Copyright

Individuals who physically remove credit lines attached to photographs violate a federal law that prevents people from stripping out copyright ownership information from works, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia (3rd Cir.) ruled earlier this week.

The U.S. District Court in New York City ordered Gawker Media Saturday to remove excerpts of former U.S. vice presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s forthcoming book from its website pending a hearing next week regarding a lawsuit filed by the book’s publisher, HarperCollins, according to court documents.

Financial news service Briefing.com settled a lawsuit with Dow Jones & Co. last week after the website admitted to violating the federal Copyright Act and “hot news” doctrine by systematically republishing time-sensitive headlines and articles from Dow Jones.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is suing dozens of websites that are using the newspaper’s content without permission.

Righthaven LLC, a Nevada company that represents the paper, has filed 37 lawsuits since March against various organizations for copyright infringement, including blogs that discuss reforming marijuana laws, sports betting and real estate.

“We believe we’ve only scratched the surface of dealing with this issue,” Righthaven Chief Executive Steven Gibson said. “There are literally oceans of infringement out there.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that a federal court in New York did in fact have the authority to approve a 2005 settlement between publishers and freelance writers over the inclusion of their work in online databases, Reuters reported.

A federal court in New York on Tuesday refused to dismiss a lawsuit by The Associated Press that claims a competing news service, All Headline News Corp., misappropriated its news content by drafting stories based on AP reports.

Artist Shepard Fairey has admitted that his iconic red, white and blue "Hope" image of President Obama was based on a photograph taken by a photojournalist on assignment for The Associated Press. Now, The AP is claiming the copyright and demanding credit and compensation from Fairey, according to the news wire's report.

The copyright lawsuit between GateHouse Media and The New York Times Co. over linking articles on the Internet was settled this week, just one day before trial was to begin in the case.

GateHouse sued The New York Times Co. last month after The Boston Globe, which the Times Co. owns, began aggregating on its Web site headlines, leads and links from local news sites owned by GateHouse.

A battle over Web site links has landed two media companies in court.

GateHouse Media, which owns several hundred newspapers and Web sites, filed a lawsuit last month in federal court in Massachusetts against The New York Times Co. alleging copyright infringement.

YouTube has refused requests by Sen. John McCain to review campaign-related videos taken off the Web site because of copyright protests, suggesting that if McCain is unhappy with the current copyright protections he can work on changing the law, according to The American Lawyer.

The McCain campaign, in a letter to YouTube this week, objected to the frequent removal of campaign-related material from the site.