Once again this blogger makes Cracked.com ("5 Famous Online Copyright Crusaders Who Are Total Hypocrites")

At this point I've lost count. It's at least the fourth or fifth time that my shenanigans have landed me on popular humor site Cracked.com. This latest appearance comes courtesy of an article titled "5 Famous Online Copyright Crusaders Who Are Total Hypocrites".  With a title like that I just had to scan and tear it down and analyze it to see what I was doing that...

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Thoughtcrime: Music festival organizer PRE-sues bootleggers

If you're going to attend the Mile High Music Festival this weekend in Denver, don't even think about bootlegging the music. Merely considering the notion means you've already been sued by event producer AEG Live. The company has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against "John Does 1-100, Jane Does 1-100, and XYZ Company" for illegal bootlegging... which hasn't even been committed yet. Since nobody exists (yet) to contest the lawsuit, it...

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The Knight Shift is standing up for The Sideshow Coalition

About three years ago, this blog's eclectic proprietor had to learn awful fast and hard about Viacom and its dispute with YouTube. If you recall, if you worked it out in your head then logically Viacom was accusing me of violating my own copyright after Viacom took my work without permission and used it for a show on VH1, and then accused ME of copyright infringement for posting the clip of that onto YouTube.Well, I won that case as best I can imagine...

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Google accuses Viacom of secretly uploading its own videos to YouTube (WOW!!!)

This is gonna be a helluva fun thing to watch. I'm getting the popcorn ready even now...Media conglomermonster Viacom - which has tied up the video hosting service in litigation for the past three years over "copyright infringement" - is now said to have been secretly uploading its own videos to the Google-owned website!From the statement on the official YouTube blog, pertaining to court documents made public earlier today...Because content owners...

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YouTube called: I beat Comcast

Okay, YouTube didn't really call me, but you know...Last month I reported that Comcast was giving me grief about how I posted a clip from E!'s show The Soup where they used MY commercial from the school board campaign in 2006... without asking me, but I was fine with that. I just expected the same courtesy from E! and its ownership that I have given them. That's not too much to ask, in my mind.And of course, this whole thing is too much like that...

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AGAIN?! Looks like I'll be fighting Comcast now...

So I got back from a delightful day of various and sundry stuff (including finally seeing Avatar, review or something coming soon) and I started catching up on an inordinate amount of stuff that had piled up in my absence.Well, there were two e-mails from YouTube in the e-mail account I use for KWerky Productions. And both of them said that the clip I had posted two years ago of E!'s The Soup had been yanked for "copyright infringement".It's an...

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Electronic Frontier Foundation launches Takedown Hall of Shame!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - which many of y'all will remember came to the aid of Yours Truly two years ago during that very bizarre situation with Viacom - is now setting out to document "the worst of the worst" of bogus copyright complaints. Hit here for the Takedown Hall of Shame, featuring outrageous acts of DMCA abuse by Warner Brothers, the Nation Organization...

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Photos from SPARKcon!

Yeah, it's been late coming ('cuz I've been alternately busy and lazy) but here's some of what went down at SPARKcon in Raleigh this past Friday!My presentation, "The Dude Who Took Down Viacom: One Filmmaker's Story" was scheduled for 5:45 that afternoon at Artspace. About 15 people showed up to hear me discuss that very bizarre situation that happened two years ago between...

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The stainless steel art of Catherine Thornton

This past Friday afternoon, while we were at Artspace in downtown Raleigh waiting for me to give my presentation about my copyright fight with Viacom as part of SPARKcon, a friend and I spent about an hour walking through the gallery and taking in the fantabulous artwork: some very neat stuff in there and some things were... rather offbeat, to put it mildly.But there was one...

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I'm speaking at SPARKcon in Raleigh this evening!

Just a friendly reminder that if you want to meet the blogger/proprietor of The Knight Shift in person and you're going to be in the Raleigh/Durham today, that you're in luck!I will be at Artspace, located at 201 East Davie St in Raleigh at 5:45 p.m. this afternoon during the filmSPARK track of SPARKcon: a grassroots-organized four-day festival celebrating individual creativity...

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Meet "The Dude Who Took Down Viacom" at SPARKcon in Raleigh!

That commercial is going to haunt me for the rest of my life, isn't it? :-PSPARKcon is a grassroots-organized four-day festival in Raleigh celebrating individual creativity around the Triangle area and throughout North Carolina. This will be the fourth annual event and this year SPARKcon will be held September 17-20. And I've been invited to speak that Friday night about...

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DMCA Abuse: 4,000 Anti-Scientology videos pulled from YouTube

During the past few days American Rights Counsel LLC has forced YouTube to pull more than four thousand videos that are critical of the Church of Scientology. At this time it's unclear whether American Rights Counsel are representing the cult and did so at the behest of Scientologists. What is known is that a butt-load of Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices went out from the firm over a period of twelve hours this past Thursday and...

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Viacom v. Knight at the Citizen Media Law Project

A few days ago was the one year anniversary of that very strange situation between multi-billion dollar multimedia conglomerate Viacom (owner of CBS, Paramount, Comedy Central and many other brands) and Yours Truly. If you're fairly new to this joint here's my first post about what happened and here's the list of all the news articles that I could find about it. Long story...

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Cuil: The ISHTAR of search engines!

You might have heard about Cuil: a new search engine, the founders of which have stated is going to be a "Google killer". It went online a couple days ago and I've tried it a number of times since then, growing more frustrated with each attempt to determine how exactly Cuil is supposed to be useful. It claims to have indexed more pages than Google. And maybe it has, and...

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Judge orders YouTube to surrender ALL user history to Viacom

A judge has ordered YouTube to hand over ALL the history of its users - including videos watched and IP addresses - to Viacom, as part of Viacom's "infringement" lawsuit against YouTube and its owner Google.I first found the story on Slashdot, which is reflecting a lot of outrage at the judge's ruling.Since it's already been established that Viacom has STOLEN video from ME, perhaps I should sue and have a judge also give me YouTube's user history...

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"Dear Sumner Redstone, from the guy you STOLE video from ..."

In spite of what I said about no hard feelings, there ain't no way that I'm gonna let this one slide...Many of you no doubt remember what happened between me and Viacom several months ago, regarding the first TV commercial from my 2006 school board campaign.To quickly recap: months after the election, Viacom's network VH1 chose to use my commercial for a segment of its show...

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Guess who will be among the CHILDREN OF EDEN!

Well, this day has seen it all.I spent most of it working on stuff in my capacity as treasurer for my friend Eric Smith's campaign for North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction. This mostly entailed finishing up the First Quarter Campaign Finance Report. Also had a few errands around town.When Lisa got home from school I gave her a birthday card and the new Mario Kart Wii (also got another Wii steering controller so that we can race...

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Yes, it's true: REAL pics of the CLOVERFIELD monster are now online!

I've just seen it and it looks... interesting. There's yet to be a full-body shot of the creature but I think it's safe to say that some of the "artist depictions" that made their way through the blogosphere during the past few days seem to have been fairly accurate. I don't consider myself very much "spoiled" though 'cuz the pics don't give away too much apart from a vague silhouette and what looks to be lots of teeth. Consider me wonderfully...

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Looking back on 2007

I don't really feel like doing this right now. We got back from a trip out of state a short while ago and I'm way tired, among other things.But, these are the last few hours of 2007, before a whole new year rings in. So I'm going to try to do my traditional wrap-up of the preceding year.I'm not going to sugarcoat things: 2007 was a very, very rough year. In fact, of the "year-end reviews" that I've done so far on this blog, 2007 has been by far...

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Here it is: YouTube video of THE SOUP on E! showing my school board commercial!

I think... I think... that this should be safe to post. And I not only say that in light of how the Viacom situation was eventually resolved, but also because on this one I did take extra steps to illustrate how hosting this on YouTube is fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976, and that proper citation is given.So that bit of peskiness out of the way, and especially for benefit of those who for whatever reason haven't been able to see and laugh...

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