Los Angeles Times on the battle between the Walt Disney Company, which purchased Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion and the heirs of Jack Kirby, the man whose art work was responsible for many of Marvel’s comic characters. “Pow! Wham! Another high-profile copyright fight broke out in Hollywood, and this one could be the broadest the industry has yet seen.”
Bloomberg: “Hollywood’s biggest movie studios, including Walt Disney Co. and Paramount Pictures, lost a suit seeking to stop customers of Australia’s Iinet Ltd. from illegally downloading movies in a ruling that may set a precedent for the industry. Iinet, Australia’s third-biggest Internet service provider, didn’t authorize copyright infringements and shouldn’t be held liable for the actions of its customers, Justice Dennis Cowdroy told the Federal Court in Sydney today, as he dismissed the suit. The suit, led by Village Roadshow Ltd.’s Roadshow Films, sought to stop Iinet customers from using BitTorrent software to download films . . . . “
See “Film industry loses iiNet download case.”
Information Week: “A Minnesota woman fined nearly $2 million for illegally downloading music has seen the fine reduced from that ‘monstrous’ amount by a U.S. District Court judge who dropped the fine to $54,000. Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother with four children, said she is seeking a way to have the fine — leveled after she lost a case with the Recording Industry Association of America — reduced even further. . . . In his opinion, Judge Michael Davis said, ‘The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music’.”
CNN Tech: “When Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel ‘The Lost Symbol’ hit stores in September, it may have offered a peek at the future of bookselling. On Amazon.com, the book sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. This was seen as something of a paradigm shift in the publishing industry, but it also may have come at a cost. Less than 24 hours after its release, pirated digital copies of the novel were found on file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent. Within days, it had been downloaded for free more than 100,000 times.”
The Digital Media Lawyer Blog: “The copyright infringement claims brought against Canadian Gary Fung and his .torrent sites have at last been resolved. On December 21, 2009, Judge Wilson of the Central District of California found Fung and several of his .torrent sites liable for inducement of copyright infringement. Wilson’s decision was based largely the same grounds on which other operators of peer-to-peer filing sharing were found liable in Grokster, Napster and Usenet. To be liable for inducing copyright infringement, a defendant must have knowledge of another’s infringement and undertake purposeful acts aimed at assisting and encouraging this infringement. . . . This means that the plaintiff must first show that there has been an act of direct infringement by third parties. . . . In the case of peer-to-peer filing sharing, infringement can occur both when a copyrighted work is uploaded (this violates the copyright holder’s distribution right) and when it is downloaded (this violates the copyright holder’s reproduction right).”