Category: Copyright Infringement

Recently it seems that Congress has continually chiseled away at our ability to utilize the wide array of technology that we purchase. Both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) have created powerful statutory weapons that equip corporate technology producers with endless legal ammunition to protect their “legal […]

A new set of bittorrent copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed in the Northern District of Illinois over the movie “The Trade of Innocents.” Five complaints for copyright infringement have been filed, specifically, The Bicycle Peddler, LLC v. Does 1-12 – 2013-cv-02372 The Bicycle Peddler, LLC v. Does 1-21 – 2013-cv-02373 The Bicycle Peddler, LLC […]

Warner Brothers was sued for trademark infringement and copyright infringement by the creators of video-based internet memes Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat. These two videos have been viewed over 245,000,000 times, collectively. Keyboard Cat is a 54 second video uploaded to YouTube in 2007 that shows a cat playing a keyboard. Staring in the video, […]

A recent District Court decision has once again reaffirmed the broad protection afforded to ISP’s under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s (“DMCA”) safe harbor provision. Viacom, as well as several other copyright holders, initiated suit against YouTube for alleged copyright  infringement occurring on the site. The case was remanded back from the 2nd Circuit with […]

Last week in  The Associated Press v. Meltwater U.S. Holdings, Inc., a federal district court in New York held that the internet news monitoring service, Meltwater, infringed upon the copyrights of the Associated Press (AP) when it compiled excerpts of AP articles and distributed them to its subscribers.   How it all started . . […]

Let me begin with one simple fact: Most of us have probably downloaded music at least once in our life. Don’t try and hide it, I understand the circumstances. Music is too expensive, online music stores do not offer everything you want, actual record stores are about as rare as a wooly mammoth, and record […]

After a New York City-based Internet startup, Aereo, prevailed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit earlier this month, major broadcast corporations, Fox and Univision, have hinted at switching their channels over to pay TV.  While the days of rabbit ears and antennas have largely faded away since the analog to […]

Last week, the Kardashian sisters filed a copyright lawsuit in California federal court, claiming Ellen Pearson, the widow of their father, Richard Kardashian, unlawfully sold their family photographs and diaries to Bauer Publishing Company.  Bauer published some of the photographs and diary excerpts in recent issues of its Life & Style and In Touch magazines.  […]

In a strange copyright infringement case, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that MMS, the text messaging standard, is not an illegal file sharing service and, therefore, cell phone carriers cannot be held liable for vicarious copyright infringement for the forwarding of copyrighted MMS messages. Luvdart, a company that produces greetings and stylized […]

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the copyright first sale doctrine not only applies to goods lawfully purchased within the United States, but also to goods lawfully purchased in foreign countries. The copyright first sale doctrine states that the rights of the copyright holder are cut off upon the first lawful sale of a […]