Newsday reports Cablevision has threatened broadband customers about file sharing: Cablevision’s high-speed Internet service, Optimum Online, has warned its customers that uploading files using baby Napsters could violate the terms of service. Optimum Online’s warning emphasizes that Napster’s successors strain its network. But, without even mentioning the word “copyright,” the …

We routinely bash Europe for a litany of sins and ills including anti-Semitism, moral relativism, spaghetti spines, bureaucratic nonsense, status quo-worship, etc, etc., but when it comes to copyright, Europe has it all over the US: European copyright protection is expiring on a collector’s trove of 1950’s jazz, opera and …

Copyright coming to China: In a triumph for China’s capitalist ambitions over its leftist history, the country’s revolutionary museum has lost a copyright lawsuit over a painting of communist founder Mao Zedong. The Museum of the Chinese Revolution – a major landmark in central Beijing – and a Shanghai company …

Just because we have trouble defining “evil” doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We have trouble defining a lot of things, including pornography, yet we have no doubt that they exist: we may disagree on this or that instance, but some instances almost all of us agree upon. “Evil” has been …

The Future of Music Coalition’s Jenny Toomey (also former leader of Tsunami, solo artist) blasts the results of corporate radio consolidation since the 1996 Telecommunications Act in the Nation, using evidence derived from the FMC’s recently released study. Toomey writes: Radio is a public resource managed on citizens’ behalf by …

This story would seem to fit in with thoughts on McDonald’s from the other day: reports of US cultural hegemony throughout the world are greatly exaggerated: “Whereas American TV shows used to occupy prime-time slots, they are now more typically on cable, or airing in late-night or weekend slots,” said …

AP reports: Canadian author Emily Somma has filed suit in San Francisco claiming the characters in “Peter Pan,” including Tinker Bell, Wendy and Captain Hook, are now in the public domain and no longer protected by a copyright awarded in 1929. The suit is a pre-emptive move in anticipation of …

Interesting BusinessWeek story on digital video, which is making it much easier for independents to shoot movies on a low budget, though it notably mischaracterizes the cost of Robert Rodriguez’ El Mariachi. While it may have been shot for only $7,225, post production work pushed to cost into the hundreds …

Perhaps emboldened by the innocent verdict in the ElcomSoft trial, a programmer has made the code available to crack the Microsoft Reader: Frustrated by the tight security and lack of interoperability of Microsoft Reader eBooks, a programmer named Dan Jackson obtained the source code for a command-line program called Convert …

Court grants stay in Pavlovich case: DVD copying has come to the attention of the nation’s highest court as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has agreed to put on hold a California Supreme Court decision restricting the entertainment industry’s ability to sue people posting programs that crack encryption codes embedded in …