MTV, which recently made a super smart and exciting YouTube-combating move by making its music video collection available online, just ruined it. They’ve censored Weird Al.

Though initially critical of the McCain campaign’s request for special treatment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has echoed parts of a letter to YouTube by calling for immediate fair use review of videos uploaded to the site upon the receipt of a counter-notice to a DMCA takedown notice.

Though initially critical of the McCain campaign’s request for special treatment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has echoed parts of a letter to YouTube by calling for immediate fair use review of videos uploaded to the site upon the receipt of a counter-notice to a DMCA takedown notice.

Though initially critical of the McCain campaign’s request for special treatment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has echoed parts of a letter to YouTube by calling for immediate fair use review of videos uploaded to the site upon the receipt of a counter-notice to a DMCA takedown notice.

Though initially critical of the McCain campaign’s request for special treatment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has echoed parts of a letter to YouTube by calling for immediate fair use review of videos uploaded to the site upon the receipt of a counter-notice to a DMCA takedown notice.

Earlier this week, general counsel for the McCain campaign petitioned YouTube to give special treatment to political ads scrubbed from the site because of DMCA take down notices. General counsel for YouTube roundly rejected that request.

After a slew of political ads from the McCain-Palin campaign were taken down from YouTube because of copyright holder DMCA complaints, the campaign sent a letter to YouTube (PDF) urging the company to be less immediate with its compliance with the letters and to subject videos to full legal review.

Either Google Germany’s lawyers aren’t up to snuff, or they’re just stuck in a really hostile environment.  Regardless, a new report indicates that two court rulings would have Google stop showing certain thumbnail images in its search results.

Lawsuits have long been the main way through which copyright owners have interacted with YouTube.  It seems that the Video ID program has achieved a sort of miracle, though, and made some owners like YouTube after all.

It’s not been a good week for developers of well-established game knock-offs. Facebook favorite Scrabulous, a Scrabble-like game developed by two brothers in India was just removed in the UK and Australia, after already being forced down from the social network in North America last month.

The presence of the Olympic’s five interlocking rings in a video of a protest against Chinese control of Tibet led to the International Olympic Committee claiming copyright infringement.

Highly public position allegedly caused confusion with readers who attributed his personal views to be Google’s opinions.

If Google has a legal achilles heel right now, it’s got to be YouTube. The search engine knew it was buying a can of worms, when it set aside $200 million in anticipation of potential lawsuits.

If you understood the subtitle reference, congratulations, you’re old enough to watch porn, and probably run for President. If you didn’t get it, you’re awfully young and let me explain something before we move on: My understanding is that there are dirty movies on the Internet; I am told dirty movies are also called "porn" and you can’t see them on TV or YouTube.
 

CS Lewis’ estate is furious over the registration of narnia.mobi by an individual in Scotland and wants the domain reassigned.

Storing news articles from properties managed by Belgium’s Copiepresse returned as an issue for Google, as the newspaper group wants damages for Google’s normal indexing of their content.

The European Union’s internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy has proposed extending the copyright protection for music performers from 50 years to 95 years.

"It is the performer who gives life to the composition and while most of us have no idea who wrote our favorite song – we can usually name the performer, " McCreevy said. If the copyright protection is not extended thousands of European performers who recorded in the late fifties and sixties will lose all of their royalties over the next ten years.

Noted Internet law expert Michael Geist criticized an opinion piece appearing in a Canadian newspaper as “astonishingly misleading and factually incorrect.”

Television networks and sports leagues are pretty vigilant about protecting their content, and have gotten fairly nasty about it lately, especially in relation to the Internet. That righteous indignation doesn’t always go both ways, though, as these same entities can be lax when it comes to use of other people’s content.

Here’s a case that’ll likely leave you with an icky feeling. A lawyer for a large company in Idaho copyrighted a cease-and-desist letter, and when an anonymous blogger posted the letter on his blog, the company subpoenaed the blog hosting company for the blogger’s identity in order to pursue copyright infringement claims.

Jeremy Toeman asks for common sense in copyright laws and warns his congresscritter against the PRO IP act: “Common sense tells me that the maximum penalty for transmitting an MP3 file should not be over 1000-fold the maximum penalty of shoplifting a CD from a store.”

We aren’t going to have common sense in this, sorry. The political system is jiggered by those who have money and can pay for lobbyists, etc.