WASHINGTON — This morning the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus announced its “2010 International Anti-Piracy Watch List,” the nations that leading members of Congress will focus on in the coming year in terms of improving the protection of U.S. rights owners of intellectual property. As was the case last year, the five nations being watched are [...]

It’s been nearly five years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Grokster and clearly established the illegality of a corporation facilitating massive copyright infringement via P2P software, but now the exclamation point has been placed on that decision by Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S. District Court. In a decision that is both obvious [...]

SANTA MONICA — Anyone who has been in the copyright policy space awhile knows that the music industry is frequently described as the “canary in the coal mine.” The analogy comes from the tradition of miners bringing caged canaries into mines to gauge how toxic the air was. If the canary died, they should probably [...]

That counterfeiting and piracy causes significant harm to creators and creative industries is unquestioned, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office has affirmed that in a new report. The report is a bit thin on substance, but that appears to be intentional. While Congress in the PRO-IP Act of 2008 called for GAO to quantify the [...]

We praised the FCC recently when it released its long-awaited National Broadband Plan. We share the FCC’s vision of a wired and wireless world of high-speed Internet connectivity. Creative industries are embracing the online market in new and innovative ways — see our In Syn(c) series for more — and the more robust and widespread [...]

Joining a bevy of other Obama Administration officials including the President himself — U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke out forcefully in defense of strong IP and in particular copyright enforcement this week. The AG spoke yesterday in Rio De Janeiro at the Prosecutor General’s office on IP enforcement (thank you Tech Law Journal for [...]

The Federal Trade Commission said today that it has warned nearly one hundred U.S. companies that personal information, including sensitive data about customers and/or employees, is floating around on P2P networks, putting those customers and employees at risk of identity theft or fraud. The federal agency also said it has “opened non-public investigations of other [...]

It is in the best interest of any broadband user who adheres to the law to see that other customers filling up the broadband pipe with infringing traffic are stymied; that leaves more pipe for the legal user. Have you ever streamed a movie or TV show through Netflix? Before the presentation begins, there’s a [...]

I came across a breath of fresh air today from the academic community — a professor who takes offense at the notion that unauthorized infringement of a creator’s works should be viewed as some kind of a just social movement. U. of California at Berkeley Law Professor Peter S. Menell has authored a short work [...]

It would appear to be a victory. Last week, we here at the Copyright Alliance reported on a brazenly infringing web site, a site that encouraged people to upload professional images over which they held no legal rights. These images were then published on the site in magazine form. The magazine was called Pilfered Magazine, [...]