Crowdsourcing, crowd-financing and… file sharing lawsuits? The science fiction comedy Iron Sky has gotten lots of help from its fans, and its filmmakers have in the past relied on BitTorrent to distribute their works. Now, a German distributor is threatening to sue file sharers. Read More »
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Germany’s broadcasters ProSiebenSat.1 and RTL won’t be able to launch their own Hulu-like service for catch-up TV, if today’s day in court is any indication. A judge agreed with regulators that the platform would establish a duopoly. That’s good news for Hulu. Read More »
Hulu is getting ready to dust off its Lederhosen as the company is reportedly working on plans to launch in Germany. The launch would consist of an offering that would be different from what’s available in the U.S., which suggests Hulu might ask Germans to pay. Read More »
Nina Paley is upset. Her movie Sita Sings The Blues is blocked for German users on YouTube, making it the latest casualty in an ongoing conflict between the video site and German music rights group Gema. Rights holders deny that they’re to blame for the incident. Read More »
A little over a month after European authorities took down the popular movie streaming site Kino.to, two similar sites have emerged — and each claims to be the official heir, with one accusing the other of stealing its content. Pirates that steal stuff? That’s unheard of. Read More »
Have you ever watched a TV show episode or Hollywood blockbuster on a website that didn’t have the proper licenses? Then you could be in trouble, at least if the example of Kino.to catches on. Rights holders are threatening to sue users of the now-defunct site. Read More »
It didn’t take long for hacktivists to respond to the takedown of the popular video streaming portal Kino.to: Activists affiliated with Anonymous responded on Thursday with a denial-of-service attack against the web site of a rights holders group. Insiders meanwhile believe that Kino.to will return soon. Read More »
An attempt of music rights holders to press YouTube for more money may have backfired: A European musician just lost a web video award because his video was blocked due to an ongoing conflict between Google and a rights holders group over music royalty rates. Read More »
German broadcasters RTL and ProSieben saw their plans to create a local one-stop online video destination site rejected by the country’s federal cartel office over anti-competitive concerns. But given the ambivalence U.S. broadcasters have toward Hulu today, maybe the regulator’s decision is actually good for them? Read More »
Two German music fans were fed up with geo-blocking on YouTube, which has been preventing them from accessing music videos from major-label artists. So they turned the tables and started to block employees of major music labels from accessing popular blogs and other websites. Read More »
Bong.tv allows its users to record shows from dozens of TV networks in the cloud with no pay TV subscription necessary. While TV networks are trying to stop Bong.tv in court, that didn’t stop Samsung from highlighting it as one winner of its TV app challenge. Read More »
German rights holders have turned litigation against file sharers into a money machine that just keeps on giving. P2P activists estimate estimates that Germany’s BitTorrent users faced more than half a million lawsuits in 2010. Some people even got sued multiple times for the same file. Read More »
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