A federal court unsealed documents in Viacom’s copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube, and Viacom posted the documents, including revealing internal e-mails, to its Web site. Digital Society is reviewing the documents for insights into YouTube’s business practices and its attitudes about copyright law and online video content.

After arguing in 2006 that the FCC “should not become … the Federal Copyright Commission”, Public Knowledge is now praising the FCC for its discussion of copyright issues in the national broadband plan.

Google and YouTube argue that they are innocent in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom because they are protected under the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. But Safe Harbor only protects websites that have no knowledge of infringement yet YouTube founders clearly knew of and almost entirely depended on pirated content. One YouTube co-founder even uploaded stolen content himself.

In Are Your Bits Worn Out?, author Todd Adelmann discusses the problems inherent within the age old hardware-software war and the consumer that is caught in the middle.

The FCC is set to deliver its national broadband plan to Congress on Wednesday, and YouTube will be interviewing Chairman Julius Genachowski about the plan and other topics a day before its release. Digital Society submitted a question on intellectual property enforcement in the digital economy.

The 2010 Intellectual Property Rights Index has been released. While it serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of property rights to economic growth and developing economies, new restrictions on digital business models may have an un-measured negative impact on property rights.

Princeton Senior Sauhard Sahi (under the supervision of Princeton Professor Ed Felton) conducted a study of 1021 randomly selected files pulled from the trackerless variant of BitTorrent.  10 of the 1021 files were found to be likely non-infringing, which would mean that more than 99% of the files sampled were copyrighted content. Figure 1 – [...]

Upon venturing to the FCC’s new Future of Media site you will be of course welcomed to the future. It seems lately that the FCC has been welcoming us all to the “future” in a lot of areas. Which generally means that FCC fingers and venturing into areas we are not used to seeing them.

Jaron Lanier discusses important digital economy issues. The further we go into the digital economy, the greater the need to develop a better system of property rights for intellectual property. The information economy will not thrive where information must be free.

The book Piracy of Digital Content is a thorough review of digital content, the infringement of copyrighted content, and the difficulties that are produced to copyright owners and policy makers in combating piracy.