Peter Kafka in Media on October 18, 2011 at 3:00 am PT
The YouTube copyright case — now more than four years old — won’t go away. In the real world, though, most media companies have made their peace with the world’s biggest video site.
Peter Kafka in Media on August 23, 2011 at 7:26 am PT
Had it gone the other way, EMI’s lawsuit against Michael Robertson and his music locker could have been a problem for Google and Amazon. And maybe YouTube and Tumblr and lots of other Web services. But since it didn’t …
Peter Kafka in Media on June 27, 2011 at 5:53 am PT
The red-hot music service is only a few months old, but it’s already growing up: It’s ditching non-U.S. users in order to give itself a fighting chance of surviving in the U.S.
Peter Kafka in Media on June 21, 2011 at 4:00 am PT
How did a start-up finally convince the music labels to let people share music with each other for free? Turntable didn’t. This could be interesting.
Peter Kafka in Media on December 15, 2010 at 6:00 am PT
Google and Apple both want to move your music to the cloud, then back to your phone, but they haven’t done it yet. But little mSpot has, at least for now.
John Paczkowski in Mobile on July 27, 2010 at 8:45 am PT
Sure, jailbreaking your iPhone no longer violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but that doesn’t mean Apple supports it. So if you want to modify your iPhone to run unauthorized software, you’re welcome to do so, but not without risk or consequence. As Apple reminds us today, jailbreaking voids the iPhone’s warranty, which could prove problematic if your tinkering bricks it.
News Byte
Voices in News on July 26, 2010 at 9:44 am PT
With a single pen stroke, it looks like the federal government may have blown the closed Apple iPhone ecosystem wide open (at least for the tinkering crowd). In their periodic updating of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibitions again circumventing copyright protections, the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Office today
ruled that it is
lawful for mobile phone users to “jailbreak” their devices in order to use apps not approved by the manufacturer and to unlock their phones in order to change carriers (though there are
barriers other than the DMCA to both practices). More on this to come as we await comment from Apple, which had
maintained that jailbreaking was illegal, although it has never pressed the issue in court.
Peter Kafka in Media on June 23, 2010 at 1:32 pm PT
Google has won its long-running case against Viacom, which accused the search giant’s YouTube of massive copyright infringement. Viacom promises to appeal the federal court ruling, which says that the video site is indeed protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It’s a really big deal.
John Paczkowski in News on May 28, 2010 at 4:00 am PT
Google and YouTube have some powerful new allies in their pitched battle with Viacom: Yahoo, Facebook and eBay. Earlier this week, the three companies filed amicus briefs in support of Google and YouTube, which are defending themselves against a $1 billion copyright lawsuit by Viacom.
Peter Kafka in Media on March 18, 2010 at 7:25 pm PT
The YouTube-Viacom documents released today are chock full of interesting morsels. Feel free to ignore most of them.
