News on Copyrights

A US jury on Thursday ordered a 32-year-old woman to pay 1.92 million dollars in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs in a high-profile digital piracy case. Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from the US state of Minnesota, was found liable for using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing network to download the songs over the Internet. The jury took just under five hours to reach its verdict. It ordered Thomas-Rasset to pay 1.92 million dollars -- or 80,000 dollars per song -- to six record companies: Capitol ...

Pablo Soto's story may be every computer whiz kid's dream — or nightmare. After leaving school at 16 to support his family, he managed to eke out a living doing what he loves most: designing computer programs. Then in 2001, the Madrid native launched Blubster, one of the world's most popular peer-to-peer Internet file-sharing programs of recent years — with no training and operating out of his grandmother's apartment. Now Soto may become a victim ...

Movie directors, composers, authors, legal experts, policy-makers and others are meeting here this week to discuss the "threats and opportunities" the Internet poses to copyright in the digital age. Some 500 delegates from more than 55 countries are scheduled to attend the 2nd World Copyright Summit being held on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Convention Center. Web and software giants Google and Microsoft and representatives of movie, music and book rights societies are also among those attending the summit organized by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors ...