Free for a Fee

The MPEG Licensing Association—the group responsible for handling the necessary patent licensing for use of MPEG video codec standards—has announced that it will not charge royalties for AVC/H.264 encoded video that is made available to view via the Internet for free. The group earlier this year had extended its limited moratorium on licensing fees for free Internet video until the end of 2015.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2010/08/mpeg-la-counters-google-webm-with-permanent-royalty-moratorium.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssand was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Hoping to administer a powerful sockdolager to online fraudsters, the California legislature passed a bill earlier this month that makes it illegal to impersonate someone else online.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/california-moves-to-outlaw-online-e-personation.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Blogging has touched off a surge in litigation by those who feel they were defamed or otherwise treated poorly by Internet postings.

The content in this post was found at http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/08/23/blogging-a-hotbed-of-litigation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Flaw%2Ffeed+%28WSJ.com%3A+Law+Blog%29 and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

The content in this post was found at http://daviding.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/michele-boldrin-against-intellectual-property-mp3-audio-econtalk-20090518/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.

Two prominent lawyers in the fight against RIAA P2P lawsuits have taken their battle to the Supreme Court. Today, Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson and “Recording Industry vs. the People” blogger/lawyer Ray Beckerman joined with a few other law professors to ask the Supreme Court not to gut copyright law’s “innocent infringer” defense.

The case concerns a woman named Whitney Harper. Several years ago, when she was a teenaged cheerleader, Harper downloaded music using P2P networks. She was caught by MediaSentry, which investigated file-sharing for the major music labels, but she claimed to be an “innocent infringer” under US copyright law, saying that in her early teen years she had thought P2P use to be just like listening to free music on the radio. That defense, accepted by the judge in her case, reduced the statutory minimum damages against Harper from $750 per song down to just $200.

The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/08/supreme-court-told-p2p-users-can-be-innocent-infringers.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.