Proposed revisions to copyright law would make "illegal streaming" of music and video a felony offense and would allow FBI to wiretap those who are suspected of violating copyright law.

This and other articles refer to takedowns of various sites that link to live streams of sporting events--not coincidentally, just before the Super Bowl. Many sites taken down aren't even in the United States, such as Rojadirecta.org, and none of them actually host the streams. Rojadirecta, in Spain, has even been ruled completely legal by Spanish courts. Yet, the heavy-handed US government continues to push its weight around the globe.

The company also began embedding each film distributed to theaters and critics with a unique identifier, so that Warner could trace leaked and pirated movies back to their source. But, in a piece of delicious irony, it seems that Warner Bros. may have actually stolen this technology from a German company called Medien Patent Verwaltung (MPV).

As part of its ongoing punishment of any institute or company that defends copyright, Anonymous has now taken down the website of The United States Copyright Office. The group managed to take copyright.gov offline for half an hour. After that the website started to respond again slowly, with occasional outages.

Righthaven's standard shakedown seems to go as follows: The firm goes trolling the web, looking for content that from the Las Vegas Review-Journal that has been reposted on other blogs or websites.