Posted 10/21/08 at 03:25:28 PM by Alex Castle

Monday, the MPAA posted an open letter to the EFF titled “Hollywood isn’t Living in the Past, EFF Shouldn’t Either.” The testily-titled missive contains the association’s responses to claims that its actions against the RealDVD DVD burning software are an attempt to maintain control over technology and innovation.

In the most pointed paragraph of the letter, the MPAA’s Jeff Williams writes:

“Forgive us if we take offense when the EFF and other activist organizations that continually take the side of those who profit from widespread copyright infringement attack our industry as one that stifles innovation. It's a desperate throw-back to the Napster days of old when they pull out this tired and weathered playbook. It's not 2001 anymore.”

The letter also argues that Hollywood and the internet are no longer at odds, and that legal services like iTunes and Hulu represent ways in which the industry is embracing innovation.

What do you think? Is the MPAA right to say that “The days of Hollywood being from Mars and Silicon Valley being from Venus are simply over?” Hit the jump and let us know.

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5

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Software, mpaa, eff, realdvd

Posted 09/24/08 at 05:00:00 PM by Quinn Norton

With a presidential election around the corner, let’s look at how people pervert copyright law to squelch speech. Copyright takedown notices were never meant to stifle whistle-blowers or detractors, yet that’s become a popular use for them. Individual critics are likely to go broke even if they win a case, so people and ISPs tend to back down at lawyer point.

It's a cruel and efficient tactic, of which more after the jump.

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6

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copyright, Diebold, eff, columns, quinn norton, byte rights, election, ninjas, michael savage, electronic freedom foundation, nonsense

Posted 07/03/08 at 12:08:06 PM by Chris Moody

Have you been uploading copyright protected content on YouTube? Have you even been looking at it? Viacom wants to know, and a Judge has ruled in the recent Viacom v. Google case that Google has to turn over “all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website”.

Kurt Opsahl with the Electronic Frontier Foundation disagrees with the courts ruling arguing that the court, “erroneously ignores the protections of the federal Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), and threatens to expose deeply private information about what videos are watched by YouTube users”. The VPPA was passed in 1988 as a result of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental history being published during his Supreme Court nomination.

I agree with Opsahl, someone’s YouTube history should be just as private as their video rental history. Privacy is harder and harder to maintain in a world where technology is outstripping existing laws, which often must be judged by people with little experience in technology. We certainly don’t need which version of Star Wars Kid we were watching to be available for anyone to look at, or for companies to go trolling for lawsuits in data. Where do you come down on the issue?

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3

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Google, Privacy, law, youtube, viacom, eff, court

Posted 11/08/07 at 10:04:54 PM by Erin Simon

The Senate debates whether to grant retroactive immunity to the phone and internet service providers who allegedly illegally turned over massive amounts of customer data to the NSA.

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2

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law, immunity, congress, bill, surveillance, fisa, patriot act, at&t, telecoms, eff, senate judiciary committee

Posted 11/04/07 at 10:51:13 PM by Erin Simon

Copyright-maximalist and fair use-protecting principles for filtering user-generated content for copyrighted material butted heads this week.

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3

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Google, copyright, law, filtering, infringement, youtube, fair use, user-generated content, eff