3 Count: Cheat Code

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1: Grooveshark Co-Founder, 28, Found Dead in Home

First off today, Anthony Clark at The Gainesville Sun reports that Grooveshark co-founder Josh Greenberg was found dead in his home yesterday. He was 28.

Grooveshark was a music streaming service that allowed users to upload tracks for others to stream. However, the service was sued by the record labels, who eventually secured several key legal victories forcing Grooveshark to shut its doors in April as part of a settlement.

However, there is no evidence of suicide or foul play in Greenberg’s death. Relatives say Greenberg was happy about the settlement, saying the lawsuit had been “hanging over his head”. There is no cause of death at this time, but toxicology results are expected to take 2-3 months.

2: Adultery Site Ashley Madison Hacked, User Data Leaked

Next up today, Arjun Kharpal at CNBC reports that the dating website Ashley Madison suffered a hack that saw some of the site’s 37 million users have their information publicly posted. However, Ashley Madison claims to have removed that data by using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as part of its efforts to rectify the issue.

Ashely Madison is a site that focuses on infidelity and encourages users to have affairs. Hackers recently breached the site and allegedly gained access to the entire site’s database. As proof, they posted a subset of their data on various sites, that data has since been removed.

However, critics are noting that Ashley Madison doesn’t actually hold copyright in the data, if it’s copyrightable at all, and that the leaked data is still out there, just not publicly visible at this particular moment, leading to a potential for a some to develop a false sense of security.

3: Made-in-China Movie Draws Fire as a Copycat of Pixar’s ‘Cars’

Finally today, Julie Makinnen, Tommy Yang and Harvard Zhang at The LA Times reports that a film in China produced by Blue MTV has become the subject of controversy for its strong resemblance to the Pixar film Cars.

The film, entitled The Autobots, doesn’t have any plot in common with Cars but the film’s protagonist looks nearly identical to Lightning McQueen from the Pixar film, making the poster confusing for many.

The film has generated a great deal of controversy with Disney calling it a blatant infringement and the Chinese film community calling it unimaginative. The Autobots director, Zhuo Jianrong, said that those who claim there is a similarity are “Chinese traitors” who have “brain damage”. The film, however, has not done very well at the box office, generating a total of $900,000 in Chinese theaters.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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