Media companies in copyright pact, Google absent
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Viacom Inc, Walt Disney Co, Microsoft Corp and other media companies have agreed to a set of guidelines to protect copyrights online but Google Inc, owner of the Web's biggest video site, was notably absent from the pact.
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The media industry is clashing with  YouTube over its proposal to offer anti-piracy tools only to  companies that have distribution deals with the top online  video-sharing service, media insiders said.
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YouTube is offering no refuge for users who uploaded copies of Fox Television&#8217;s 24 and Simpsons according to Internet.com&#8217;s ASPnews.  A 20th Century Fox spokesperson says that Google and Live Digital have complied &#8220;with subpoenas issued by the U.S. District Court in Northern California and disclosed to Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally [...]
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A YouTube deal with the British society that collects royalties for composers, songwriters and publishers means artists will be paid for tracks used to back clips on the video-sharing website. The agreement will also give YouTube a defense when media companies holler "piracy."
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Google continues to fight its upcoming copyright infringement suit without support from others book-scanning sites. Reports say that Yahoo has rebuffed its rival's request for information on the smaller firm's efforts to create digital copies of books which may or my not still be in copyright.
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Should prices for blank media and recording products include a royalty fee to copyright holders for presumed losses to piracy?
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A Belgium court has ordered all content from French and German newspapers represented by the firm Copiepress to be pulled from the Google News Web site.  The Brussels court said the U.S. search engine is in breach of authors' rights and data bank regulations, Expatica reported Monday.
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It's been a long weekend of copyright-related news; Glaskowsky finishes up with a Google deal and an announcement by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
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YahooÂs refusal to talk about its efforts to create digital copies of books is another setback for Google as it prepares to fight a copyright infringement suit.
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The chief executive of media giant Viacom expressed reservations Thursday about Google's plan to enter YouTube content into a database and give owners the chance to take down the material.Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion over content being used on Google's YouTube Web property without permission. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit event San Francisco, Viacom President/CEO Phillipe Dauman expressed a willingness to work with online media properties but was skeptical of the Google plan, called Video Identification.Dauman said he had an open mind about reaching an agreement and that the announcement of Video Identification was a positive evolution. But it is not enough."I don't think we're quite there" said Dauman. Google, he said, can do things quickly if it wants to, he added. "I guess they haven't wanted to at this point," Dauman said.Google wants a proprietary system that benefits just one company, but the solution has to be a cooperative effort, said Dauman. He added he suspects Viacom at some point in the future will work with Google. The company does have a good relationship with Facebook, he said.Viacom has had its defenders, according to Dauman. "A lot of the technology companies out there welcome what we do," he said. Companies have said it was about time somebody took a stand, Dauman added.Like Google, Viacom has to protect its intellectual property. "I don't see their algorithms being shared openly with competitors," said Dauman."We took a step reluctantly because we had to," he said.Content producers need to be rewarded for what they do, Dauman said. "That nurtures creativity," he said.Viacom was part of a group of media and technology companies, along with vendors like CBS and Microsoft, that detailed Thursday principles intended to enable growth and development of user-generated content online while respecting intellectual property rights.Featured in these principles is implementation of filtering technology to eliminate infringing content; upgrading of technology and cooperation in technology implementation, and development of procedures to address claims that content was blocked in error. Removal of content also is addressed.Google was not a party to Thursday's announcement.
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An alliance of technology and media companies releases a set of principles for promoting user-generated content while protecting copyright online.
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Google Inc. is paying The Associated Press for stories and photographs, settling a dispute with a major provider of the copyright news that the online search engine finds and displays on its popular Web site.
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Google has reached a settlement in its copyright suit in Belgium with with news photographers and journalists. The NY Times (reg req&#8217;d) carries the Bloomberg story:  Google, the world&#8217;s most-used Internet search engine, reached a settlement with Belgian photographers and journalists yesterday in a copyright dispute over how Google&#8217;s news service links to newspaper content. The [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Media company Viacom said on Tuesday that it was filing suit against Google Inc. for what it alleges are "massive intentional copyright infringement" of Viacomâs property. Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages and asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to place an injunction on Google and to prevent the company from sharing around 160,000 unauthorized video clips on the company's YouTube video sharing site, Viacom said in a statement. Google was not immediately available for comment. Viacom, which owns popular brands including MTV, Comedy Central, VH1 and Nickelodeon, said its programming had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times on YouTube, the video sharing site that Google purchased in October, 2006, for $1.6 billion. âYouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to othersâ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," Viacom said in a statement.Â  "Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws." The suit by Viacom follows a notice from Viacom in February, 2007 under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to remove its videos from YouTube. Viacom alleges that Google does little to police copyright violations on YouTube. "This behavior stands in stark contrast to the actions of other significant distributors, who have recognized the fair value of entertainment content and have concluded agreements to make content legally available to their customers around the world," the company said. Shortly after buying YouTube in October, Google struck deals with Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group to offer music videos on YouTube and share advertising revenue. The company also negotiated with Viacom on a similar deal, but Viacom claims those negotiations were unproductive and that Google is following an "unlawful business model." "Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused," Viacom said.
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Google Inc. is working with Dow Jones & Co. Inc., Conde Nast, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and other large content companies to syndicate their video content on other Web sites, the New York Times reported on Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Google violated the copyright of Belgian newspaper publishers when it posted extracts from their stories on its Google News Web site, a Belgian court ruled on Tuesday. The judgment upholdsÂ an earlier decisionÂ from the Court of First Instance in Brussels, which required Google to remove the content from Belgium's French- and German-language newspapers from its site. It could open the door to further lawsuits and limit the ability of search engines in Europe to display copyright material on their Web sites. The Belgian newspapers, represented by the trade group Copiepresse, had argued that Google profited unfairly by posting short extracts of their stories on its Web sites. Google appealed the initial judgment and the result of that appeal was announced on Tuesday. "Google cannot claim to be an exception under copyright law," the court said in its decision. Margaret Boribon, Copiepresse's secretary general, called the ruling "a very good result for us" and said it largely upholds the court's original findings in September.. Google said it was disappointed with the decision and that it planned to file a further appeal. "We believe that Google News is entirely legal," the company said. It reiterated its argument that it posts only a short snippet of newspaper stories on its Web site and that users must click through to a newspaper's Web site to read the full story. Google's lawyers were studying the judgment on Tuesday morning and were not ready to comment in detail, said Google spokeswoman Jessica Powell. The court did not affirm every part of the earlier ruling, which was issued in September. It significantly reduced the daily fines that Google was required to pay for not removing the newspapers' content from its Web site, from â¬1.5 million per day to â¬25,000 per day. Still, Tuesday's decision is a blow to Google and possibly to otherÂ search engines in Europe. Copiepresse had also complained toÂ Microsoft's MSN divisionÂ and toÂ YahooÂ about their use of its members' content, although so far it has brought legal action only against Google. Copiepresse will now go back to MSN and Yahoo and apply renewed pressure on them to remove all of its members content, Boribon said. Microsoft said Tuesday that it would provisionally remove all links to the Belgian newspaper content from its Web sites rather than become embroiled in a legal dispute. "Microsoft however underlines that these measures do not imply any acknowledgement or recognition of Copiepresse's rights and that it reserves all rights," the company said. While some newspapers clamber over each another to be in Google News, others see it as a threat to their business because users can bypass their home pages to find stories, and possibly avoid visiting their sites altogether. Copiepresse wants Google to pay a share of its advertising revenue to its members in return for using their content, Boribon said. Google responds that it helps publishers to reach a wider audience and drives traffic to their sites because users must click through to the newspapers' Web sites to read the full stories. It has called the Belgian case an important one because it "goes to the heart of how search engines work." The company has also had to delay its launch of Google News in Denmark after newspapers there demanded a system that would allow them to "opt in" to Google's service, rather than having their content trawled automatically. And a Norwegian media group has objected to the way that Google reuses their news photographs. A spokesman for the European Commission on Tuesday suggested that the Commission may take a closer look at copyright law in Europe as a result of the Google ruling. "Its something we are following with great interest but we have no specific comment at this time," said Oliver Drewes, the Commission's spokesman on copyright-related matters. (Paul Meller in Brussels contributed to this report.) Â
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A website which provided links to films, music and TV programmes loses a copyright case in the US.