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Zediva, a startup with a unique approach to online movie streaming, was ordered to shut down its service by a U.S. federal judge for running afoul of copyright law.

The site offers inexpensive movie streaming via a Silicon Valley-based data center that houses a number of DVD players and DVDs, which users could effectively rent and use over the Internet. Rather than physically shipping discs to consumers, Zediva would allow them to control their DVD players via their Website. It was this unusual model that, its founders believed, exempted Zediva from the usual streaming licensing rules faced by competitors like Netflix. It also enabled them to charge much lower rates for movie rentals and make those movies available sooner than other video on demand services can.

An archive containing over 18,000 scientific papers, downloaded from the academic journal database JSTOR, has been uploaded to The Pirate Bay, where they're now available as a torrent.

The papers were uploaded by a user named Greg Maxwell who says that his decision to make the large quantity of scientific papers available was a response to the indictment earlier this week of early Reddit-er and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz. Swartz has been charged with felony hacking and computer fraud for downloading some 4.8 million papers from JSTOR.

Digital piracy. It's an illicit activity undertaken by college students in their dorm rooms or by teenagers in their parents' basements, right? Wrong, according to a recent survey by the British law firm Wiggin. Or wrong when it comes to e-book digital piracy at least.

According to the firm's annual Digital Entertainment Survey, one in eight women over age 35 who owns an e-reader admits to having downloaded an illegal version of an e-book. That compares to just one in 20 women in the same age group who admits to having pirated music.

Twitter photo-sharing service TwitPic has updated its terms of service to clear up any misunderstanding of who owns the pictures uploaded to the service. There have been controversies in the past year about media organizations using photos posted on TwitPic and not giving proper attribution or compensation to the original photographer.

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.

Yesterday, YouTube redesigned its copyright help center to help educate its users about the ins and outs of copyright law. Copyright law can be complicated and, in light of that, the site now sends offenders to the YouTube Copyright School where they can watch explanatory cartoons in an experience that our own Audrey Watters isn't too sure arrives at education.

If you agree, then you might want to get in on YouTube's next effort - a Q&A with legal experts it will be holding on the video site at the beginning of May.

YouTube has long had to battle complaints and lawsuits - most often from record labels and film studios - that the video-sharing site is awash in copyright infringements. YouTube does take measures to pull content when an infringement claim is made, and it has had a longstanding policy to ban users who repeatedly post videos that violate copyright.

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.

Recent changes to Google's search algorithm have sought to reduce the rankings of what Google has described as "low quality" and "low value add" sites. And while some of these websites have seen a significant drop in traffic, we may find that content farms aren't eradicated. Rather, they're relocating. Impact Media's Mike Essex suggests their new destination may be e-books.

On the Internet, many content farms are full of unoriginal content, often scraped from other sites, and republished under different headlines. The advent of easy self-publishing makes it incredibly simple for this process to be replicated in e-books.

Earlier this week, brand protection company MarkMonitor issued a report on online piracy and counterfeiting, detailing the amount of Internet traffic that "rogue websites" receive. The findings aren't particularly shocking: sites that offer pirated material get a lot of traffic. But the figures touted by MarkMonitor are meant to demonstrate, as the introduction to the report suggests, that "illicit online sales have a significant impact on the U.S. economy in financial terms as well as in public health and well-being."

These figures are likely to be invoked by those forces seeking passage of anti-piracy legislation, particularly, as CNET recently reported, as the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee tries again to secure passage of COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act. And so it's worth looking closely at the methodology MarkMonitor utilizes in order to make these claims - about traffic, sales, and impact.

Ah, Terms of Service - the legally-binding document we never read before clicking "accept." So when Agence France-Presse argued this fall that Twitter's ToS granted it free access to photos shared on the microblogging service, there was a veritable shitstorm of people saying, "Wait, what did I agree to?"

Well, rest easy. A U.S. District Court has decided that the AFP (and anyone else for that matter) does not have open rights to content you post to Twitter or photos to you post to Twitpic.

As the company behind the world's most popular search engine, a video site that famously gets more than 35 hours of video uploaded every minute and a blogging network that allows an undisclosed number of users to self-publish, Google has a lot of content on its hands.

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".