14 DAY TRIAL // Britney Spears makes new victims. This time the one affected by Britney's celebrity is PerezHilton, one of the largest gossip websites. According to Reuters, Britney Spears' music company Jive Records filed a lawsuit against PerezHilton.com and its owner Mario Lavandeira for publishing unauthorized copies of 'Blackout', the next album signed by the famous pop star. What's most interesting is that the label company announced a few days ago that the album will be released earlier that it was planned before because some of the included songs were published on the web.
It seems like PerezHilton published numerous recordings on the website and, even though some of them were removed by the Internet service provider, the owner continued to upload them online. The label companies first issued concerns about unauthorized copies of Britney's songs in September but PerezHilton ignored them and published the 'Blackout' songs on its official page.
However, Lavandeira's lawyer sustains that Britney's music company is only seeking free publicity as PerezHilton is a very popular website. "It seems to me that when you single out PerezHilton and put out a press release, that maybe what you're looking for is publicity," Bryan Freedman said.
After a quick look on PerezHilton, you should notice that the owner tries to protect himself from this kind of lawsuits using a copyright infringement policy which informs the readers that any copyright infringing material will be removed as soon as possible. "If you believe that any content appearing on PerezHilton infringes on your copyright, please let us know," a fragment of the text published on the page states.
Copyright infringement seems to be one of the most popular reasons to visit the judge as numerous Internet companies accused one another for this illegal activity. For example, Google's video sharing service recorded hundreds of lawsuits, all of them for copyright infringement because the users uploaded clips without owners' authorization.