5 years later, Viacom still suing YouTube out of “principle”

A five year-old legal battle between Viacom and Google-owned YouTube over copyrighted content continues to clog up the U.S. court system because Viacom, parent company of Paramount Pictures and MTV, believes there’s an important principle at stake, president and CEO Philippe Dauman said Tuesday.

Dauman, in an interview at the D: Dive Into Media event, defended his company’s ongoing litigation against YouTube, the purveyor of user-generated content, despite a 2010 federal ruling establishing that the … Continue Reading

What is ACTA and why are thousands of Europeans protesting it?

Has Europe gone mad? A trade agreement most Americans have never heard of has sparked outrage and protests across the pond.

Twenty-two of the European Union’s 27 member states signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Tokyo on January 26. In response, thousands of Poles marched in the streets, members of Poland’s parliament donned Guy Fawkes masks, and a member of the European Parliament quit in protest.

By contrast, when U.S. President Barack Obama signed … Continue Reading

Pass the popcorn: Y Combinator startup caught stealing from 37signals

Here’s some developer drama for your Saturday morning: Curebit, a Y Combinator startup that just closed a round of funding from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund, has been caught red-handed stealing HTML code, images, and the like from 37signals.

37signals, for those of you not familiar with the inner workings of the machine we call the Internet, is a web shop founded by Ruby on Rails creator DHH (short for David Heinemeier Hansson) and Jason … Continue Reading

House debate over SOPA anti-piracy bill to resume in Feb.

The U.S. House of Representatives has decided to push back a vote on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) for at least a month.

The delay is due in large part to opposition from many companies and organizations in the tech industry, including Google, Wikipedia and others. The House Judiciary Committee announced the delay in a new statement today.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who authored SOPA, said he expects markup on the bill (a.k.a. … Continue Reading

Founders of Reddit, Veoh and Craigslist join forces in anti-SOPA/PIPA discussion

In advance of testifying at a congressional hearing tomorrow, a group of technology industry leaders participated in a public discussion about the ill effects of the proposed SOPA and PIPA anti-piracy legislation.

The discussion, held in Washington D.C. today and sponsored by lobbyist group P Street, included such panelists as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Scribd founder Jared Friedman, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures Brad Burnham, Veoh founder Dmitry Shapiro, and … Continue Reading

Universal’s YouTube snafu still leaves questions unanswered for Megaupload

Are you in the mood for a mystery? Right now, a judge and a couple teams of lawyers are working on a great one — the case of the disappearing, reappearing YouTube video.

Earlier this month, Universal Music Group pulled a wildly popular video by file-hosting service Megaupload off YouTube. While YouTube has reinstated the clip, UMG has not yet said why it requested the video be pulled in the first place. The video only … Continue Reading

Why did Universal get this video yanked off YouTube if it doesn’t have a copyright claim?

Universal Music Group recently had a video removed from YouTube because…

Well, that’s a good question, actually. The video was removed without notice and without any copyright violations, and most folks (outside of a small group of contract attorneys) are still struggling to understand why.

UPDATE: YouTube has reinstated the video and has given VentureBeat the following statement: “Our partners do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they own the … Continue Reading

Megaupload is suing Universal for unjustly yanking its commercial off YouTube

In an interesting reversal on usual Internet copyright disputes, file-sharing site Megaupload is taking Universal Music Group to court.

UPDATE: The filing is now official; you can read the whole thing online as a PDF.

Megaupload’s Mega Song commercial is a bizarre and surreal commercial featuring endorsements from an impressive A-list roster of celebrities, including Will.i.am, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Serena Williams, Snoop Dogg and a host of others.

Macy Gray actually sings parts of … Continue Reading

YouTube buys a friend in the music biz

YouTube has purchased music royalty processing startup RightsFlow for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced Friday. Another day, another acquisition for YouTube parent company Google, right? Not so fast, this deal has big implications and could make YouTube a much more music-friendly place.

RightsFlow was founded in 2007 and operates a copyright compliance system that manages a database of more than 30 million song licenses. Think of the company as a content licenser (and digital … Continue Reading

Xunlei, despite canceling IPO, is still raising U.S. copyright concerns

Xunlei, the Chinese Internet company whose IPO was scheduled, then postponed indefinitely this summer, is now catching U.S. legislators’ attention.

VentureBeat guest contributor and Shanghai-based lawyer Greg Pilarowski wrote a column in July comparing Xunlei’s media download business to the peer-to-peer file sharing technologies used by Napster and Grokster, both now defunct thanks to their facilitation of rampant copyright violation. He points out that 234 copyright-infringement cases were brought against Xunlei in China in 2009 … Continue Reading

Pirate Bay founders launch BayFiles: a copyright-friendly file-hosting service? (Yup)

Founders of popular file-sharing website The Pirate Bay are launching a new file-hosting service called BayFiles, reports TorrentFreak.

Much like file-sharing services RapidShare and Megaupload, BayFiles works lets users upload files to its servers and easily share them online. That’s different from The Pirate Bay, which currently hosts torrent files (essentially pointers to files you can download from the peer-to-peer BitTorrent network).

And unlike The Pirate Bay, BayFiles will be dedicated to respecting copyrights — … Continue Reading

Copyright Office says illegal streaming should be a felony

It’s all fun and games until the government brings felony charges against the guy who uploaded a 2 minute clip of Who’s The Boss to Vimeo.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, newly appointed Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante argued in favor of the IP Enforcement Czar’s recommendation that the Government should stop treating illegal streaming offenses as unauthorized performances and instead start classifying them as unauthorized reproductions and distributions.

By doing so, the … Continue Reading

No more syncing: Didiom streams music to your iPhone from anywhere

With the iPhone app Didiom, syncing music files to your phone may become a thing of the past. That’s why we’re choosing Didiom as the first innovative app for VentureBeat’s Mobile App Spotlight.

Didiom lets you stream music to your iPhone or iPod Touch (or BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile 6 phone) from your Windows PC over Wi-Fi and 3G. It’s available in two flavors: A free, or Lite, version that lets you stream up to … Continue Reading

Belgian court orders ISP to block copyrighted content

With the iPhone app Didiom, syncing music files to your phone may become a thing of the past. That’s why we’re choosing Didiom as the first innovative app for VentureBeat’s Mobile App Spotlight.

Didiom lets you stream music to your iPhone or iPod Touch (or BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile 6 phone) from your Windows PC over Wi-Fi and 3G. It’s available in two flavors: A free, or Lite, version that lets you stream up to … Continue Reading