Universities win Senate fight over anti-P2P amendment
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Blog: Sen. Harry Reid withdraws legislation that would have required universities--in exchange for funds--to use technology to "prevent the illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property."
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The Senate could take action this week on a bill that would make it easier to sue "peer-to-peer" networks like Kazaa and LimeWire.
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A handful of lawmakers, law professors, and consumer groups have raised objections to a new U.S. copyright bill that could significantly increase the fines for copyright infringement.
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'Power to the people. And us.' Just after Comcast copped to throttling P2P traffic, a new net neutrality bill appeared on Capitol Hill.â¦
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The U.S. Supreme Court has set March 29 as the date for oral arguments on whether companies providing peer-to-peer file trading software should be held responsible for copyright infringement committed by users of their products. The arguments are part of a long-playing case pitting a cadre of entertainment industry players against distributors of the Grokster and Morpheus file trading software. The p-to-p companies have already won in district court and again last August when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Grokster, Morpheus distributor StreamCast Networks, and a site operated by StreamCast called Musiccity.com were not liable for copyright violations by their users. The entertainment companies, led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), decided to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying there are seminal issues at stake. The Supreme Court is expected to issue an opinion by the end of July.
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The deans of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania law schools are opposing discriminatory content that has been found on the Web site AutoAdmit.
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Entertainment groups and consumer organizations were unable Thursday to reach a compromise over a Senate proposal aimed at manufacturers of file-sharing software commonly used to steal electronic copies of music, movies and computer programs.
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LOS ANGELES -- Despite evidence that sharing music and movies online remains popular, a report issued yesterday by a committee of entertainment and university leaders says universities have made strides the past year in curtailing online piracy.
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A handful of lawmakers, law professors, and consumer groups have raised objections to a new U.S. copyright bill that could significantly increase the fines for copyright infringement.The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (or PRO IP Act ), debated before a congressional subcommittee Thursday, would allow courts to assess copyright infringement damages for each piece of a compilation or derivative work found to infringe copyright, instead of treating the compilation as one infringement.The maximum fine for infringing three songs in one compilation would increase from $150,000 to $450,000 under the bill, introduced Dec. 5, said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a consumer rights advocacy group. The fines for infringing five poems in one compilation would rise from $150,000 to $750,000, said Sohn, referring to a letter signed by 25 IP professors.The bill would also make it easy for courts to forfeit computers and other property alleged to be used for infringement in civil copyright lawsuits, and it would allow the U.S. government to pursue criminal copyright enforcement before the creator registers a work or product with the U.S. Copyright Office.&quot;While we agree that enforcement of intellectual property laws is essential to encouraging creativity, certain provisions in the proposed act risk undermining this essential goal by threatening consumers with an overbroad and inapposite enforcement regime,&quot; Sohn told the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. &quot;These provisions of the bill ... represent a step away from a rational, realistic copyright regime.&quot;The bill will hurt the consumer electronics industry with companies that make recording and copying devices scared to introduce new products because of a fear of lawsuits, added Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat.&quot;The effect on innovation will be real, and it will be adverse,&quot; Boucher said.But supporters of the bill said it&#39;s needed. Counterfeiting and piracy cost U.S. companies between $200 billion and $250 billion a year, said Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.Conyers, the primary sponsor of the bill, tried to dispel criticism that the legislation was targeted only at music and movie piracy. Counterfeit drugs, automobile parts, and airplane parts are &quot;placing human lives at risk,&quot; he said.Copyright theft also costs hundreds of thousands of jobs, added James Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a large trade union. Members of the union deliver DVDs, CDs, and video games from legitimate companies, he said. &quot;When pirated DVDs and CDs are sold on a street corner in an underground economy, we lose jobs,&quot; he said.Government agencies also lose tax revenue through pirated or counterfeit goods, Hoffa said. &quot;Lost tax revenue has a significant and potentially debilitating impact on American working families,&quot; he added. &quot;By most anyone&#39;s calculations, the bridges and roads that our members both build and travel over are in a critical state of disrepair throughout the country.&quot;While Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, called copyright infringement &quot;massive,&quot; others raised concerns that the bill goes too far. Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from Silicon Valley in California, noted that the bill could increase the penalties for infringing a 10-song CD from $150,000 to $1.5 million. &quot;I think that&#39;s unreasonable,&quot; she said.Public Knowledge&#39;s Sohn noted that a Minnesota woman was fined $222,000 for 24 songs in a court case that ended in October. She called on the subcommittee to kill the portion of the bill that would increase copyright damages for compiled works.&quot;I don&#39;t think anybody&#39;s arguing that statutory damages are inadequate,&quot; she said. &quot;I&#39;m not sure that increasing penalties 10 fold or 20 fold does anything other than stop legitimate innovators.&quot;
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com. In the latest battle in the file-sharing war, the movie and music industries have petitioned the US Supreme Court to overturn an appellate court decision that gave the green light to software firms to trade copyrighted material.
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The U.S. Senate defeated on Tuesday an amendment that would take away legal immunity from telecommunications providers that helped the U.S. National Security Agency conduct surveillance on U.S. residents, earning criticism from two civil liberties groups.The Senate, by a 31-67 vote, defeated an amendment to the FISA Amendments Act, a bill that would make changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and allow the NSA program to continue. In the past, the NSA has conducted telephone and e-mail surveillance of U.S. citizens conversing with terrorist suspects overseas without court-approved warrants.The Senate was scheduled to vote on the full FISA bill late Tuesday.The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) slammed the Senate vote. &quot;Immunity for telecom giants that secretly assisted in the NSA&#39;s warrantless surveillance undermines the rule of law and the privacy of every American,&quot; said EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston. &quot;Congress should let the courts do their job instead of helping the administration and the phone companies avoid accountability for a half decade of illegal domestic spying.&quot;It doesn&#39;t make sense for Congress to work hard on the FISA bill when the NSA and telecom providers can circumvent the law, added Greg Nojeim, CDT&#39;s senior counsel. &quot;The telecom immunity provision sends a message that it&#39;s OK for a telecom to assist with unlawful surveillance when secretly asked to do so by the government,&quot; he said.Democratic Senators Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin had sponsored the amendment to get rid of legal immunity for the telecom providers. AT&amp;T and other telecom carriers are being sued in U.S. court in San Francisco for their participation in the surveillance program, which many civil liberties groups say is illegal.Last month, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech that it is &quot;entirely appropriate&quot; for U.S. intelligence agencies to seek help from private companies like telecom providers, because agencies don&#39;t have all the resources they need to keep the U.S. safe from terrorism.&quot;Some providers are facing dozens of lawsuits right now,&quot; Cheney said then. &quot;Why? Because they are believed to have aided the U.S. government in the effort to intercept international communications of al Qaeda-related individuals.&quot;A House bill, passed in November, does not include legal immunity for telecom providers that participated in the NSA program. The House and Senate would have negotiate the differences in the two bills before sending the legislation to U.S. President George Bush to sign. Bush has threatened to veto a surveillance bill that does not include legal immunity for telecom providers, but congressional authorization for the surveillance program expires Feb. 15.It would be counterproductive for Bush to veto a bill that extends surveillance programs that he says are critical, Bankston said. &quot;The only way they can [get legal immunity] is by fallaciously tying it to something critical,&quot; he said.The EFF will push hard to have House negotiators keep the telecom immunity provisions out of the bill that goes to Bush, Bankston added.The EFF and CDT both prefer the House FISA bill, called the Restore Act. Unlike the Senate bill, the House bill would require court approval of surveillance, and the House version would expire in two years, as opposed to six years in the Senate version. The CDT has produced a chart comparing the two bills.
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Closing arguments have completed in a trial aimed at overturning a 1998 law aimed at curbing pornography. While proponents of the law saw it is necessary to prevent children from viewing objectionable material, opponents say it hurts free speech.
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Users of Internet "peer to peer"  networks, already dodging lawsuits from the recording industry,  could face up to three years in prison under a bill passed by  the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday.
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As an Australian court considers whether Kazaa&#39;s parent company should be forced to pay damages for the file sharing that goes on over its peer-to-peer (P2P) network, questions persist about
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Senators debate whether to extend or limit a ban on access and other Internet-only taxes.
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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.
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The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments March 29th on whether companies that provide peer-to-peer software violate copyright laws if their users commit copyright infringement.