We are starting a new periodic series on the blog to help you understand important copyright law cases In Plain English. This first installment is authored by the Copyright Alliance’s legal intern William Ruiz.  William is originally from Southern California and is a third year student at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in [...]

The highly documented takedown of the site Megaupload.com on January 19th has provoked much speculation as well as retaliation.  We spent the last week looking over the indictment and to learn more about the takedown of Megaupload.com and what it means for future IP enforcement. Megaupload claimed to have over 150 million registered users and [...]

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a founder of rogue website NinjaVideo.net was sentenced to 22 months in prison for criminal copyright conspiracy.  Hana Amal Beshara plead guilty to conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement, and is one of five NinjaVideo.net administrators to be indicted.  Three of her co-defendants have also plead guilty and [...]

As the House Judiciary Committee readies for markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act tomorrow, much attention is also being paid to a competing proposal that would utilize the International Trade Commission (ITC) as the venue for enforcing copyrights and trademarks online against foreign based rogue websites, outside of US jurisdiction. While the creative community [...]

Opponents of this legislation would have you believe that it would somehow give rightsholders unilateral ability to shut down any site that contains any infringing content. This is incorrect.  Rightsholders do not have the ability to act unilaterally.  They do not have the right to seek to shut a site down or make it inaccessible, [...]

A guest column in today’s New York Times may have set new records for overblown rhetoric about legislative efforts to curb offshore rogue websites profiting from illegal distribution of American intellectual property. In it, Rebecca MacKinnon of the New America Foundation accuses the bipartisan legislation of establishing blacklists, firewalls and censorship. Scary indeed, and who [...]

Given some of the threatening rhetoric surrounding the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, it is appropriate to consider the types of sites this legislation does and does not target. It does not target legitimate sites like YouTube, Twitter, eBay or Facebook. It does target sites that are “dedicated to theft of U.S. [...]

The U.S. House of Representatives today introduced H.R. 3261, The Stop Online Piracy Act, a bipartisan bill that would promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. intellectual property. Eight members joined House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), Ranking Member John Conyers (D-MI), IP Subcommittee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Rep. Howard [...]

Sorry to stick that “round and round, round and round” tune into your head, but it seems appropriate for the activity of the last several days by a small but vocal cadre of technorati who are amping up the drama and fear factor related to enforcement of copyright laws online. First, a “new” group called [...]

A bill to modernize Canadian copyright laws to include protections against circumvention of technical measures, and make various other changes was introduced yesterday. In the Ottowa Citizen,  Industry Minister Chrisian Paradis said of the bill: “Our government recognizes how new technologies are changing the lives of many Canadians. This bill delivers a common-sense balance between the [...]