A class action lawsuit claims that the adult entertainment industry has found a new business model to earn money: threatening alleged illegal downloaders with an embarrassing and very public lawsuit if they do not settle out of court. The lead plaintiff in the case is Jennifer Barker. Her lawsuit names Patrick Collins Inc., Malibu Media, K-Beech, Third Degree Films, and London-based Raw Films.

The European Court of Justice has made a ruling that could cause lots of problems for publishers in Europe. The highest court in Europe has ruled that game publishers cannot stop European consumers from reselling their downloaded games.

"An author of software cannot oppose the resale of his 'used' licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet," the ruling read. The Court said the exclusive right of distribution covered by a license is "exhausted on its first sale".

Cloned games are nothing new to the games industry. You can hardly walk the isles of Gamestop or browse the listings of the iPhone App Store without coming across a clone or two [thousand]. This is especially true for many classics such as Breakout or in this case Tetris.

According to a Wired report, Japanese politicians are pushing hard for a new law that would make it a crime to download or make unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. The new law would also make it illegal to use copyright circumvention devices. Those breaking the law could face up to two years in prison and a two million yen ($25,400) fine. We assume the devices being referred to are like the R4 used to copy DS games...

According to New Zealand publication Stuff, the FBI is on the defense after being accused in court by lawyers representing file sharing site Megaupload that it illegally exported data it seized from the company and its founder Kim Dotcom.

Last week American author John Beiswenger settled his lawsuit against GameTrailers and dropped his lawsuit against Ubisoft "without prejudice." The lawsuit alleged that Ubisoft knowingly used plot points and story mechanics from his novel LINK in their Assassin’s Creed video games. While Beiswenger ended his legal fight, he left the door open to sue Ubisoft at a later date and his lawyer said that he still asserted the claim that Ubisoft had infringed on his work.

Lawyers for Megaupload won a legal victory in court this week against the U.S. Government and pushed ahead with requests to have the case dismissed outright and - barring that - release the seized assets of the company.

American author John L. Beiswenger has settled his lawsuit with GameTrailers and has decided to walk away from his lawsuit against Ubisoft "without prejudice." The author filed the lawsuit against Ubisoft and GameTrailers earlier this year claiming that the plotline from the Assassin’s Creed games borrowed liberally from his novel "LINK."

And it's one, two, six strikes you’re out at the old ball game - but the ball game has been delayed. And when I say ballgame, I mean the agreement between rights holders in the United States and Internet service providers which would institute a "six strikes" system for those naughty people that infringe on copyrights while using the Internet...

A lawsuit with record label EMI may very well kill 4mm Games, the company that, along with Terminal Reality, brought the popular DEF Jam Rapstar game to life in late 2010. But the lawsuit with EMI filed earlier this year against both companies may end up bankrupting the studio long before it ever gets to the point of a resolution in the case.

Emboldened by The Court of The Hauge’s January ruling that two of the Netherlands’s largest ISPs must implement a DNS and IP block of The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy group BREIN went ahead and sued a few more Dutch ISPs to censor the site.

Well, chalk up another success for BREIN because the Court has ruled that UPC, KPN, Tele2, T-Mobile and Telfort must also block The Pirate Bay.  The blocking order covers 20 specific domains such as ThePirateBay.org, ThePirateBay.se, ThePirateBay.com, DePiraatBaii.be and TheMusicBay.net.

 A lawyer representing the novelist who filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft last month for allegedly infringing on his book "LINK" is defending her client publicly for the first time in this Eurogamer story. The author of the book, John Beiswenger, claims in his lawsuit that Ubisoft violated his copyright in the plot of Assassin's Creed.

Last week's presidential election saw Socialist Francois Hollande rise to the highest political post in France. While this election may have serious repercussions all over the world, one side effect of it might be the end of the supposed "three-strikes" copyright infringement law better known by French citizens as "HADOPI." When we say end, we mean that HADOPI might not be enforced against internet users even though it might still take aim at large websites that traffic in copyrighted materials.

When you think of news sources, Something Awful probably doesn't come to mind, but one of its writers took some time away from writing jokes to point out a few odd things with the Ron Paul: Road to REVOLution game that has managed to rake in over $10,000 from a highly publicized Kickstarter campaign. SA obtained access to the developer's server and found that his game uses assets borrowed from other games.

In a major setback for rights holders doing business in Australia, the High Court of Australia has ruled that Internet providers have no legal obligation to act on copyright infringement notices sent to them by rights holders. The court ruled that copyright infringement notices provide no "reasonable basis for sending warning notices to individual customers containing threats to suspend or terminate those customers' accounts."

Link, the 2001 sci-fi fantasy book at the center of a lawsuit filed against Ubisoft and GameTrailers, is getting review bombed by angry gamers. Beiswenger, who is also a research engineer that holds over 20 U.S. utility patents, published his novel Link in 2002. The first Assassin's Creed video game was released in 2007. In his lawsuit against Ubisoft and GameTrailers, he alleges that Ubisoft stole core ideas from his book and used them in their games.

Libertarian-leaning publication Reason Magazine offers a new episode of Reason TV called, "Too Much Copyright?" in a brand new video featuring Ben Huh, CEO and founder of Cheezburger; law professor Tom Bell; and MPAA's head content protection counsel, Ben Sheffner. Host Zach Weissmueller asks all three about the current state of copyrights laws, their effectiveness, and the push for new laws like SOPA and PIPA. Check out the video to your left.

Cory Doctorow, who you may know best as the gentleman behind the wonderful Boing Boing web site, has a brand new column in The Guardian examining why a former defender of SOPA would suddenly decide to switch sides.

The highest court in the European Union has ruled that internet service providers can be compelled by courts to turn over private information of subscribers suspected of engaging in piracy or copyright infringement. Shortly after Sweden's anti-piracy legislation, IPRED, became law in 2009, five book publishers asked a local court to force ISP ePhone to hand over personal details on a subscriber who they allege stored more than 2000 audio books on his server. They claim that 27 of those audio books infringed on their copyrighted works.

A man named John Beiswenger has sued Ubisoft and GameTrailers for stealing the storyline for Assassin's Creed from a novel he wrote called Link. Nintendo might take issue with that title for obvious reasons. All kidding aside, the confusing part of the lawsuit is why he decided to sue GameTrailers. According to the complaint he named the popular website in the lawsuit for offering a number of video game trailers related to the Assassin's Creed series.

Tomorrow the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will ask a federal judge to finally establish a process that allows lawful users - including a number of government agencies - of Megaupload's cloud storage service to reclaim their files. The hearing in USA v. Dotcom is set for 9 a.m. on April 13 at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.

According to a SiliconValley.com report, the U.S. House of Representatives will take up a revised version of the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) at the end of April. The revisions to the bill should address concerns about privacy, according to its sponsors, but details on what has been changed in the language are unknown at this time.

The Center for Copyright Information, an organization that was created to oversee a new anti-piracy regime negotiated by content providers and internet service providers last summer, has begun to take shape and some of its key leaders are surprising. The organization announced on Monday that the names of its executive director and several members of its advisory board. At face value, the choices to serve as the architects of the "Copyright Alert" system could strike a balance between the interests of rights holders and the rights of users.

The creators of the music game Def Jam Rapstar are the target of a lawsuit filed by music giant EMI.

Clearwater, Florida-based ValCom issued a press release today announcing that it has retained legal counsel and filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Megaupload to get a taste of the millions of dollars seized by the government. While ValCom claims in its releases that it "owns content that was pirated on the Megaupload.com group of sites," the company does not offer a specific list of titles.

Enterprising criminals have apparently decided that former Megaupload users are as good a target as any, and have started sending fake demand letters to people under the guise of a law firm representing rights holders. So far, scammers are using two approaches to target file-sharers: the technical approach (malware and web browser redirects) and the pay-up-or-else-we'll-sue-you letter approach.

Social game studio 6Waves Lolapps has laid off its development staff to focus on publishing games. The company will apparently no longer make any games internally as part of a new reorganization. 6Waves Lolapps is currently fighting a game cloning lawsuit filed against it by mobile studio Spry Fox. Spry Fox filed a lawsuit in January claiming that 6Waves Lolapps blatantly copied its game Triple Town when it created Yeti Town.

Earlier this month the federal district court in Nevada issued a declaratory judgment that made it a lot harder for copyright holders to file lawsuits over excerpts of material being used on web sites and online forums. The judgment is a direct blow to law firms like Righthaven, who filed a ton of lawsuits against websites claiming that they had infringed on copyright holders it represented.

At the Association of American Publishers annual meeting this morning, leaders from the MPAA, RIAA, AAP, Business Software Alliance and other groups got together to talk about what went wrong in their fight for SOPA and PIPA, and what the industry can do to get their points across in the future.

Over the weekend Mojang's Carl Manneh announced on the company's official web site that it had settled its lawsuit with Bethesda Softworks (a wholly owned studio of Zenimax) over use of the word "Scrolls" for its next title. The lawsuit was filed after Mojang filed for a trademark of the term for its next game.