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Hollywood studios ask Google to censor Kim Dotcom’s Mega
A couple of the major Hollywood studios have asked Google to remove the homepage of Kim Dotcom’s Mega from Google search results. This includes NBC Universal and Warner Bros, who are claiming that their copyrighted content is hosted on the URL (http://mega.co.nz) and want it taken down. Dotcom is naturally [...]
Read More »US Congress gets off its fat ass, introduces bill to make cellphone unlocking legal
There has been a lot of unrest regarding cellphone unlocking since the Librarian of Congress declared it illegal to unlock cellphones in the United States without the explicit permission of carriers. First, over 100,000 Americans signed an online petition asking the White House to legalize unlocking of cellphones. Then the [...]
Read More »White House and F.C.C. want unlocking cellphones to be legal in the US, throw the ball in Congress’s court
Remember that petition that asked the White House to make unlocking cellphones legal? You know, the one that more than 100,000 Americans signed? The White House has issued their official response — they not only agree, they’re not alone.
The official response from the White House states that they agree [...]
Read More »Over 100,000 Americans sign petition asking White House to make unlocking cell phones legal
As dotTech pointed out last month, it is now illegal to unlock your cell phone in the United States without approval of your carrier. This decision was made by the Librarian of Congress vis-a-vis interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As expected, the absurdity of the ruling has outraged [...]
Read More »North Korea gets pwned by DMCA, propaganda video is taken down for stealing footage from video game
You probably read the headline and thought, “wait, what?” Don’t worry, it’s exactly what you think it is. A bizarre North Korean propaganda video has been taken down by YouTube after video game publisher Activision filed a DMCA complaint.
The video shows dreams of future space dominance by North Korea, [...]
Read More »You can be fined 1 million dollars and be imprisoned for 10 years for unlocking your phone in the USA
If you don’t already know, unlocking your phone in the US without carrier permission has become officially illegal since January 26th. Section 1204 of Public Law 105-304 says that any person who violates the law willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain will be subject to [...]
Read More »Unlocking cell phones becomes illegal in the United States starting this Sunday
Here in the United States we have the ‘Digital Millennium Copyright Act’ (DMCA). The act is intended to help protect copyright owners against intellectual property theft. However, as we have seen over and over, DMCA is often misused or abused. And today we have yet another example of what is, [...]
Read More »Google is now reporting false DMCA takedown requests
In an effort to improve transparency, Google began publishing reports on the DMCA takedown requests it receives. According to Google, removal requests are now up from 250,000 weekly in May, to 2.5 million requests weekly today. Unfortunately for copyright holders and their never-ending battle against piracy, not all these requests [...]
Read More »Dumb DMCA: Movie producers ask Google to take down links to their own websites, legitimate sources to purchase content, and film reviews
We have seen examples of dumb DMCA takedown requests before, such as the requests Microsoft sent to Google in July of this year. But movie studios asking Google to take down links to their own websites and/or websites that contain legitimate copies of movies and TV shows probably takes the [...]
Read More »Microsoft asked Google to censor “infringing” links belonging to BBC, CNN, Wikipedia, US government, and more
We have seen dumb takedown notices and requests (via DMCA) in the past, such as when a researcher was kicked off MediaFire. However, we have not yet seen something as ridiculous as the following.
As I mentioned before in my criticism of LeakID, companies are allowed to issue DMCA takedown [...]
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