Monday 26 May 2008

Copyright infringement news

The Associated Press reports that Google's lawyers have filed documents that claim Viacom's copyright infringement lawsuit of YouTube is a threat to the freedom of the internet. Google owns YouTube and was responding to Viacom's latest lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to "an explosion of copyright infringement" by YouTube and others.
And Ars Technica has a story about multimillion dollar infringement judgments against 2 small websites, ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net, for copyright infringement of various movies and TV shows. They were sued by the Motion Picture Association of America and were found guilty of contributory copyright infringement because they searched for, identified, collected, and indexed links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows - even though they didn't host any infringing content. The folks blogging at Techwhack say that " similar charges can now be levied against search engine giants like Google and Yahoo which also enable users to hunt for pirated media online. "

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