Free content pioneer Lawrence Lessig notes at his blog today that a US Federal Court has upheld open source licenses (pdf), helping to build a case history for Creative Commons licenses that are frequently used in new media:
The Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on [...]

Google’s YouTube troubles just got kicked up a notch.
Italian media company Mediaset SpA is suing YouTube and its owner, Google, for at least 500 million euros ($779 million).
Mediaset claims that Google and YouTube carried out the “illegal distribution and commercial use of audio and video files,” according to a Bloomberg report:
According to a sample analysis [...]

Google announced today that it had reached an agreement with Viacom that will avoid a media debacle over YouTube users privacy:
As we let you know on July 4, YouTube received a court order to produce viewing history data. We are pleased to report that Viacom, MTV and other litigants have backed off their original demand [...]

The Center for Social Media has released a Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.
If you have a vlog, video podcast or post videos to sites like YouTube, knowing about fair use could help keep you from getting sued.
Here’s a summary of their recommendations:

The Associated Press, after sending cease and desist letters to the social media site Drudge Retort, plans to release guidelines that explain how much of its articles and media bloggers and Web sites can copy within fair use rights:
The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying [...]

Remember Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google over copyright infringement?

Viacom sued Google, arguing that “YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization….based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content.”

Google is fighting back, claiming that the Viacom lawsuit threatens the future of the Internet as we know it!

The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) has published an excellent primer on fair use and copyright in the context of new media.
These are topics that podcasters, indie video publishers and bloggers continually struggle with. A recent example is the controversy over the Richter Scales unauthorized use of Lane Hartwell’s photos in a video for one [...]

There’s been a lot of controversy in the last year over the use and reuse of coyrighted content in videos published at sites like YouTube. A new study on copyright and creativity from the Center and American University‚Äôs Washington College of Law may help clear things up.
The study (pdf), Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material [...]

Portable media player manufactuer Neuros Technology has created the Unlocked Media brand to create a consumer friendly trademark out of the abstract idea of “DRM Free” media.
The concept behind the Unlocked Media trademark is that it be made available for free to any entity that uses media using open standard technology which is available to [...]

The controversy over the Richter Scales’ Here Comes Another Bubble appears to be drawing to a close.
The video was taken down from YouTube after photographer Lane Hartwell objected to the unauthorized use of one of her photos in the video. This has led to a great deal of debate over the role of copyright and [...]