According to recent research, 1,139 IP addresses are likely to be monitoring users of Bit Torrent around the world.

The IP addresses belong to known copyright enforcement agencies, such as Checktor (a company which offers commercial Bit Torrent monitoring services) and Peer Media Technologies (which monitors the ebook and movie torrents of the Harry Potter series), reports King & Wood Mallesons.

The US Second Circuit has held that a service streaming copyrighted television programming live and over the Internet does not constitute a “cable system”, and so is not covered by the US Copyright Act § 111 statutory license for retransmission.

As Kilpatrick Townsend reports, the Second Circuit found that the relevant statutory text did not clearly answer the question of whether Internet streaming constituted a cable system. However, when the Second Circuit examined the legislative intent, it found that “Congress did not intend for § 111’s compulsory license to extend to Internet retransmissions.”

For the second time in under a month, a court has confirmed a six-figure statutory damages award against an illegal music downloader, reports Baker & Hostetler.

In the latest development in a six-year long dispute, the Eighth Circuit issued a unanimous decision reinstating a $220,000.00 jury verdict against Ms. Jammie Thomas-Rasset for illegally downloading and distributing music through Kazaa, a peer-to-peer file sharing application.

The High Court of Australia has refused Optus’ application for special leave to appeal the Full Court of the Federal Court’s decision in the TV Now case, National Rugby League Investments Pty Limited v Singtel Optus Pty Ltd.

K&WM reports that, after hearing argument from counsel for the applicants as to why special leave should be granted, their Honours Justices Gummow, Hayne and Bell declined to hear from counsel for the respondents.

Justice Gummow then gave judgment on behalf of the Court stating that special leave was refused because the applicants had insufficient prospects of successfully appealing against the Full Federal Court’s decision and the specific facts of the case were unlikely to yield more universal propositions.  Costs were ordered in favour of the respondents.

My post on the decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court is here.

UK movie studios are taking justice into their own hands by initiating criminal proceedings against copyright pirates, reports King & Wood Mallesons.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit has ruled that myVidster’s linking to illegally uploaded videos is not an act of contributory copyright infringement.

According to the ruling, which vacated a decision granting a preliminary injunction, linking to streamed videos does not contribute to infringement by copying, because there is no copying occurring.

The court recognised as plausible an argument that the linking contributed to infringement by public performance (transmission). However, the court was not willing to grant a preliminary injunction on the facts before it.

Most relevant, as a matter of fact, was that myVidster was “not providing a market for pirated works, because infringers who transmit copyrighted works to myVidster’s visitors are not selling them”. This meant there was no evidence that myVidster’s linking was “actually contributing significantly” to the unauthorised public performance of the videos.

A U.S. district court judge has ruled that an IP address, on its own, is not enough to determine a person’s identity as an infringing downloader of copyright material.

As Fenwick & West explain, this ruling throws a wrench in the copyright infringement claims brought by pornographic film producers in four related mass BitTorrent lawsuits.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum began in 2007, when graduate student Joel Tenenbaum was sued by a number of record labels for downloading and distributing 30 songs using file-sharing services like Napster, Morpheus, Kazaa and LimeWire.

After a five-day trial in 2009, the jury found Tenenbaum liable for infringing the copyrights in the 30 songs. It awarded statutory damages of $22, 500 for each song – an order that was allowed to stand after an appeal and remand.

Mr. Tenenbaum currently owes $675,000 in statutory damages. Mintz Levin explains how the jury came up with the damages figure of $22, 500 per song.

The Federal Court of Canada has ruled that providing an ‘inline link’ to a copyright work on the copyright owner’s website is not an infringement of copyright.

The court recognised that the provision of the link amounts to a “communication of the work by telecommunication”, which is an act within the exclusive rights of the copyright owner. However, the provision of the link does not amount to infringement where the linked-to work was posted by the copyright owner. This is because the original act of posting the work “authorized” the communication that occurred as a result of the hyperlink.