With Tumblr’s decision this week to ban porn on its platform, everyone’s getting a firsthand look at how bad automated content filters are at the moment. Lawmakers in the European Union want a similar system to filter copyrighted works and, despite expert consensus that this will just fuck up the internet, the legislation moves forward. […]

When the Internet Archive Forgets On the internet, there are certain institutions we have come to rely on daily to keep truth from becoming nebulous or elastic. Not necessarily in the way that something stupid like Verrit aspired to, but at least in confirming that you aren’t losing your mind, that an old post or […]

Back in 2016, an ambitious group of fans began work on an Unreal Engine 4 “reboot” of role-playing, light-sabering classic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic called Apeiron. The project has made impressive progress since then, but it emitted a tragic Wilhelm scream this week when Lucasfilm lawyers zapped it out of existence. As […]

Today, the EU held a routine vote on regulations for self-driving cars, when something decidedly out of the ordinary happened… The autonomous vehicle rules contained a clause that affirmed that “data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on databases inapplicable.” This […]

Before there was Star Trek: Bridge Crew, Ubisoft’s game about piloting the original Enterprise, there was Star Trek Stage-9, a fan project recreating the Enterprise-D from The Next Generation in Unreal Engine. This week the project is no more, following a cease and desist demand by CBS. One of the leads on the project, who […]

Internet users must ask for a photographer’s permission before publishing their images, even if the photos were already freely accessible elsewhere online, the European Court of Justice ruled Tuesday. “The posting on a website of a photograph that was freely accessible on another website with the consent of the author requires a new authorisation by that […]

A controversial overhaul of the EU’s copyright law that sparked a fierce debate between internet giants and content creators has been rejected. The proposed rules would have put more responsibility on websites to check for copyright infringements, and forced platforms to pay for linking to news. A slew of high-profile music stars had backed the […]

The problems are huge, not least because the EU will implement an automated content filter, which means that memes will die, but also, if you have the money to spam the system with requests, you can basically kill any content you want with the actual content holder only having a marginal chance of navigating EU […]

Memes, remixes and other user-generated content could disappear online if the EU’s proposed rules on copyright become law, warn experts. Digital rights groups are campaigning against the Copyright Directive, which the European Parliament will vote on later this month. The legislation aims to protect rights-holders in the internet age. But critics say it misunderstands the […]

‘This content is not available in your country’ – a damn annoying message, especially when you’re paying for it. But a new EU regulation means you can now access Netflix, Amazon Prime and other services from any country in Europe, marking an end to boring evenings in hotels watching BBC World News. The European Commission’s […]

Nissan the car company never really cared who Uzi Nissan was. Then it decided he had something it wanted very much—the website www.nissan.com, which he created for his small retail computer business in 1994—and it sued him for $10 million. When the two Nissans went to war, Uzi Nissan prevailed in the end, but lost […]

This is the list of patents (Attachm​​ent 1) covered by the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License as of January 1, 2018. Under the MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License, royalties are payable for products manufactured or sold in countries with an active MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio Patent at the time of manufacture or sale. Please note that the last […]

A Danish man has become the first European to be convicted of taking part in the promotion of an illegal online film site.The 39-year-old man was handed a six-month suspended sentence by an Odense court for promoting the illegal online film streaming service Popcorn Time via his website popcorntime.dk. […] More specifically, the man was […]

More than a decade ago, Hollywood was struggling to get to grips with the file-sharing phenomenon. Sharing via BitTorrent was painted as a disease that could kill the movie industry, if it was allowed to take hold. Tough action was the only way to defeat it, the suits concluded. In 2007, however, a most unusual […]

On Thursday, Tomczak tweeted a screenshot of the complaints that have been lodged against his video, “10 Hours of Low Level White Noise.” The clip is exactly what its title advertises, and the absurdity of someone claiming ownership of a bunch of frequencies with equal intensity playing simultaneously—that’s all white noise is—clearly illustrates just how […]

According to Julia Reda’s blog, the only Pirate in the EU Parliament, the European Commission in 2014 paid the Dutch consulting firm Ecorys 360,000 euros (about $428,000) to research the effect piracy had on sales of copyrighted content. The final report was finished in May 2015, but was never published because the report concluded that […]

Subtitle lovers, beware: a court just ruled that making fan subtitles or translations is not protected by the law. A Dutch group called (translated) the Free Subtitles Foundation took anti-piracy group BREIN to court over “fansubbing.” BREIN has previously been active in taking fan subtitles and translations offline, and the Foundation was hoping a Dutch court […]

Cited in a DMCA takedown request filed against Google on behalf of Paramount Pictures, and spotted by TorrentFreak (and tipped to us by reader ~nonanonymous) is an innocuous link to a 32-bit alternate install image Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS. The takedown request seeks to remove links to a number of torrent URLS that are alleged to […]

Film studio Warner Brothers has asked Google to remove its own website from search results, saying it violates copyright laws. It also asked the search giant to remove links to legitimate movie streaming websites run by Amazon and Sky, as well as the film database IMDB. The request was submitted on behalf of Warner Brothers […]

All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas, provide an impetus for change in the patent system, and to preempt patent trolls. The system works by pulling text from the entire database […]

Copyright strikes again, with photographers and publishers hit particularly hard. Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects even if you own them. That’s the result of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which extends the copyright of artistic objects […]