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Top-ranking Obama administration officials, including the U.S. copyright czar, played an active role in secret negotiations between Hollywood, the recording industry and ISPs to disrupt internet access for users suspected of violating copyright law, according to internal White House e-mails.

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.

Clear arguments on Copyright, "Salvos Against Big Brother". It's ironic, but Eric Flint - a very successful published author - is a Trotskyite (socialist), but his views on copyright are very libertarian. He skewers the monopolists better than anyone else.

The nation’s major internet service providers by year’s end will institute a so-called six-strikes plan, the “Copyright Alert System” initiative backed by the Obama administration and pushed by Hollywood and the major record labels to disrupt and possibly terminate internet access for online copyright scofflaws. The internet companies may eliminate service altogether for repeat file-sharing offenders

At issue in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons is the first-sale doctrine in copyright law, which allows you to buy and then sell things like electronics, books, artwork and furniture, as well as CDs and DVDs, without getting permission from the copyright holder of those products. Under the doctrine, which the Supreme Court has recognized since 1908, you can resell your stuff without worry because the copyright holder only had control over the first sale.

Imagine a world where something does not even have to be a copy to be covered by “copyright” – it could just be similar. Check the 2 photos in the link to see what could breach “copyright” in the England
Overlay the powers of SOPA on to that…………..
Very scary.

Jimmy Wales has shown his support for Sheffield student Richard O'Dwyer, who is contesting extradition to the US to face copyright infringement charges. Mr O'Dwyer's mother, Julia, said the petition was a "huge boost". The US authorities say the 24-year-old's TVShack website hosted links to pirated films and TV programmes. On the petition website, Mr Wales wrote: "Copyright is an important institution, serving a beneficial moral and economic purpose. But that does not mean that copyright can or should be unlimited."

The Center for Copyright Information (CCI) is part of the group's controversial "graduated response" effort: a partnership between Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, the MPAA, RIAA, and others that will enforce copyright claims against customers by serving them with warnings and escalating penalties.

Whenever possible, when the law is ambiguous or silent on the issue at bar, the courts should let those who want to market new technologies carry the burden of persuasion that a new exception to the broad rights enacted by Congress should be established. That is especially so if that technology poses grave dangers to the exclusive rights that Congress has given copyright owners. Commercial exploiters of new technologies should be required to convince Congress to sanction a new delivery system and/or exempt it from copyright liability. That is what Congress intended.