copyright

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has been rejected by the European Parliament's trade committee, the opinion of which is a major influence on the wider parliament.

INTA supported rapporteur David Martin's rejection of ACTA this morning by 19 votes to 12. Minutes before, the committee also voted 19-12 to ignore European Commission calls to postpone voting until the European Court of Justice has decided on ACTA's legality.

Trade commissioner Karel De Gucht said late last night that he would still ask the Parliament to reconsider ratifying ACTA when the ECJ ruling comes through in a year … Read more

Internet social corkboard Pinterest announced today that it is providing more attribution tools for sites such as Etsy, 500px, Kickstarter, Slideshare, and SoundCloud, linking to the content's source and giving full credit.

The social-sharing site, which launched in March 2010, lets users collect videos, photos, and other "things they love" from around the Internet and "pin" them on interest-specific boards. Users can then respond to that pin by commenting on it, liking it, or repinning it as one of their own favorites.

A backlash by content creators not too appreciative of having their creations posted … Read more

British Telecom became the final broadband provider in the U.K. to block customer access to the The Pirate Bay following an April court order forcing the move.

From about 4 a.m. PT Tuesday (noon British Summer Time), more than 6 million BT customers were faced with a "site blocked" message when trying to access the Magnet-link sharing site.

Some users were surprised to find that Web addresses and IP addresses that still worked on other broadband providers' networks threw up a "blocked" message on BT's system.

It later became clear that BT had … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In what might have been the shortest hearing yet during the case of Oracle v. Google, legal teams from both sides met Monday at the U.S. District Court to clean up unresolved financial issues surrounding the case.

There were three major points discussed and finalized during the 25-minute session.

First, Oracle filed a stipulation earlier in the day in which Google has been asked to pay $0 in statutory damages (in reference to the nine lines of code in the rangeCheck method and the test files). Oracle has done this to move proceedings along faster as it works … Read more

A New Zealand court has ordered the U.S. government to get ready to give MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom and his co-defendants copies of the data from servers seized by federal agents, ComputerWorld reported today.

The data includes over 10 million intercepted emails, financial records and more than 150 terabytes of data stored on servers seized in New Zealand.

The same court told the U.S. in May that it had three weeks to show the evidence that supports its indictment against MegaUpload managers.

In January, the U.S. government  indicted DotCom and five others connected to the company … Read more

MegaUpload's request to dismiss criminal copyright charges should be denied, the U.S. Attorney's office said yesterday in a court filing.

Claims made by MegaUpload two weeks ago that the U.S. government has no jurisdiction over the Hong Kong-based cloud-storage service are untrue, according to the document filed by Neil MacBride, U.S. Attorney for Eastern District of Virginia.

In January, MacBride's office indicted MegaUpload, founder Kim DotCom, and six other men connected to the company. The U.S. accused the group of operating the company as a front for a massive piracy scheme that made … Read more

Google and a French authors group have reached an agreement, which means the country will be able to start selling electronic books, the New York Times reported today.

The agreement between Google and the Society of Men of Letters of France includes Google setting up a framework agreement that would allow publishers to offer digital versions of their works for Google to sell. This means France is the only country with an industry wide book-scanning agreement in place to cover works that are out of print but still under copyright, an issue that continues to plague U.S. authors.

Google … Read more

Wildly popular image-sharing site Pinterest has tapped an ex-Google lawyer to head its legal department and, presumably, watch its back on copyright issues, according to a report.

Business Insider says Pinterest has confirmed that it has hired Michael Yang, who, BI said, left his position as deputy general counsel at Google yesterday.

BI notes that Yang did damage control when people objected to Google's Buzz product publishing the names of people its users frequently e-mailed. He also dealt with a controversy over Chrome's terms of service, and went to Washington this year to explain Google's new privacy … Read more

The Recording Industry Association of America's CEO, Cary Sherman, testified before Congress today on "The Future of Audio." Although the minutes of the hearing aren't yet available, Sherman did publish a statement of his speech, according to TorrentFreak, which first reported this news.

In Sherman's statement, he stresses that online piracy must be stopped and one of the ways to do this is by having search engines, like Google and Bing, censor any results that could lead users to sites with illegally obtained copyrighted material.

"Major advertisers and ad agencies announced a series of … Read more