WebProNews

YouTube Called Out Over Country Music

Happy Friday!  To mark the weekly occasion, we can tell you that YouTube appears to have been served with yet another lawsuit.  This time it’s Cal IV Entertainment, a country music publisher, that feels Google’s video-sharing site isn’t doing enough to protect copyrighted material.

Macmillan CEO Lifts Google Laptops

Richard Charkin is the CEO of Macmillan Publishers, and he recently got into a bit of a tiff with Google.  This didn’t involve angry letters or frivolous lawsuits (entertaining as those are); instead, Charkin stole a pair of Google laptops.  And blogged about it.

Warner Music Sues Imeem For Infringement

Did you hear that Flea (of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame) is going to teach schoolchildren music?  Well, Warner Music Group (which represents the Chili Peppers) is going to teach Imeem a lesson - it’s suing the social networking site for copyright infringement.

Attorney General Shows Interest In Copyright Law

I have to wonder if Alberto Gonzales has been watching “Wag the Dog”; the attorney general lacks the power to start a military conflict, but he has put forth a proposal that attacks various forms of copyright infringement.  Some onlookers see this as little more than an attempt to divert attention from Gonzales’s own problems.

Internet Archive V. Shell: The Publicity Aftermath

After news of Suzanne Shell's countersuit against Internet Archive surviving by the thread of one non-dismissed claim – the claim that Internet Archive's Wayback Machine web crawler was guilty of breach of contract by ignoring the site's terms of use – hit the cyber circuit, a real catfight hissed and scratched its way across the weekend. You might call it a "flame war," in the traditional Internet sense, but that's hardly accurate.

Webmaster Claims Spider Entered Contract In Suit

The Web and artificial intelligence have brought about some surreal, science fiction like questions. The most recent mind-bending concept is whether or not robots can enter into contracts – that is, is a Web crawler implicitly entering a contract posted on a website announcing copyright conditions?