A few years back, we wrote about a documentary that couldn't be shown due to copyright problems. It appears this problem is only getting worse. jprlk writes in to let us know about growing concerns from documentary filmmakers that issues concerning copyright make it increasingly difficult to actually make documentary films. Having reached this age where so many people are claiming "ownership" of content and demanding huge fees for any usage, documentary filmmakers run the risk of either getting charged repeatedly with copyright infringement or going through the long, difficult and expensive process of securing the rights. As the article quotes one documentary film maker saying, "Half of my budget is rights clearances, if you can get them." Given that the whole point of documentaries is to document things that are actually happening, it seems rather silly to realize that they can't document many things without first paying for the permission to do so.

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The RIAA has filed a federal complaint against the music search engine Project Playlist, arguing that most of the material it turns up is infringing and that the site operators know it. The "we just link to the music" defense may not fly in this case.

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The $5 billion lawsuit against Google charging the company with crimes against humanity, terrorism, and other various evils has been dismissed on appeal.

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We've long promoted the common-sense idea of orphan works legislation. Orphan works are works still under copyright whose present owners are unknown. This is a serious problem because there's no way to license orphan works and a big risk of a subsequent infringement lawsuit if they're used without a license. My co-blogger Jerry Brito has a post examining a pair of bills (one in the House, one in the Senate) that would address the problem. Under the proposal if someone is unable to find the owner of a copyrighted work after a diligent search, then the work could be used without the fear of a crippling lawsuit later. If a copyright holder comes along later, he won't be able to obtain draconian punitive damages. Rather, the court would estimate how much a reasonable licensing royalty would have cost and assign that amount to the copyright holder. One of the best things about this proposal is that it would give an incentive to copyright holders to start placing copyright notices on their works, something that was mandatory until the 1970s. If more copyright holders marked their works, that would dramatically reduce the orphan works problem going forward, because it would be easier for people to find copyright holders and negotiate licenses.

Of course, it should be said that "statutory damages" for copyright infringement -- which can be as high as $150,000 per work infringed -- are way too high across the board. It will be great if we can reduce that burden for the users of orphan works, but I'd like to see punitive damages lowered across the board so we don't see any more travesties of justice like the 2000 MP3.com case. In that case, the damages were so excessive that MP3.com couldn't even afford to appeal. Orphan works legislation is a good first step toward reforming the copyright system, but there's a lot more that needs to be done.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Microsoft has announced today that four of its five Asian Xbox 360 markets will enjoy price cuts on the various SKUs in the hopes that the Asian market can continue to expand the company's 19 million-strong army of Xbox owners.

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The NY Times has an article talking about how the various TV producers are , noting that Warner Brothers is now opening the vault and adding a bunch of old shows that can be streamed directly online. This isn't all that surprising. However, what's odd is that the article includes a few complaints about the cost of doing this compared to the revenue, with NBC Universal boss Jeff Zucker complaining "there are streaming costs so you have to make sure you’re covering that." Of course, that brings me back to a discussion some folks had around here over four years ago -- when we started wondering why television companies didn't just use BitTorrent to distribute their shows. If you combined RSS and BitTorrent (which was briefly referred to as "Broadcatching" by Ernest Miller) television companies could make it very easy for people to watch their shows. With RSS, they would "subscribe" to the shows, so as soon as a new one came out, subscribers would definitely see it. It would increase loyalty and remind people to watch their favorite shows. And by using BitTorrent, it would take the bandwidth cost away from the television companies. Unfortunately, the entertainment industry is still too scared of BitTorrent to realize how it can be embraced. So they complain about bandwidth costs for absolutely no reason.

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Linux filesystem developer Hans Reiser has has been found guilty of murdering his wife. The verdict could force Reiser to shift his focus from hard drives to hard time.

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Microsoft has officially announced the availability of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. The languages are now available via the Microsoft Download Center and Windows Update.

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Hollywood believes the Internet is the key to its future. But its constituents are again squabbling over how to get there. As in the recent television writers strike, the major studios are at odds with some members of the creative community over digital distribution.

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The Federal Communications Commission was poised on Monday to impose a cap on fast-growing subsidies the government allots to providers of telephone service in rural America. A proposal to limit the phone subsidies moved towards passage as FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell threw his support behind the idea, giving it a crucial third vote on the five- member commission.

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In comments filed at the Federal Communications Commission Monday most broadcasters argued that new localism proposals are unnecessary and burdensome.

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Hospital administrators and medical device manufacturers fear unlicensed use of "white spaces" spectrum between television channels could interfere with medical devices. "If a new white space application that's operating thousands of times more powerfully came online, either in the hospital or outside the hospital, it could very well directly interfere with the telemetry system and prevent patient monitoring," Tim Kottak, engineering general manager for GE Healthcare's systems and wireless division, said in a telephone interview with CNET News.com this week.

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The Republican National Committee has developed a new method for rebutting attack ads against John McCain: Send threatening letters to any cable networks that might run them. RNC chief counsel Sean Cairncross has notified NBC, CNN and MSNBC that he believes the new Democratic ad attacking John McCain's "maybe a hundred" years in Iraq line is illegal on two counts: 1) It is misleading, in that Cairncross says it distorts McCain's words, and 2) It constitutes collaboration between the Clinton and Obama camps and the DNC in fashioning a message against McCain.

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The week began with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton bashing each other with negative TV ads on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary. It ended with the prospect of a longer, tougher contest after Clinton’s win, and with the volatile issue of race again occupying a prominent place in the media narrative.

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Rupert Murdoch has made headlines this week with the resignation of Wall Street Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli, a reported $580 million bid for Newsday and more talk of how he is transforming the Journal’s front page coverage to take on the New York Times.

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Public radio is drawing its largest audience ever, some 28 million listeners nationwide each week. But if it’s a golden era, you wouldn't know it from the frenetic activity to remake the genre.

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U.S. newspaper circulation fell 3.6 percent in the latest set of figures released by an industry group on Monday, reflecting a migration of readers to the Internet and publishers' efforts to streamline their businesses.

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Television stations in Indiana and North Carolina may receive an advertising windfall of more than $8 million in campaign spots as the Democratic presidential nomination race drags out longer than expected.

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The odds may be long against Congress overturning new Federal Communications Commission rules that make it easier for newspapers and TV stations in a market to buy each other, but the broadcasting and newspaper industries are concerned enough to attempt to forestall such action.

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In a potential setback for fans of broadband over power lines, a federal appeals court has sided in part with amateur radio operators who challenged rules designed to speed the nascent Internet service's rollout.

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