On last week's show we spoke to German media professor Nikolaus Peifer about Hitler's Mein Kampf entering the public domain. Listener Chuck Strinz wrote in to tell us a story about how in 1939, Adolf Hitler's American publisher engaged in a copyright lawsuit against an American journalist who published a tabloid version of the book without permission.

Before Alan Cranston became a US Senator for California, he was foreign correspondent in Germany for the Independent News Service. In a particularly colorful 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cranston recounts seeing an English-language version of Mein Kampf on display at Macy's bookstore in 1939, but when he picked it up,"[he] knew it wasn't the real book because it was much less weighty, it was much thinner.  It turned out it had been edited so that a good bit that Hitler wrote was left out."

This week, a British high court declared the self-described "most resilient BitTorrent site" guilty of "massively infringing on copyright", and ruled that British ISPs must block access to the site. Since The Pirate Bay is infamous for telling legal interlopers to sodomize themselves with retractable batons, the team at The Pirate Bay doesn't seem too concerned.

In the face of strong criticism, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP act have been shelved for the time being.  But the movie, music, television and video game industries continue to argue that they offer much needed protection against pirates outside the reach of American law enforcement. Steve Tepp of the business lobbying group the US Chamber of Commerce tells Bob that despite criticism, these bills are narrowly targeted and would protect copyright holders against pirates. 

New Country Rehab - Ramblin' Man

This week saw more then its share of internet drama. The US Government led a massive operation against the website MegaUpload. And dozens of major websites staged a blackout in protest of two proposed laws - the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. Bob talks to Techdirt's Mike Masnick about the implications of the proposed legislation and the foment online.

Since the summer of 2010, the US Office of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been seizing the domain names of websites around the world that it believes have engaged in copyright infringement or sold counterfeit goods. Mark Lemley, a lawyer defending one of the websites seized by the government, talks to Bob about whether ICE has the legal authority to make these seizures and how they might be netting sites that haven't done anything wrong.

The Dodos - Companions

This weekend, we will be airing an interview with Mark Lemley, who is representing a website called Rojadirecta that had its domain name seized by the US government for copyright infringement in February of this year. But several blogs are reporting today that the Justice Department, which has worked with the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a domain name seizure operation known as Operation In Our Sites, has returned a mistakenly seized domain after a year of legal wrangling.

We've reported numerous times both on the show and on the blog about Righthaven, a company that buys copyrights on newspaper stories and images and then sues bloggers who repost them either in part or in full. Recently, they've suffered setback after setback, having several cases dismissed, and being hit with attorney fees in dismissed cases, and court penalties.

As of yesterday, things have become much worse for Righthaven, as US District Judge Roger Hunt ordered the company to pay nearly $120,000 in court and attorney fees in a failed lawsuit. The Las Vegas Sun's Steve Green reports:

On Monday, The Author's Guild filed a lawsuit against several universities who have announced their intentions to make available electronic copies of so called "orphan works," books for which no copyright owner can be found. Law professor and blogger James Grimmelmann talks to Bob about the sticky legal issues that orphan works present.

Update: According to Vegasinc.com, Righthaven has warned that it might have to file for bankruptcy. The warning came in an emergency request for a stay on an order that it pay $34,045 in legal fees to blogger Wayne Hoehn, who successfully defended himself against a Righthaven lawsuit. (original article continues below)

Over the past year, we have reported a couple of times on a company called Righthaven, which buys certain copyrights on newspaper content and sues bloggers and aggregators who repost said content, either in part or in full. This week, several news outlets have reported that Righthaven is facing an existential crisis. Where did Righthaven come from, and how close are they to extinction?

Typically, when companies file lawsuits are filed against people for infringing on their intellectual property, they don’t actually name the defendents. Instead, they sue a group of John Does, and subpoena the identities of the defendants from their internet service providers. This practice has always been controversial, and defendants are starting to challenge this method of identification in court.

In 1976 Congress changed copyright law so that any musician who wrote a song after January 1^st, 1978 could apply to reclaim rights to those songs after 35 years.  So in 2013 there’s a long line of 1978 hitmakers who stand to regain their valuable songs and albums.  Duke professor James Boyle explains to Brooke why the windfall for Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Funkadelic and others is being fought tooth and nail by the record industry.

Song: Minute By Minute

Artist: The Doobie Brothers

Song: I Will Survive

Artist: Gloria Gaynor

Over the past 9 months, writer, director, and editor Kirby Ferguson has been releasing episodes of Everything is a Remix, a video series about how appropriation, borrowing, and adaptation are inherent in, well, everything we as a culture create. The third installment of the four-part series just came out last week, so we thought we'd ask him a few questions about the project and his personal opinions on copyright and fair use.