Google on Collision Course With Movie Biz Over Piracy & Safe Harbor
Wherever Google has a presence, rightsholders are around to accuse the search giant of not doing enough to deal with piracy. Over the past several years, the company has been attacked by both the music and movie industries but despite overtures from Google, criticism still floods in. In Australia, things are definitely heating up. Village Roadshow, one of the nation’s foremost movie companies, has been an extremely vocal Google...
Epic Games Uses Private Investigators to Locate Cheaters
Last fall, Epic Games released Fortnite’s free-to-play “Battle Royale” game mode for the PC and other platforms, generating massive interest among gamers. This also included thousands of cheaters, many of whom were subsequently banned. Epic Games then went a step further by taking several cheaters to court for copyright infringement. In the months that have passed several cases have been settled with undisclosed...
Sweden Considers Six Years in Jail For Online Pirates
Ever since the infamous Pirate Bay trial more than a decade ago, prosecutors in Sweden have called for a tougher approach to breaches of copyright law. In general terms, the country has been painted as soft on infringement but that could all be about to change. After reaching the conclusion that penalties in Sweden “appear to be low” when compared to those on the international stage, the government sought advice on how...
Game Companies Oppose DMCA Exemption for ‘Abandoned’ Online Games
There are a lot of things people are not allowed to do under US copyright law, but perhaps just as importantly there are exemptions. The U.S. Copyright Office is currently considering whether or not to loosen the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, which prevent the public from ‘tinkering’ with DRM-protected content and devices. These provisions are renewed every three years after the Office hears various arguments...
How Linux became my job
I’ve been using open source since what seems like prehistoric times. Back then, there was nothing called social media. There was no Firefox, no Google Chrome (not even a Google), no Amazon, barely an internet. In fact, the hot topic of the day was the new Linux 2.0 kernel. The big technical challenges in those days? read...
