Sony's Grouper Picks On Searchles TV

pradeepe writes "Sony's Grouper, a video sharing site, has sent Searchles, a social search engine, a cease and desist letter over Grouper videos being streamed through Searchles TV, "the Internet's first video player that empowers users to mashup videos back-to-back with one player using multiple sources like MySpace, YouTube, Google Video, Blip.tv or Grouper." Grouper claims that Searchles has "effectively stripped away Grouper's extensive copyright protection system, including the 'Flag as Inappropriate' button and the link that appears on every single page of the Grouper website to allow copyright owners to report allegedly infringing material, in accordance with the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." It's interesting to note that Grouper itself is being sued for copyright infringement."

Comments

Re:a flaming wasteland

[Kris_J]

Knowing Sony, Grouper's probably being sued by Columbia.

And in other news, Viacom is suing GooTube for the same dubious stuff that Viacom's Ifilm and Atom do. Anyone feel like listing all the legal actions being fired off for movie and music sharing? Then the class-action stuff over DRM. And the investigations by various government bodies into anti-competitive behaviour by assorted entertainment companies. Then there's region coding, macrovision, HDMI and watermarking.

Frankly, maintstream entertainment has gotten so hostile I'd rather just play a boardgame with some friends.