P2P News
150,000 take FCC broadband speed test in first week
The FCC has had it with ISPs. For more than a decade, the agency has relied on ISP reports to get a picture of broadband speeds and availability in the US, and the results have been uniformly terrible. The ISPs don’t want to report numbers detailed enough to be useful, so the feds finally dropped a pile of cash on the table last year to do some proper broadband mapping.
Continue reading »Accusations Fly in Viacom, YouTube Copyright Fight
Google deliberately weakened its copyright compliance standards after it acquired YouTube in 2006 so it “would profit from illegal downloads,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin once said, according to a Friday filing by Viacom in its infringement suit against the company. YouTube, in its own Friday filing and in a blog post , said it was legally immune to copyright infringement claims -– even if it knowingly hosted copyrighted works on its video-sharing site. One reason was that Viacom — which owns MTV, BET, Paramount and other media concerns — had a marketing practice of secretly uploading its own videos to YouTube, some of the same works at issue in the case.
Continue reading »feature: Smoking guns, dark secrets aplenty in YouTube-Viacom filings
Court documents in the $1 billion lawsuit between Viacom and YouTube were unsealed today, finally shedding some light on key questions: did Viacom have “smoking gun” evidence that YouTube was deliberately profiting from 62,637 Viacom clips that were watched more than 507 million times on the site? Was Google aware of the copyright infringement problems when it purchased YouTube in 2006? Were YouTube’s own founders involved in uploading unauthorized materials?
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