Google’s advertising business is a negligence lawsuit waiting to be actioned

Apparently the New Zealand government says Big Tech will pay a ‘fair price’ for local news content under new legislation. Forget the newcomers like Stuff and The New Zealand Herald. The Fairfax Press, as the former was, was still running ‘The internet is scary’ stories at the turn of the century. What will Big Tech […]

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The Red Points saga: this might finally be resolved

Nine days since the first DMCA notice was lobbed against us, the saga has finally reached the powers-that-be at Hearst SL. And once it did, things began happening quickly. I’ve heard from their head of legal, and what he’s outlined to me seems like a good resolution to the whole saga. He tells me some […]

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Red Points Solution SL walks right into it, attempts to shut down free speech via DMCA

This is too good. Now, Hearst Communications, Inc. was sensible enough to realize that what I raised was real, and a senior VP put me on to a colleague dealing with Hearst Magazines International. Nothing yet, but I wrote a release, sent it to a few colleagues, and published it on Lucire describing what had […]

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Google finally responds to our first counter-notification

I suppose it’s positive that Google has finally responded to our first counter-notification against Hearst SL’s and Red Points Solution SL’s fraudulent DMCA notice. Hey, Google, why don’t you begin by asking your complainants for proof before presuming an innocent party guilty? Then used your milliards of dollars and high-tech to see that our work […]

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Companies worth millions engaging in fraud, and Google is their weapon

Yesterday morning, we received a second notice with two more URLs—one with wholly our own content—from Hearst SL and its contractor, Red Points Solution SL. I’ve done a bit more digging and it’s usually fraudsters who engage in this behaviour. You can read more about them in Techdirt, Mashable and Search Engine Land. With their […]

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Time to get New York involved

Still nothing from the Spanish outpost of Hearst or from Red Points Solution SL on their false accusation against Lucire, so tonight I contacted one of the Hearst VPs in New York—as they’ll more likely understand where we’re coming from. Whenever there’s been a copyright matter, Americans tend to respond quickly, faster than Europeans or […]

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False accusations from Red Points Solution SL

Yesterday, I returned to find a DMCA claim filed against us by Red Points Solution SL, purporting to act for Harper’s Bazaar España publisher Hearst Magazines SL, falsely accusing us of breaching their copyright with this article. You can read the notice here. Naturally, I filed a counter-claim because their accusation is baseless. Our source […]

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How Jaguar Land Rover can still win its Land Rover Defender IP case against Ineos

I haven’t read the full judgement of the Land Rover Defender case, where Jaguar Land Rover sought to protect the shape of the original Defender under trade mark law, to prevent Ineos from proceeding with the Grenadier.    According to Bloomberg, as reported in Automotive News, ‘The judge upheld the findings by the IP Office […]

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Warning about Facebook “copyright” phishing scam—which Facebook itself covers for

Yesterday, I received an email purporting to be from Facebook, with the body reading: Hi, We are obliged to inform you that your page has been flagged because of unusual and illegal activity, therefore your page might be permanently deleted. In order to avoid such actions from our side, you need to fill the forms […]

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EU copyright: as far as we’re concerned, link away

European Union—www.europarl.europa.eu/downloadcentre/en/visual-identity, Public Domain; link I’m reading more about this EU copyright directive that was voted in last month.    Without doing a full analysis, I can say that we won’t go after anyone who links to our publications.    We presently don’t care if you use a brief snippet of our content and link […]

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