Victoria Espinel, U.S. copyright czar Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the U.S. copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails. The e-mails, obtained via the Freedom of ...

Matthew Crippen LOS ANGELES — Federal authorities in the first-of-its-kind Xbox modding trial opened their case here Wednesday, hours after the judge called a recess to give the government time to reach a plea deal or dismiss the case. The government decided to forge ahead in the landmark trial after U.S. District ...

LOS ANGELES — Opening statements in a criminal Xbox 360 modding case are set to begin here early Wednesday, a day after 12 jurors were picked to decide the outcome of the first-of-its kind trial. It took five hours to empanel a jury, whose members include a university student dean, music ...

LOS ANGELES — Opening statements in a criminal Xbox 360 modding case are set to begin here early Wednesday, a day after 12 jurors were picked to decide the outcome of the first-of-its kind trial. It took five hours to empanel a jury, whose members include a university student dean, music ...

LimeWire on Tuesday finally shuttered its file sharing services months after a federal judge sided with the Recording Industry Association of America and found the New York company liable for a “substantial amount of copyright infringement” that the music industry claims amount to $1 billion. The 4-year-old case, brought by the ...

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke issued a blistering diatribe against music piracy Monday, declaring it “a growing threat” that “should be dealt with accordingly.” “This isn’t just an issue of right and wrong,” Locke said in a speech at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the nation’s musical focal points. “This ...

A Las Vegas company established to sue bloggers who clip news content is expanding its operations to a second newspaper chain. Righthaven, LLC has struck a deal with Arkansas-based WEHCO Media to expand its copyright litigation campaign, in which bloggers and aggregators across the country are being sued on allegations of ...

Facebook has sued a little-known website for educators called Teachbook, claiming Facebook literally owns the “book” when it comes to naming social networking sites. “Misappropriating the distinctive book portion of Facebook’s trademark, defendant has created its own competing online networking community in a blatant attempt to become a Facebook ‘for Teachers,’” ...

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post ...

If you’ve used BitTorrent to snag unauthorized copies of independent films you should be interested in the arguments unfolding in Wednesday in federal court in Washington, DC. At issue is a mass-litigation campaign, in which the fledgling US Copyright Group is suing about 15,000 users whose IP addresses were detected harvesting ...