3 Count: Renewed Vows

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1: CBS Defends Right to Restrict Access to Online Streams

First off today, Eriq Gardner at The Hollywood Reporter Esquire reports that CBS has drafted a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defending its previous restrictions on its online streams saying that their move did not violate net neutrality and that not letting them do so would discourage networks like them from putting content online.

The letter is part of an FCC review of a battle between CBS and Time Warner Cable. The two were unable to reach a retransmission agreement before the deadline ran out and CBS programming was not only lost to Time Warner Cable customers but also blocked to Time Warner customers who sought to view episodes online at CBS’ site.

According to CBS, any attempt to limit creators’ ability to restrict viewing of their content would discourage the posting of it online and that net neutrality deals with ISPs restricting access to content, not content providers restricting access to viewers, making their actions legal.

2: China Vows Copyright Protection for Online News Media

Next up today, Michael Martina at Reuters is reporting that China is vowing to do more to combat copyright infringement of news media.

The announcement follows a public dispute between Caixin, a major news outlet in the country, which called out a news portal WallStreetCN saying that it was illegally reproducing their articles. WallStreetCN said that it would correct any mistakes if they were made.

The copying of news articles is extremely common in China but as the news industry has become increasingly privatized and competitive in the country, the copying of articles, along with outcry over the copying, has become more common. In response to this, a state official called for a an “efficient and low-cost authorization mechanism” for enabling legitimate republication.

3: Feds Drop Case Against Torrent Site, ‘Return’ Domain After 5 Years

Finally today, Ernesto at Torrentfreak writes that the FBI has returned the domain Torrent-Finder.com to its owner after a seizure that took place 5 years ago.

In 2010, as part of one of its Operation In Our Sites efforts, the FBI seized the domain claiming that it pointed to pirated content. However, the site itself did not host any torrents or any infringing content, instead was just a torrent search engine that used frames pointing to pages on other sites. The domain’s owner, Waleed Gadelkareem, appealed the verdict but the FBI and Department of Justice declined to return it.

The government agreed to return the domain as part of a compromise after it became clear that their case against the site was not strong enough to keep holding onto it. The domain now forward’s to a new torrent search engine created by Gadelkareem. The government recently completed the latest Operation In Our Sites, which resulted in the seizure of over 37,000 domains.

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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