copyright

The massive popularity of Epic Games' Fortnite battle royale game has been the catalyst for more than a couple successful streaming careers. These streamers often draw higher than usual audience numbers during big in-game events, such as the rocket launch and, more recently, the blizzard. The company's next big event is a live DJ Marshmello concert that will take place in Pleasant Park, but it has raised some concerns about copyright issues.

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January 1, 2019 wasn’t just the start of a new year. It was also the start of a new period in the creative history of mankind. After a 20-year delay, copyrighted works from 1923 are now in public domain, with everyone free to adapt and remix them without fear of prosecution. A key moment in copyright and trademark history, these now pubic domain works could usher in a new corpus of literary, musical, and artistic works that could now go public rather than stay underground or in the dark corners of the Web. But it could also challenge existing laws that may have remained untouched since the 20s, causing a bit of chaos in the very same industry.

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It should come as no surprise that Grand Theft Auto V — and its online component GTA Online — remains incredibly popular and successful for its publisher Take-Two Interactive. Unfortunately, GTA Online has a bit of a reputation for cheating, which hurts both the player base and Take-Two's revenue from the game. As part of the publisher's ongoing lawsuit against one creator of cheat-enabling programs, a court has issued a preliminary injunction preventing any further sales of the software.

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Downloading ROMs of classic games is something a lot of gamers do, much to the distress and frustration of the companies who own the rights to those games. Nintendo in particular has historically taken a hard line against ROM downloads and the sites that make them possible, and it shows no sign of letting up. The company has filed a lawsuit against two massive ROM sites, and if the it gets what it's asking for, the damages could be immense.

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Bluehole subsidiary PUBG, the company behind the second most popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, has dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit against Epic Games. The latter company is behind massively popular battle royale game Fortnite, which quickly rose in popularity to eclipse PUBG and the gaming genre it popularized.

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Less than a month after going after Facebook over alleged copyright infringement, BlackBerry is back with another lawsuit, this time taking Snap to task. As with last month's lawsuit, BlackBerry has accused Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, of infringing upon some of its messaging patents, in this case half a dozen that were issued from 2012 to 2014. Two of those six patents are part of BlackBerry's legal action against Facebook.

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A ruling recently made by a New York federal court has threatened to upend the way copyright infringement is handled online. A judge ruled that merely embedding a tweet is enough to violate someone's copyright, meaning millions of shared tweets and tweeted images could now be considered instances of copyright infringement. This is in contrast to a precedent set back in 2007.

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If you're a frequent Google images user, you'll likely soon notice a change when it comes to searches featuring professional, copyrighted photos. Google has reached an agreement with Getty Images that sees the search giant getting a "multi-year" license for Getty imagery, in turn ending the photo company's legal complaint with the European Commission over copyrights and attribution.

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Kodi lives on, but some of the developers behind a few of the more nefarious addons for the service are now out of the game. Or so they've suggested. Cease and desist letters have been sent to developers behind the Colossus Kodi addon repository, URLResolver, MetaHandler, Ares Wizard, and more have been knocked out by a new wave of threats of legal action from major studios. One legal warning was apparently delivered by hand to the developer The_Alpha - that was the final straw for that particular dev.

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The days of content software receiving notices of copyright infringement from their internet service providers are about to come to an end. The Center for Copyright Information announced today that it's killing off its Copyright Alert System, which began seeing use four years ago. The system would send a number of warnings to consumers when ISPs, studios, and artists detected copyright infringement through P2P file sharing, with different punishments envisioned depending on how many warnings a person had received.

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Facebook is working on building its own copyright tracking technology, according to sources, and it'll use this technology as part of a larger licensing plan. Say the sources, big-name record labels have been pressuring the social network to remove user-uploaded copyrighted videos, and to license the music shared by its users. However, the sources caution that we likely won't see a deal struck between the record labels and Facebook until at least spring 2017.

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The use of satire and parody over the Internet isn’t new, but as always, humor doesn’t travel well over TCP/IP. And given its very nature, such jokes often end up offending involved parties. Unfortunately, there are times when the law can be used, or abused, by offended parties to their benefit. That may seem to be what Samsung has just done in using a copyright takedown notice against a popular GTA 5 mod that literally used the Galaxy Note 7’s explosive powers. Unfortunately, as with any legal, especially copyright, matter, things are not as straightforward.

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