Report: U.S. to Crack Down on Pirated Material
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U.S. officials are expected to  announce on Monday a coordinated crackdown on the theft of U.S.  intellectual property such as pirated compact discs and  knockoff auto parts, the Wall Street Journal reported on  Monday,
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The arrests and seizures came at a time American politicians and executives are pressing China to take strong measures to curb software piracy.
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DVDs will be harder to pirate thanks to new copy protection measures by Macrovision.
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WASHINGTON The United States is cracking down on the growing trade in counterfeit and pirated goods that costs American businesses hundreds of billions of dollar annually, US government and industry officials said Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - A new bill in the U.S. Congress aimed at protecting the fair use rights for consumers of copyright material would "legalize hacking," the Recording Industry Association of America said. The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship (FAIR USE) Act, introduced Tuesday by U.S. Representatives Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, and John Doolittle, a California Republican, would allow customers to circumvent digital copy restrictions in six limited areas when copyright owners' business models are not threatened, Boucher said in a press release. So-called fair use doctrine allows customers of copyright works to make limited numbers of copies, particularly for reviews, news reporting, teaching and research. The bill would allow exemptions to the anticircumvention restrictions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed by Congress in 1998. The bill is revamped from similar bills introduced in the last two sessions of Congress, Boucher said. "The fair use doctrine is threatened today as never before," Boucher said in a statement. "Historically, the nation's copyright laws have reflected a carefully calibrated balanced between the rights of copyright owners and the rights of the users of copyrighted material. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public's right to fair use." But the RIAA said the bill would effectively repeal the DMCA. The bill would "allow electronics companies to induce others to break the law for their own profit," it said in a statement. Advances such digital music sales, online games, on-demand movies and e-books can be traced to DMCA protects, the RIAA said. "The difference between hacking done for non-infringing purposes and hacking done to steal is impossible to determine and enforce," the RIAA said in its statement. The Boucher bill would limit the availability of statutory damages against individuals and firms who may be found to have engaged in contributory infringement, inducement of infringement, or other indirect infringement. The bill would allow libraries to circumvent digital locks or secure copies of works that have been damaged, lost or stolen. The Consumer Electronics Association applauded the bill, saying it would give protections to consumers, educators, and libraries. Without fair use protections, consumers couldn't use devices such as VCRs and digital TV recorders, the trade group said.
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Russia should shut down a pirate music Web site that is robbing U.S. recording companies of sales if it wants to become a member of the World Trade Organization, the top U.S. trade official said on Wednesday.
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The Motion Picture Association of America is launching civil and criminal actions worldwide against movie pirates in a bid to curb illegal film downloading.
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YouTube plans to introduce technology to help media companies identify pirated videos uploaded by users.
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In what could be perceived as a signal of a thaw in relations between the recording industry and digital music technology, this morning's annual report from its chief international representative points to a turnaround in the piracy problem.
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Microsoft Corp. plans to severely curtail the ways in which people running pirated copies of its dominant Windows operating system can receive software updates, including security fixes.
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HR.4077, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, has been approved by the United States&#39; House Judiciary Committee. The bill specifies up to five years&#39; jail for anyone making over a thousand copyrighted works available for download.
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The increased zeal among copyright holders to clamp down on any hint of piracy by online video sites puts the notion of user-generated content at risk.
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Move over, terrorism. Attorney General John Ashcroft pledges to make fighting piracy a top priority for the Justice Department. By Katie Dean.
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The U.S. Senate has voted to outlaw several favorite techniques of people who illegally copy and distribute movies, but has dropped other measures that could have led to jail time for Internet song-swappers. -Reuters
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The U.S. Justice Department on  Tuesday outlined what it called its most sweeping crackdown on  bootleg DVDs, fake designer goods, illegal music downloads and  counterfeit drugs.
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(InfoWorld) - Swedish police are expected to decide later this week whether a criminal case is warranted against 10 major music and movie companies over their alleged efforts to disrupt the Pirate Bay, one of the largest file-sharing search engines. If Swedish police decide to pursue a criminal complaint, the Pirate Bay will be spared the time and expense of pursuing its own civil suit against the companies, Peter Sunde, one of a small circle of volunteers in Sweden that runs the Web site, said on Tuesday. The Pirate Bay, with an estimated two million daily users, is a search engine for torrents, or small files used to trade content between computers via a peer-to-peer (P-to-P) network. Media companies say the site is used mainly to enable the illegal trading of copyright files and have sought its closure. But the Pirate Bay struck back last Friday, filing a criminal complaint in Sweden against content companies that hired MediaDefender, a company that specializes in disrupting P-to-P networks. The Pirate Bay alleges that MediaDefender attacked its operations by distributing fake torrent files and other methods. It is charging the media companies, which include the Swedish subsidiaries of Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, with infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks, and other hacking and spamming offenses, according to its blog. The complaint followed the damaging release of thousands of internal MediaDefender e-mails, which described in part how the company tries to foil file-sharing services. MediaDefender uses a software program that sets up fake user accounts and then distributes fake torrent files, which are designed to reduce the volume of copyright files being traded, Sunde said. The source code for that software, as well as the internal e-mails, are now being widely circulating on file-sharing networks. The software can read "captchas," the strings of distorted numbers and letters designed to ensure that real people are using a Web site rather than an automated program. The Pirate Bay says it matched IP (Internet protocol) addresses for some of the fake torrents to some of the internal e-mails, providing compelling evidence that MediaDefender was sending out fake torrents, according to Sunde. The Pirate Bay blacklists IP addresses associated with fake torrents and also shares those lists with other torrent search engines, Sunde said. "We are very proactive when it comes to spam handling, but it's still a problem when they [MediaDefender] do it," he said. Despite complaints from media and content companies, the Pirate Bay has continued to operate in Sweden. In May 2006, Swedish police seized at least 25 servers after a raid on five locations, but have yet to file charges. Swedish prosecutors have until Oct. 1 to file a criminal case, but Sunde said he expects the government attorneys to file for an extension. Sunde maintains that the Pirate Bay is just a search engine and doesn't actually store any files, merely directing users to where files are located. "We are quite sure the Pirate Bay is legal in Sweden," said Sunde, who is based in Malmo, in the south of Sweden, and also runs a Web site consulting business. As a precaution against future police action, Sunde said he knows the location of only one of the 40 or so servers currently powering the Pirate Bay. Some of those servers are now in countries outside of Sweden, he said. Â
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WASHINGTON -- The FBI seized computers, software, and equipment as part of an investigation into illegal sharing of copyrighted movies, music, and games over an Internet ''peer-to-peer&quot; network, Attorney General John Ashcroft said yesterday.