The DMCA was once drafted to protect the interests of copyright holders, allowing them to take infringing content offline. Today, however, the system is systematically abused by rights-holders as an overboard censorship tool. One third of the notices sent to…
| By Mike Masnick | Sourced from TechDirt| It’s really quite stunning to watch Lamar Smith pull out really out-dated talking points as he gets more and more desperate to defend SOPA, as he discovers that all the vaunted “support”…
By Glyn Moody | Sourced from TechDirt | As the battle rages over SOPA and PIPA, censorship is very much on people’s minds. But there are many different kinds of censorship, operating at different levels of precision. For example, while…
By Mike Masnick | One of the more interesting things that I’ve seen over the last few months as the SOPA/PIPA fight has become more involved, is that people I respect in the entertainment industry itself have been speaking out…
Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner (who has done fantastic research in the past on problems with the patent system) appears to have turned his attention to copyright law as well. A new report he has put out shows how…
Late last year there was a ridiculous ruling against news aggregator Meltwater in the UK. Meltwater, like a number of other news aggregators, pulls together headlines from various online news stories, along with brief snippets of the articles, and links…
Another day, another case of someone abusing copyright law (and the DMCA specifically) to try to stifle criticism. Before we get into the details, let me be clear on one thing: as I was just discussing last week, I don’t…
Efforts to harness law enforcement resources in the service of copyright enforcement continue apace. Last Thursday, the so-called “illegal streaming” bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee (although that’s still some way away from becoming law). The bill would increase criminal…
Court Finds Righthaven Had No Authority to Bring Claims Against Political Forum San Francisco – In a decision with likely wide-ranging impact, a judge in Las Vegas today dismissed as a sham an infringement case filed by copyright troll Righthaven…
A year and a half ago, we noted some new laws and plans for laws in India that would likely lead to widespread censorship of the internet in that country, and a commenter on that post just alerted us to…
Censorship in America 