Media Defender, an “anti-piracy” business (or Content Cartel front) may be getting a richly deserved visit from the FBI over it’s practices, after attacking Revision3 with a Denial-of-Service attack.
Previous coverage of Media Defender shenanigans here and here.
What’s sickening is that if it was a bunch of pink-haired 16-year-olds doing this, they’d get a glorious perp-walk, [...]

Background/original story: NBC “accidentally” distributed American Gladiators with the Broadcast Flag turned on.
EFF podcast/discussion:

Alan Wexelblat:
I’m talking about traveling back in time to late 2005 when the ‘net was buzzing - angrily—about a Cartel proposal to require DRM to be embedded in every broadcast signal. The end of ‘free’ TV? No more time-shifting allowed? You remember [...]

YouTomb documents copyright takedowns on YouTube.
YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.
More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the [...]

WMG has decided to test the DMCA Safe-Harbor provisions once again by suing Seeqpod.
The safe harbor principle is the same one that prevents major search engines from being sued every time they link to illegal information or content (though it hasn’t prevented porn purveyor Perfect 10 from going after both Google and Microsoft over the [...]

Interactive: Singularity is “the first large-scale online web conference in the world,” from October 24-26th, 2008.
Flixwagon joins Qik as a live-video-blogging-service-via-cellphone.
Film, video, and music: Made in America. Stacy Peralta documents LA gang culture.
Cynical-C blog digs up some hilarious FCC complaints from Government Attic.
Download some Negativland.
Radiologik is a Mac DJ automation app:
Radiologik is a set of [...]

Awesome.

Via the Evolution Control Committee.

Interactive. iPhone/Touch Starbuck’s “Quickorder” application. No waiting. Pocket Guitar for iPhone/Touch. Interactive Architecture. Interactive building façades.

Web Trend Map 2008 Beta.
Film, video, music. The films of Joe Merrell. Good Copy Bad Copy (2007), Copyright+Culture. Hulu Discusses Private Beta, Suggests Public Launch Time Frame. Jem Cohen directs DVD for The Ex. Talking to the Music Industry, a [...]

YouTube has released a “beta” of it’s content identification and filtering tools for Copyright owners.
Google Blog: Latest content ID tool for YouTube.
YouTube Video ID Beta page.
Time will tell how this effects both Fair Use and YouTube’s popularity.

Hopefully, such high-profile outrages as the $220,000 fine levied against a Minnesota woman for “infringement” will ignite the necessary backlash to rein in the RI/MPAA. All the salient points are nailed in this piece by Declan McCullagh at CNET:
After decades of special-interest lobbying by large holders of intellectual property rights, U.S. copyright law has spiraled [...]

A link roundup. Gettin better.
Record Labels Use Piracy Data to Please Fans
Most people assume that record labels hate filesharing, but it seems that some companies actually use it as a research tool. We found out that Interscope records, and probably other record companies as well, use P2P data to determine which tracks they will release [...]

Awesome Story this week unfolding around Media Defender, an anti-piracy company working with the content cartels to do things like pollute P2P networks with bogus/corrupt files, hack P2P users computers and entrap people into illegal file-sharing. Emails and all sorts of internal goodies have been outed on the Internets. All sorts of interesting tidbits and [...]

Of course, referring to “Hollywood” movies as “Culture” is often a stretch.
I was going to link to this yesterday but never got around to it. Ken Fisher at Ars explains the consequences of AACS adoption. From Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight:
It’s not clear to me is where we go from here. In under a year we’ll [...]

The MP/RIAA and their puppets in the Senate are proposing blackmailing Colleges into doing their Due Diligence/dirty work. This proposal (Senate Amendment 2314) would withhold federal funding for student aid unless schools adopt surveillance and filtering technologies on their campus networks.

via Reuters:
The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in [...]

Is CNN’s promise of “unrestricted” usage rights to it’s Presidential Debate coverage not really “unrestricted”?