Despite the company's official disapproval, jailbreaking iOS is still big among a certain subset of users, as evidenced by the popularity of the A5 Absinthe tool that was released last Friday. But should people in the jailbreak community continue to rest easy, assured that freeing their devices will forever remain legal? Probably not.

The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen, says the EFF, is for everyone to let the Copyright Office know that they would prefer to see jailbreaking remain legal, and why. There's a comment form that lets them do that.

In addition to smartphones, the EFF wants the Copyright Office to add exemptions for tablets and video game consoles as well. Two years ago, the tablet market simply wasn't what it is today, let alone the jailbreak community around it.

Video game consoles have been hacked and modded for years, but more recent tinkering with Microsoft's Kinect in particular has brought the true potential of the technology to the forefront. Even though Microsoft itself has embraced Kinect-hacking, the EFF doesn't want to let this kind of user-modification of game consoles slip through the legal cracks.

For the past month, Operation Payback, spearheaded by Anonymous, has targeted organizations like the RIAA, the MPAA, the UK Copyright Office, as well as KISS bassist Gene Simmons with DDoS attacks - either crashing their sites completely, grinding them to an unbearable halt, or in some cases, putting redirects in place so that visitors end up instead at the popular BitTorrent Pirate Bay website.

Anonymous sees itself as the defenders of the Internet, using the denial-of-service techniques as a sort of 21st century form of non-violent civil disobedience. Not a formal political group or organization, Anonymous is rather a loose coalition of individuals who see the crackdowns against file-sharing, done in the name of copyright protection, as contrary to the very freedom of the Internet.

TorrentFreak, reporting on today's attack against the U.S. Copyright Office, points to offline demonstrations being planned for November 5, Guy Fawkes Day. But it's not the sixteenth century Catholic rebel that tried to blow up Parliament that's being honored here. Rather it's a nod to the Alan Moore comic V for Vendetta, in which the revolutionary V (not just a munitions expert, but a hacker) takes on the totalitarian government.

The frequency with which Anonymous is staging its online protests seems to show no signs of abating, and so look for fireworks on Friday, the 5th of November.

TwitPic's new terms of service should clear up that confusion. In it TwitPic explicitly states that content uploaded by a user is the copyright of the respective owner. It is not part of the public domain and is subject to how the user, not media organizations, chooses to have it disseminated.

"To clarify our ToS regarding ownership, you the user retain all copyrights to your photos and videos, it's your content," Noah Everett, founder of TwitPic, wrote on the company's blog. "Our terms state by uploading content to Twitpic you allow us to distribute that content on twitpic.com and our affiliated partners. This is standard among most user-generated content sites (including Twitter). If you delete a photo or video from Twitpic, that content is no longer viewable."

TwitPic users have fought back against the media. One photographer, Emily James of Just Do it, went so far as to invoice The Daily Mail in the United Kingdom £1,170 (British pounds, around $1,900 America dollars by today's exchange rate) for photos that it had used of a polling station during the British General Election.

New media copyright is a Wild West of usage and rules. Generally, copyright and Creative Commons are the rules for using photos taken off the Internet and social media. That does not stop thousands of blogs from using whatever photos they want and getting away with it. The difference between small blogs and big media, though, is that mainstream publications stand to make money off the photos they attach to their content.

The rule is simple. If you create it, you own the copyright. Media organizations have to give attribution and/or compensation to the producer if they use that content.

This new law creates a high-level office in the White House (the 'Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator'), raises the limits on possible damages in copyright cases substantially, and increases the number of things that can be confiscated.

Better Than it Could Have Been

The only positive aspect of this bill as it was signed by President Bush this week is that it does not include the per-song piracy penalty of the original bill which was introduced earlier this year. Under this provision, an accused pirate could have been charged separately for each copyright infringement, including once for every song featured in a pirated movie, for example.

Remix Culture

Copyright lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig argues that these kind of draconian laws and the obsession with prosecuting copyright violations stifles our culture and that the law should be relaxed in order to create for a thriving 'remix culture.' The ProIP act, however, takes the law into the opposite direction.

The new legislation, which was cosponsored by numerous Democratic and Republican senators, including Hilary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Gordon Smith, and Lindsey Graham, was unanimously adopted by the U.S. Senate and passed the House with a wide margin.

Works are part of the public domain when their copyright expires or when the artist designates the work as such. This means that people can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work - even for commercial purposes, without asking permission.

"The Public Domain Mark is a further step on the path towards making the promise of a digital public domain a reality," said American University law professor Michael Carroll, a founding board member of Creative Commons. "Marking and tagging works with information about their copyright status is essential. Computers must be able to parse the public domain status of works to communicate its usefulness to the public. The metadata standard underpinning the Public Domain Mark and all of CC's licensing and legal tools are what makes this possible."

Labelling works as part of the global public domain is challenging as different countries have different intellectual property laws. Creative Commons says it is working on a system for identifying works that are in the public domain, but in only a limited number of countries.

"It's a huge concern for creative bloggers," said Amy Anderson, who blogs on the arts and crafts site Crafter Minds. "I don't think Pinterest does anything to help protect copyright besides removing content when people ask."

Pinterest did not respond to a request for comment, but its Web site has instructions for requesting the removal of copyrighted content.

"If they were manually showcasing content and/or putting this content up themselves, they would definitely be in violation and break their protections," Get.com co-founder Steven Fruchter said in an email. "Since their users are the ones 'pinning' content, which is then downloaded and served via Pinterest's servers, they are considered a user-generated site, which only needs to take down content after they receive a take down notice by the copyright holder."

Among many Pinterest users, as well as several artists who have had work pinned on the site, a code for giving proper credit is developing. Artist Laura C. George said Pinterest has no way of knowing if links tied to images link back to the original artists' Web site, but so far Pinterest users have been better about giving credit than Tumblr.

"That being said, it's still awful that I might discover a new painter on Pinterest and not be able to find them. To not know their name or have their website," she said. "It's truly an awful situation...it seems impossible to enforce this type of rule on such a huge site with thousands of members and billions of pins. They would have to check the link to every 'original' pin and research to make sure it was the original. That's insane."

Yesterday Cryptome published a 22-page PDF called the "Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook". Cryptome publisher John Young said he believed the document showed "improper use of copyright to conceal [...] violations of trust toward its customers." The Electronic Frontier Foundation said Young was within his fair use rights, but the watchdog site was pulled offline none the less. After 14 years spent posting 40,000 sensitive documents, Cryptome is a legacy resource online. Its return is something to celebrate.

While much of this content is precisely what makes the Web go 'round, Google says that there are some "bad apples who use the Internet to infringe copyright." The company has laid out a number of steps it says it will take to ensure that it does its part to "better address the underlying problem".

First, Google says it will "act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours," for copyright owners who "use the tools responsibly". It says it will do the same for counter-notice complaints "for those who believe their content was wrongly removed."

Secondly, Google is going to "prevent terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in Autocomplete." The company acknowledges that this may be difficult to implement and, with Google Instant, we can't say that it doesn't sound a bit scary. Already, the site has many terms it won't include in autocomplete. Now, we have to imagine terms like "torrent" and "download" and "episode" are likely to disappear too? Where does this end, exactly?

The final points seem more innocuous. Google says it will improve its anti-piracy review for Adsense, to make sure ad revenue isn't derived from ads shown on "pages that provide infringing materials," as well as "experiment to make authorised preview content more readily accessible in search results."

What do you think about Google's plans to prevent copyright infringement? While we can heartily agree with quick response to DMCA takedowns and counter-notices, what about removing terms from autocomplete? How much more filtering do you want on the Web's most trafficked gateway to content?

But in YouTube's words, "copyright law can be complicated," and so rather than just banning without recourse or reform, the service has redesigned its copyright help center and made a few changes to its policy.

For those unfamiliar with Happy Tree Friends, these adorable cartoon animals have their own series which involves a lot of gibberish and mayhem. The short episodes (yes, you can find them on YouTube) often end violently. Really violently. Now I'm a huge fan of cartoon violence, don't get me wrong. And I can immediately see the appeal of using these characters to appeal to a certain demographic that may well be apt to upload infringing material.

The Happy Tree Friends video does take a quick, four-minute stab at explaining how copyright law - and YouTube's policies - work, but I'm just not convinced that Copyright School is the smartest educational tool.

The video starts with a pretty clear explanation of how copyright works. (And it helps that this time, the Happy Tree Friends have narration and not just gibberish.) But when the video gets to the issues that most people probably do have questions about - fair use and mashups - the narration runs into high speed, brushing over legalese like it's a joke. "Contact a copyright attorney" if you have questions or doubts about the legality of a piece of content, the video suggests.

Well that's not helpful. Here's another cartoon that I think explains things better (ironically, yes, posted without the author's permission):

Now sure, some of the changes that YouTube announced today are an improvement with how it deals with copyright issues. It's good to move away from a one-size-fits-all punishment policy and give users the ability to erase blemishes they might have on their permanent record.

While it's good to see a proactive approach in terms of educating users about copyright, it's a shame that YouTube glosses over the legalities of some of the most interesting content online - mashups - and some of our most important rights as creatives and educators - fair use.

Bloomberg reported this morning that Google "has agreed to meet demands from a local writers' group that it stop scanning and uploading books to the company's online library without authors' permission."

This certainly isn't the first time Google has run into complaints over its practices with the project. Last month, the company was convicted of violating France's copyright laws. A Globe and Mail report on Google's practices stated that over 80% of the French books offered were still under copyright. The company has also faced criticism in Germany over its Google Books service, where today the German minister of Justice warned that the company may be reaching monopoly status, requiring government intervention.

The Bloomberg article notes that in China, Google trails behind the search engineBaidu. This is in a country with more Internet users than the entire population of the United States. But is the problem of supposed copyright infringement a public relations issue in a country where the average consumer sees counterfeit products in nearly every storefront window? While we stand on the side of writers getting paid for their work, we're not sure this issue would really stand in the way of Google gaining popularity in China.

The original case was thrown out last year when a U.S. District Court judge ruled that YouTube was protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which essentially argues that site owners are immune from the legal implications of what the site's users do, such as uploading copyrighted material.

Google's Anti-Piracy Measures

Google is well aware of the copyright issues raised by sites like YouTube and has gone to great measures to try and alleviate the problem, in the hopes of not only avoiding $1 billion lawsuits, but also partnering up with traditional media companies in the future.

Last month, Google touted a series of accomplishments it's made in the battle against digital piracy. The company says it responds to all DMCA content take-down requests within 24 hours, often much earlier than that. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told an audience of TV executives in Scotland that the average take-down request is fulfilled within four hours.

They've also developed a set of tools to help copyright owners more easily make claims of infringement. The company's Content ID technology is used to automatically check audio and video clips against a large database of copyrighted material to determine if it's in violation of the law. They've even blocked certain piracy-related terms from showing up as auto-suggestions in their search query box.

So What's the Big Deal?

Despite Google's recent efforts to assuage copyright concerns, Viacom is arguing that from 2005 to 2008, Google deliberately allowed copyright-infringing material - 63,000 video clips in particular - to be uploaded to YouTube and sit there until complaints were made. Google says there isn't a single copyright-infringing clip that wasn't taken down upon request. The judge that heard the original case agreed.

Obviously, Viacom's legal team doesn't think the first judgement was legally sound and wants it to be overturned. Even though YouTube isn't known to be routinely hosting any pirated, Viacom-owned clips these days, the company is hoping to establish a new legal precedent, which would serve as a victory for traditional media companies and copyright owners, who often view the Web and companies like Google as a threat to the way copyright law and intellectual property have worked historically.

The panel of judges haven't decided whether or not to hear the appeal yet. If they do, Viacom will have its work cut out for it as it tries to convince the court to counteract the prevailing legal precedent over DCMA and safe harbor.

The 84-year-old Redstone, whose company is in the midst of a lawsuit against Google's YouTube seeking $1 billion in damages for what it terms "massive intentional copyright infringement," was coy about the video sharing site, but did make some pointed remarks about what he thinks of YouTube's current business model. "Think about it: You cannot pay the rent posting videos on YouTube," he said. "And most aspiring novelists do not aspire to self-publish. You cannot make it as a musician, you can't make it as a filmmaker or a writer without ... effective and enforced copyright legislation."

Redstone, though, does see a future for monetization of online content via advertisements. "Advertising will pay the way," he told the crowd.

On the other hand, content producers need to be more accommodating of changing consumer viewing habits. More and more people are getting video, audio, and textual content online, or doing things like timeshifting television programming with Tivo. Big media needs to get on board and realize that consumers want to be able to view their media whenever and wherever is most convenient for them. Giving consumers a choice of where and how to consume media would be beneficial to media producers in the long run.

The problem for media companies, though, is that even with explosive growth of online advertising, it likely can't match the profits they get from other mediums. The Law & Order franchise, for example, reportedly rakes in over $1 billion in profits from rerun licensing rights, DVD sales, and overseas licensing. That's a lot of money that content producers might feel hesitant to potentially cannibalize by bringing content online.

Ustream put out a statement today saying that the subpoena actually came earlier this year, and that Ustream has fully complied with its demands.

The mixed martial arts championship alleged that one user from a single IP address uploaded two events that drew 36,000 and 78,000 non-paying viewers, respectively, representing a "significant loss of revenue" to UFC and their mobile, online, cable and satellite distribution partners. The events cost $44.95 each or $55.95 for the HD version via cable and satellite providers and official online outlets.

"I can't wait to go after the thieves that are stealing our content," UFC President Dana White said in the statement. "This is a fight we will not lose."

Zuffa LLC, the UFC's parent company, cites a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows copyright owners to order service providers to disclose the identity of subscribers who allegedly engage in copyright infringement. The company has aggressively pursued pirates in the past, settling over 500 lawsuits last month and testifying before Congress.

Ustream seems prepared to full comply with Zuffa's demands - the UFC actually has an official channel on Ustream, where it broadcasts footage from behind the scenes as well as some live events.

Justin.tv, which also received subpoenas, has remained silent on the subpoenas so far but has moved to protect copyright owners in the past.

The company's four-pronged approach to reeling in the amount of copyright-infringing content found on its sites was announced in December in response to years of criticism from media outlets and rights holders over the ease with which users have been able to publish and find such content via Google's properties, including YouTube and Blog Search.

Google has made two changes to its search results pages aimed to discourage piracy and promote original content when published by its rightful owners. Rich Music Snippets help highlight legit audio content, while changes they made to Autocomplete have blacklisted a number of piracy-related search terms, so as not to appear to openly encourage copyright infringement.

They've also begun to more actively enforce their long-standing prohibition against AdSense users displaying Google's ads on pages that offer pirated content.

In more directly addressing copyright issues, Google is not only protecting itself from future litigation like Viacom's failed $1 billion lawsuit, but also assuages the concerns of large content providers, with whom Google needs to partner if it wants initiatives like Google TV, Google Music, Google Books and its YouTube movie rental service to succeed.

"We are not your enemy and we want to help," Schmidt told the crowd at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Not coincidentally, the company announced the day before that Google TV would soon be launching in Europe, starting with the UK.

Viacom Plans to Appeal

According to CNET, Viacom intents to appeal this judgement as soon as possible:

"We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions. We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible.

Viacom Didn't Help Its Own Case

It is worth noting that - in the end - Viacom probably did not help its own case by secretly uploading its own videos to YouTube while still complaining about the face that YouTube hosted these videos. Often, Viacom even "roughed up" these videos to make them look stolen, which YouTube's chief counsel Zahavah Levine noted earlier this year.