The CEOs of some of the largest and most influential U.S. technology companies made the guest list at a gala White House state dinner held in honor of Chinese President Hu Jintao Wednesday evening.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie, and John Chen, chairman, CEO and president of Sybase, are on the list.
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China's "indigenous innovation" policies, and other trade issues with the United States will be in the spotlight Wednesday when both President Barack Obama and Chinese president Hu Jintao meet up in Washington. D.C. to discuss those and other issues.
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A reknowned hacker and 21-year-old whiz kid who was the first to unlock an iPhone says in a Thursday cable television interview that Sony’s lawsuit against him for his latest Sony PlayStation 3 hack only serves to highlight the absurdity of a landmark digital copyright law. Keep Reading
Chinese officials vowed to step up the government's copyright enforcement this week ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington, DC next week. Keep Reading
WASHINGTON, January 13, 2011 - Congress can't get away from controversial copyright- and patent-related issues, said panelsts at the first Intellectual Property Breakfast Club of the new year on Tuesday, as the internet and intellectual property news and events service released the full length video of the event. Keep Reading
WASHINGTON, January 7, 2011 – The Washington-based internet and intellectual property policy news and events service, BroadbandBreakfast.com, http://broadbandbreakfast.com, announces its Winter 2011 series of events (January through February) for the Intellectual Property and Broadband Breakfast Clubs. All breakfast club events are held at Clyde's of Gallery Place, 707 7th St. NW, Washington, DC 20001, in the Piedmont Room. Events begin at 8 a.m., with both American and continental breakfast served, and end at 10 a.m. Attendees are encouraged to join in onthe breakfast discussions. Keep Reading
The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Monday formally named the members of its new intellectual property litigation team, bringing on board Yahoo's senior legal director for copyright and an entertainment attorney from the law firm of Loeb & Loeb in Chicago. Keep Reading
On Friday, the Library of Congress announced that it has put Senior Adviser Maria Pallante in charge as the current Register Marybeth Peters retires at the end of the year. Keep Reading
The Copyright Alliance on Monday named Sandra Aistars as its executive director. Aistars succeeds the group's Founder Patrick Ross, a well-respected Washington, D.C. technology journalist who left earlier this year to return to writing. Keep Reading
The Motion Picture Association of America on Monday announced that it has hired Karen Thorland as vice president and senior content protection counsel. Keep Reading
Late into the night at the end of November, a text message woke up Waleed A. Gad El Kareem, an open-source web developer in Alexandria, Egypt. The 31-year-old developer had set up an alert to tell him whenever his site Torrent-Finder.com was inaccessible online. "I waited for it to come back, and it didn’t so I called [domain name provider] GoDaddy," he recalled in an interview. "They had no idea about it." Keep Reading
Government officials from both the United States and China on Wednesday said that they had made progress on several key issues that had been on the table during their trade negotiations in the past couple of days in Washington, D.C. Keep Reading
Harvard's student newspaper on Monday endorsed the way that the movie industry has approached the phenomenon of illegal downloading at university campuses, calling it "a sensible compromise." Keep Reading
For all of the tough talk coming out of Congress as the United States and China embark on a high profile trade summit today, a confidential memo sent by U.S. Ambassador Jon M. Huntsman at the beginning of 2010 illustrates how the fortunes of the two countries have changed in modern times, and how the leadership of the United States is scrambling for innovative ways to readjust as its economic clout fades. Keep Reading
As requested by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, the U.S. International Trade Commission on Monday released the first of two comprehensive reports detailing the impact of China's "indigenous innovation" policies and its local intellectual property enforcement regime on the U.S. economy. Keep Reading
A Clinton administration architect of a digital age copyright law, a former solicitor general for the United States, and an army of content industry associations on Friday sided with Viacom in its appeal of a June court decision that said that YouTube wasn't liable for infringing the media company's copyrights. Keep Reading
WASHINGTON, December 7, 2010 – The internet and intellectual property policy news and events service BroadbandBreakfast.com is postponing its December breakfast , “China & Intellectual Property with the Chinese Embassy IP Attache.” An unforeseen change in the schedule of Fuli Chen, the Chinese Embassy Intellectual Property Attache, has caused the postponement, owing to the visit of Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan to Washington next week. The event, which was to be on December 14th, 2010, has been rescheduled for February 8th, 2011. Registration for the February 8 event is available at http://ipbreakfastfebruary2011.eventbrite.com/ Keep Reading
Google's YouTube isn't eligible for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions because its founders deliberately built the business on pirated content, according to media behemoth Viacom's lawyers in an appeal of a June district court ruling against its favor. The appeal cites internal e-mail correspondence at YouTube that said that if copyrighted content… Keep Reading
The acting chief of the Motion Picture Association of America says that he was "encouraged" by Google's recent announcement about technical changes it is making to stifle online piracy. Keep Reading
Justice Samuel Alito told his colleagues last week that they missed a rare opportunity to clarify copyright law in the digital age when they declined to hear a case concerning the question of when an individual is sufficiently notified of a musical work's rights status. Keep Reading
Russian authorities have quietly dropped their piracy charges against an environmental group that had been critical of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's environmental record after Microsoft declined to co-operate in the investigation, according to the New York Times. Keep Reading
Direct, personal relationships without lawyers as intermediaries appears to be one of the keys to Netflix's runaway success with its online movie streaming service, according to Greg Sandoval, CNET's Media Maverick columnist. Keep Reading
Swedish online music streaming start-up Spotify is under pressure to launch in the United States, according to the Financial Times. Keep Reading
The Denver Post is apparently trying to prop up its web site traffic by reminding readers of what the legal concept of fair-use really means. Keep Reading
Oracle's high-profile white-collar legal counsel David Boies on Monday told a jury in Oakland that it should award the company $1.7 billion in damages because rival SAP deliberately encouraged a subsidiary to illegally download and copy hundreds of thousands of versions of Oracle software in 2005, according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News. Keep Reading
WASHINGTON, November 19, 2010 - The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday unanimously approved legislation that would provide the U.S. Justice Department with enhanced powers to quickly block the domain names and third party enablers of web sites that it deems are dedicated to the piracy of intellectual property. Keep Reading
SAN FRANCISCO, November 18th, 2010 -- The U.S. Senate's latest battle plan against intellectual property piracy online could gain traction and be approved by the body's Judiciary Committee Thursday, but a large group of the internet's founding architects are warning that the plan's technical approach would wreak havoc and destabilize the global network. Keep Reading
WASHINGTON, November 11, 2010 - The French copyright authority HADOPI -- and what lessons it presented for America's approach to copyright piracy -- was the key subject of the November Intellectual Property Breakfast Club. On Thursday, BroadbandBreakfast.com released the free video of the event. Keep Reading
WASHINGTON, November 9, 2010 – The Motion Picture Association of America has notified the United States Trade Representative as to what it believes are the most “notorious” physical and online markets threatening legitimate commerce. Keep Reading
WASHINGTON, November 4, 2010 – The internet and intellectual property policy news and events service BroadbandBreakfast.com invites the public to its FREE November event in its Intellectual Property Breakfast Club series, “Approaches by Internet Service Providers Around the World to Copyright Infringement.” Our November 2010 panel continues the discussion about file-sharing and other forms of copyright infringement, but broadens it to the global stage, with a particular focus on the approaches of broadband providers outside the United States. What tactics have been deployed by ISPs in France and elsewhere? Will America follow suit? Keep Reading
French authorities have started to send out warning letters to individuals suspected of copyright infringement online, and a whole cottage industry of lawyers and technologists has mushroomed up to both give tips on evading the law enforcers and to aid recipients of the notices, according to a Wednesday report in the Wall Street Journal. Keep Reading
Five of Russia's largest internet companies have called for an update of its copyright laws, according to the wire news service Agence France Press. "We believe that when the procedures are being observed (to prevent copyright violations) internet services cannot be held responsible for content uploaded by users," said the five companies in a recent statement published on their websites. "In Europe, the United States and other countries the legal question about restricting the responsibility of the Internet media in these situations was decided more than 10 years ago." Keep Reading
Google has partnered with three digital music providers to launch a new online music service to increase broadband usage and stave off internet piracy, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Keep Reading
China's official newspaper recently criticized Apple's iPAD because users must pay for music and movies, according to a recent report in The Christian Science Monitor. Keep Reading
Viacom has hired former Solicitor General Theodore Olson to appeal an unfavorable outcome in a billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit that came down this June, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Keep Reading
Copyright holders in the French music industry are reporting a staggering 25,000 "music-related" infringements to the country's top enforcement authority on a daily basis, according to a a music industry trade group director quoted in the trade magazine Billboard. Keep Reading
The interim chief of the Motion Picture Association of America on Thursday urged lawmakers in Japan to enact new legislation that would mandate the disconnection of illegal file-sharers from their internet connections after being warned about their activities several times. Keep Reading
A Las Vegas realtor who used an excerpt of a local newspaper's article on his promotional web site was exercising his right of fair-use and a local copyright-holding company doesn't have a case for copyright infringement, said a federal district court judge on Tuesday. Keep Reading
As the landmark dispute over retransmission consent fees between Fox and Cablevision threatens to drag on through Tuesday, New York area baseball fans who are also Cablevision subscribers are scrambling to make alternative plans to view or hear the game. One ostensibly legal option they have is to view the Tuesday game between the San Francisco Giants and the Philadelphia Phillies on a new internet television service that retransmits broadcasters' signals over the internet. Keep Reading
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is continuing to battle an emerging phenomenon known in some legal circles as "copyright trolls," companies that have been set up to abuse copyright law to pressure individuals suspected of copyright infringement into monetary settlements. The digital rights group on Friday filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging a federal district court in… Keep Reading