SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act, has been covered before here on Ghacks. The bill is a blatant attempt to give law enforcement agencies and copyright holders more abilities under U.S. law to fight counterfeit goods and copyright infringements. Many arguments have been brought forth against this, from threatening online freedom of speech and web-related [...]

Categories: Browsing, Google Chrome

Uploading your property onto the internet can be scary. Intellectual property can be just as, if not more, valuable than the cars we drive and homes we live in, yet we often treat it as if it’s nothing of value – as if we have no vested interest in protecting it. When we post photos [...]

Categories: The Web

Ever so often, the people in charge try to get tough with those who break the law. Sometimes, the ‘bad guys’ get away but more often than not, they get caught. And that’s exactly what happened to Torrentvalley.com yesterday. Torrentvalley is different from other BitTorrent services in that it’s not a file tracker like Pirate [...]

Categories: Music Industry, Online Services, P2p, Search Engines

Youtomb is a MIT Free Culture research project that monitors the most popular Youtube videos for copyright related takedowns. The project is currently monitoring more than 220000 videos at Youtube and has identified a a takedown rate of nearly 8%, a pretty hefty rate. The website lists a screenshot and the name of the video, [...]

Categories: Music and Video, Online Services

The first thing that came to my mind when I read “Attempted copyright infringement” was the term thought crime. It seems that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including “attempts” to commit piracy.

Categories: Knowledge, The Web

Every webmaster witnesses content theft from time to time. Most of the time it is text or images that gets copied and published on other websites. There is however a solution for images that adds a visible copyright notice to them. You could use image editors like Gimp, Adobe Photoshop or Paintshop to create a [...]

Categories: Operating Systems, The Web, Windows

Rapidshare, one of the largest file hosters in the world, is currently under heavy fire in Germany. The Gema, which administers the copyrights of more than 60,000 members as well as those of over 1 million rights owners from all corners of the world managed to get a court ruling in their favor. The court ruled that the hoster could be held responsible for copyright violations committed by users who upload copyrighted material to Rapidshare servers. The court furthermore ruled that Rapidshare had to implement filters that would prevent further copyright violations.

Categories: Music Industry, The Web

This sounds like one of those plots to conquer the world in comic series like Pinky & The Brain. The Piratebay (and fellowship) are planing to raise enough money to buy the Principality of Sealand located in the North Sea off the coast of Suffolk. I’m not sure if they really intend to buy Sealand because the sovereignty was never recognized by another country.

Categories: The Web

Nonsense. That was my thought when I first read the articles ” Music industry demands the right to sue ISPs” from the Independent Online Edition and “Indie Labels want copyright shift” from the BBC Online. Several trade organisations including the Association of Independent Music (AIM), the Musicians’ Union and the MCPS-PRS Alliance proposed that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be liable for illegal filesharing by their users. (which means that it would be possible to sue ISPs because of this liability)

Categories: Music Industry