The saga of the Megaupload viral video takedown just got weirder. Universal has responded that several of the artists portrayed in the video did not consent to appearing in it, and Techdirt reports featured artist will.i.am filed a takedown notice of his own for that reason. Megaupload insists that it has contracts for all artists and material featured in the video, so someone on one side or the other is obviously either lying or mistaken. I do wonder why those artists allowed Megaupload to film them singing its praises if they didn’t want Megaupload to use what it filmed....

This story might need to be taken with a grain of salt based on its sources, but it could have some serious implications if true. Megaupload, like Rapidshare, is a cyber-locker site where people can upload files of any kind for others to download. Many of those files are illicitly-copied commercial material, which naturally gives Hollywood, record labels, and publishers (after all, this material does include both e-books and audiobooks) conniptions. Recently, a number of music celebrities recorded a music video in support of Megaupload. This was considered a newsworthy event, and covered by a number of places, but...

It’s time for the tri-yearly circus to kick off again. Ars Technica reports that it’s just about time for the Library of Congress to consider granting exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s DRM anti-circumvention provisions. This process comes every three years, and the exemptions last only until the next exemption granting—which means that even already-granted exemptions have to be requested and argued again. The last go-round resulted in six exemptions, including allowing circumvention for incorporating clips into new works for purpose of criticism or comment, including educational purposes. (Apparently the MPAA’s suggestion that professors should just point a...

Did I just hear the DMCA’s anti-circumvention precisions creak a little? Ars Technica reports that a judge has ruled educational institutions are legally entitled to rip and stream DVDs that they have legally purchased. The case involves UCLA ripping and streaming some educational DVDs from Ambrose Video Publishing. Ambrose sued over the anti-circumvention provision violation, insisting its DVDs were sold under a licensing agreement that prohibits rebroadcast and public display. However, the UCLA insisted that fair use gave it the right to rip and stream, and that Ambrose’s catalog specifically says “All purchases by schools and libraries include...

E-publisher E-Reads and the Curtis Agency are launching a joint venture to target pirated e-books uploaded to filesharing sites such as Rapidshare, Megaupload, and so on. The venture uses a search bot to “spider” the Internet to detect unauthorized files based on author’s name. The results are collected on a search page for human users to review in order to issue takedown notices. A recent test detected 3,500 illegally-shared files on a Friday. The process of sending removal orders for them took 45 minutes, and by Monday almost all of them had been removed. The two...

A recent decision in the lawsuit against Michael Robertson’s user-uploaded-music locker MP3Tunes.com could have profound implications for the use of media in the cloud—if it stands, profoundly good ones. Music label Capitol Records sued the company for enabling piracy, and attempted to argue that it didn’t qualify for “safe harbor” under the DMCA’s copyright provisions. A judge mostly disagreed—essentially, he said that MP3Tunes was in the clear except on essentially one point. And though a number of places have been spinning that one point as a RIAA “victory”, in actuality the victories for MP3Tunes far outnumber it. That one...

Nate Hoffelder has spotted a developer offering Kindle, Nook, and Adept DRM removal tools for $30 to $35 each, or $50 for the whole set. Hoffelder notes that the Kindle removal app, which he tested, is slow and clunky and only does one book at a time. Since this is a blatant, out-in-the-open, commercial violation of the DMCA, he wonders how long this can last before the government slaps this developer down. (It appears to be based in California, with a Florida phone number, which would suggest it is vulnerable to prosecution.) Personally, I’m more annoyed that it’s a...

In February, I covered the International Sheet Music Library Project, a sort of Project Gutenberg-like e-repository for public-domain sheet music. As I mentioned at the time, music publishers are not very happy about this site, as it undercuts their lucrative business of selling printed versions of public domain music without having to pay anybody royalties. Lately, this unhappiness has come to a head with the British trade group Music Publishers Association of the UK sending a DMCA takedown notice to the ISMLP’s domain registrar, GoDaddy. Under the terms of the DMCA, GoDaddy had no choice but to disable the...

Canada may be about to get its own anti-circumvention law, akin to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, PaidContent reports. In response to calls from the US entertainment industry to tighten up its copyright enforcement, the Canadian legislature is considering a bill called C-32 which contains such a provision. The DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision, that prohibits users from cracking digital rights management even to make fair use of devices and media they own, has been a fairly controversial law in Internet circles ever since it was passed. Canada, however, has largely been able to avoid such a law—until now. The...

More important ACTA news from BoingBoing. For those of our readers who are concerned about our government negotiating secretly to limit our rights, and to impose those limitations on the rest of the world, BoingBoing's coverage is a must read. You can find their past coverage at the end of this article on their site: Michael Geist writes in with news on the latest draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secretly negotiated copyright agreement: "One of the biggest stories over the three year negotiation of ACTA has been the willingness of the U.S. to cave...

Joanna has railed at length about the obnoxiousness of the regional restrictions in publishing that limit the availability of e-books from country to country. Even though it is possible to import a printed book from another country, those who want another nation’s e-book are largely out of luck. It appears that at least some publishers are moving to reduce these frustrations; a few days ago GalleyCat reported on HarperCollin’s announcement that it was merging its US SF/fantasy imprint, Eos, and its Australia/New Zealand imprint, Voyager, into a global imprint called Harper Voyager. At eReads,...

We’ve previously covered the Associated Press’s attack on bloggers for quoting material, and a company called Attributor that was supposed to start filing copyright violation suits on behalf of various clients including the AP earlier this year. While I haven’t heard anything more about Attributor, the Las Vegas Sun has an article on a copyright-police company called Righthaven, with an interesting business model that could be described as copyright trolling. Whereas up to now most newspapers have simply asked violators to take their content down, and replace it with links to the papers’ own sites, Righthaven has filed copyright lawsuits against...