowing. In the United States, however, data from earlier this year has indicated otherwise.
According to the 2007 Digital Media Survey, which was published in the UK by Entertainment Media Research and law firm Olswang, unauthorized downloading of music is at its highest level - reversing the slight decline of last year.
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A description of the musician Prince's multiplatform approach to the music biz, including how he gave away his latest album in British in conjunction with a newspaper publisher.
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So some fear that Blockbuster and Netflix are turning into giant free-movie banks as film fanatics rent once and burn for all their friends. Not so, says the NPD Group, a research group that has monitored the behavior of 12,000 Americans with software on their computers. Only about 1.5 percent of those even have DVD ripping software. And 2/3 of them used it in the first quarter of this year.
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NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton suggests that society wastes entirely too much money policing crimes like burglary, fraud, and bank-robbing when it should be doing something about piracy instead.
"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," Cotton said. "If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year." Cotton's comments come in Paul Sweeting's report on Hollywood's latest shenanigans on Capitol Hill.
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Modern capitalism rests on a foundation of property rights, agreements between parties to transfer those rights, and laws that enforce those rights and agreements. My impression is that property rights in virtual worlds are very simple. If I have an item in my Second Life inventory, from an inworld perspective I "own" it entirely. No one can steal it from me without hacking the database, I can use it and sell it as I please. (EU Lawyer Vincent Scheurer has noted that this ownership doesn't mean a whole lot after leaving the inworld sphere, but that is an entirely different issue.) About the only sophistication I see is that I can sell it to someone with slightly restricted rights--they can't copy and/or modify it.
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The Motion Picture Association of America, a trade organization for Hollywood’s largest film studios, sued two Internet sites, claiming they illegally post copyrighted material.
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On the day that most American webcasters fell silent in protest of scheduled performance royalties rate increases to be imposed by the US Copyright Royalty Board, the key sponsor of House legislation to override those fees finally got one minute of floor time, to speak on behalf of his bill.
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Graduate posts on Youtube, upsets university and students. "The five-minute clip, identified as a film about Winston-Salem State football, showed a fistfight between two ex-athletes, up-close shots of scantily clad women dancing, a depiction of players mixing grain alcohol, a picture of an athlete defacing another university's property, and enough foul language to make a rapper blush."