Articles about DMCA

Just a few days ago -- before it has even been officially announced -- Windows 11 leaked online and remains available to download from numerous sites. The Windows 11 ISO torrent spread like wildfire, and now Microsoft is fighting back.

The company has issued a slew of DMCA takedown notices to various sites it says are distributing "a leaked copy of the unreleased Windows 11". Unsurprisingly, an article entitled "How to Download and Install Windows 11 Right Now" caught the eyes of Microsoft lawyers.

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Although Windows 10 doesn’t spy on its users in the way it did when first launched, and people now have much greater control over their privacy settings, the truth is many users would prefer to tighten their control over the operating system further than Microsoft allows.

There are a number of great free third-party tools which let you boost your privacy and make various changes to the software, including removing annoying bundled software. That’s fine right? Not according to a lawsuit in which Microsoft says this is a breach of its license.

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If you've been searching for Kodi using Google, you will have noticed that the media playing software has vanished from search results.

The banishment comes after a DMCA takedown request from the Turkish pay-TV service Digiturk. Owned by the beIN Media Group, the DMCA takedown request related not only to the content of a pirated stream, but to the use of a copyrighted logo on suc ha sstream.

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The source code for the iOS bootloader iBoot has been leaked to GitHub, prompting Apple to issue a DMCA takedown notice.

Although the source code is for iOS 9.3 and a couple of years old, it appears to be the real deal and would still cause something of a headache for Apple. Copies of the code have been circulating online despite the takedown notice, and the concern is that it could be used to exploit iOS with malware.

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The use of other people's copyright material on YouTube is permitted in certain circumstances. Fair use rules allow for the use of copyright material for the purposes of review, parody, and more -- but this doesn't stop copyright holders from issuing DMCA takedown notices.

YouTube is a natural breeding ground for copyright violations, but there are also countless examples of fair use that end up in court. This is something that many people are scared of, and rather than fighting back, will tend to cave in. Now Google has said that it is willing to stand up for users and will defend them in court.

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One of the many great things about the internet is it preserves the past. If you want to read about something that happened years ago, you can find that news story somewhere on the web. Photos posted over time are available online, and historical content is regularly digitized and made available to view.

If you want to revisit your youth and play old video games, the internet can help here too. You can find ROMs to play on emulators, browse 'abandonware' sites, and even play games directly on the web thanks to the likes the Internet Archive. However, companies that preserve old video games are often on shaky ground legally, with the Entertainment Software Association (the trade body that represents the major game publishers) firmly against the practice of restoring the functionality of old games -- making them playable on other systems, for example -- if they are no longer supported by the original publisher.

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The DMCA has been the subject of controversy since it was passed, being used and, in many cases, misused to try and take down content. Now we encounter what may just be the strangest example of misuse. Alien visitors, or at least the investigation of their possible existence, have run up against genealogy website Ancestry.com. Talk about strange encounters!

The behemoth of the genealogy industry is strong-arming The Black Vault to take down records that are in the public domain. On the surface this may seem like a laughable claim, but the company is actually serious about it.

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Throughout today I have watched, with a sort of detached fascination, the attention suddenly being heaped upon cloud storage service Dropbox. It is certainly not the sort of publicity a company wants, either. It also is unwarranted. The company, at least by some outlets, is being accused of policing users' personal files in a search for copyrighted material.

The fact is, this all came about based on a tweet from one lone user, who was simply mentioning a system that was already in place, and has been for some time. Darrell Whitelaw, the user at the center of this, was only asking a question, not accusing the service of anything.

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Kim Dotcom enters the spotlight once again after claiming that Google, Facebook, Citibank and Twitter, among others, infringe upon his patent for two-factor authentication. The man is one of the founders of controversial Megaupload and Mega cloud storage lockers and is currently under indictment in the US for copyright infringement.

Dotcom decided to reveal the alleged wrongdoing and mention the patent yesterday, after Twitter enabled the security feature: "Twitter introduces Two-Step-Authentication. Using my invention. But they won't even verify my Twitter account?!". The patent in question was filed in 1998 by Kim Schmitz (Dotcom's birth name) and is named "Method for authorizing in data transmission systems".

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Something's fishy here. A message board thread where developers unanimously criticized the Windows 8 tile interface has been delisted from Google, thanks to a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown order issued by none other than Microsoft itself.

The board is dedicated to ConeXware's Power Archiver compression toolkit, and the thread in question began on August first, when Windows 8 was released to manufacturing. The post announcing the RTM was then followed by a handful of comments from different users and developers who panned the Windows 8 interface.

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