If you’ve been hoping for a touchscreen Internet tablet, it looks like you’re going to have to keep waiting. TechCrunch today announced that they were sending their much-hyped CrunchPad design to the deadpool. According to TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington: The CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants your help to beat a recently approved patent on podcasting that many feel is bogus.

“I’m certainly not a lawyer or an expert in patent law,” said podcast pioneer Dave Winer upon hearing of Volomedia’s patent announcement, “but it seems the work Adam Curry and I did in creating the format and protocol for podcasting, in 2001, may have inspired their ‘invention’. It certainly predates it.”

We’ve seen a lot of ignorant new media moves over the last few years – but it looks like photosharing site TweetPhoto and their lawyers could be blazing a new trail. TweetPhoto, via their representatives Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, has sent a takedown letter full of legal threats to podcaster Frank Peters, because Peters […]

Lawyers working on a $1 billion copyright lawsuit, filed by Viacom against Google’s YouTube, may have found evidence that YouTube employees uploaded pirated videos to the site, in order to bump up traffic. According to a CNET News article: Internal YouTube e-mails indicate that YouTube managers knew and discussed the existence of unauthorized content on […]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s Corynne McSherry has published a blog post that explains why the group is taking part in a lawsuit against Amazon over the Kindle: Customers who shell out $300 for a Kindle are not getting the product they expect: a device that will let them do electronically most of the things they […]

Chicago’s Horizon Realty, a property management company, filed a $50,000 libel lawsuit Monday against a former tenant, Amanda Bonnen, over one of her alleged Twitter posts. Horizon argues that Bonnen libeled the company with her May 12th tweet, which read in part “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon Realty […]

Campaigning for sweeping reform of copyright, privacy and patent laws, Sweden’s Pirate Party this weekend won enough votes in the country’s national elections to secure a seat (possibly two) in the European Parliament. Sweden is accorded 17 representatives in the EU governing legislature, and the Pirate Party’s 7.1 percent showing is enough for at least […]

Peter Althin, the attorney representing Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, has called for a retrial, Swedish news site The Local revealed today. Swedish radio channel Sveriges Radio’s P3 news programme reports that the judge in the case was a member of the same copyright protection groups as several of the main entertainment industry representatives, who […]

YouTube is bringing back silent movies – by censoring at least some videos that make use of unauthorized copyrighted music. Here’s an example: More examples here and here.  YouTube displays this message under the videos: These videos cry out for remixing with some alternate music, don’t they? via Mashable

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports that Apple appears to be using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to limit what iPod owners can do with their portable media players: At the heart of this is the iTunesDB file, the index that the iPod operating system uses to keep track of what playable media is on […]