United States District Judge Jeremy Fogel has delivered Prince, and Universal Music a fair use smackdown in a case that may end up reducing the number of nuisance takedown notices filed against people that share videos at sites like YouTube. Universal had sued Stephanie Lenz over the use of Prince’s song Let’s Go Crazy in […]

Free content pioneer Lawrence Lessig notes at his blog today that a US Federal Court has upheld open source licenses (pdf), helping to build a case history for Creative Commons licenses that are frequently used in new media: The Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) […]

Google announced today that it had reached an agreement with Viacom that will avoid a media debacle over YouTube users privacy: As we let you know on July 4, YouTube received a court order to produce viewing history data. We are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original […]

The Center for Social Media has released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. If you have a vlog, video podcast or post videos to sites like YouTube, knowing about fair use could help keep you from getting sued. Here’s a summary of their recommendations:

YouTube has responded to a federal court order requiring the company, as part of Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit, to give Viacom copies of YouTube’s server log files. These log files are needed by Viacom to help it determine the extent to which YouTube has been used to distribute copyrighted content without permission. However, Viacom doesn’t […]

This is one of a series of videos by Frances Pinter and David Percy that look at building businesses based on Creative Commons licenses. It takes a look at Magnatune, a digital music store built on CC licenses, and the company’s founder, John Buckman. Creative Commons licenses are a set of free tools designed to […]

The Associated Press, after sending cease and desist letters to the social media site Drudge Retort, plans to release guidelines that explain how much of its articles and media bloggers and Web sites can copy within fair use rights: The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even […]

The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York today made public a decision in the proceeding to determine reasonable license fees to be paid to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) by AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo! for their online performance of musical works. Total payments to be made […]

The Open Rights Group has an in-depth look at Magnatune, a pioneering record label that licenses its releases under Creative Commons licenses. This means that Magnatune’s music is: Shareable: Users are invited to share their purchased tracks with up to three friends, can listen to the entire catalogue for free via the website’s 128kbps streams, […]

The Citizen Media Law Project has published a free online legal guide. The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) is jointly affiliated with Harvard Law School‚Äôs Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a research center founded to “explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development,” and the Center for Citizen Media, an initiative […]