By , March 25, 2022.

A SMART New Approach to Combatting Piracy — Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid examines new copyright legislation introduced by Senators Tillis and Leahy, which would create a process for the Library of Congress to designate technological measures for identifying or protecting copyrighted works that must be implemented by online service providers.

WIPO’s Pirate Site Blocklist Expands to 4,042 Active Domain Names — Torrentfreak reports, “WIPO, which is part of the United Nations, was founded more than 50 years ago with the aim of protecting intellectual property. This includes combating online piracy, something it hopes to facilitate with its “WIPO Alert” blocklist. The goal of the project is simple; allow stakeholders from member states to report problematic sites and share the resulting list with advertisers, so they can block bad apples. This should result in less money going to pirate sites, making it harder for them to generate profit.”

Social Justice Meets IP at Howard Law Clinics Tackling Diversity — Bloomberg Law visits Howard University School of Law to take a close look at the schools patent and trademark clinics, which “tackle[] diversity issues in intellectual property in two ways: encouraging more people of color to enter the traditionally white, male intellectual property field and providing legal assistance to people who are underrepresented in inventorship and trademark registration applications.”

State Laws Forcing Publishers to License Ebooks to Libraries Are Unlawful [PDF] — A new white paper from Free State Foundation explains, “As the District Court in AAP v. Frosh recognized, under Section 106 of the Copyright Act, copyright owners possess exclusive rights to decide who can distribute or make available their copyrighted works and on what terms and conditions. State laws that force publishers to license copyrighted works to libraries clearly conflict with federal law.”

Europe Takes Aim at Big Tech With Digital Markets Act — “The new law, set to take effect next year, sets out a list of dos and don’ts that outlaw many of what are currently core business practices among major tech companies. Apple, for example, will have to allow alternatives to its App Store for downloading apps and allow payment methods for the App Store other than Apple’s own. (Apple charges a 30 percent commission on all Apple App Store payments.) Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will no longer be able to offer targeted ads across multiple platforms — using data gathered as users move between services owned by the same company, YouTube and Google Search, for example, without receiving explicit consent. Amazon will be barred from using data collected from outside sellers on its services to offer competing products, a practice already the subject of a separate EU antitrust investigation.”

By , March 18, 2022.

Latest USPTO report finds industries that intensively use intellectual property protection account for over 41% of U.S. gross domestic product, employ one-third of total workforce — “The report found a substantial wage premium for workers in IP-intensive industries, with average weekly earnings 60% higher than that received by workers in other industries.”

Copyright Office Issues Final Rules for CASE Act Copyright Claims Board Proceedings — The Copyright Office is in the final stages of fleshing out the details of the copyright small claims tribunal that is set to launch this summer. IPWatchdog reports, “the rules establish procedures for designating service agents for receiving notices of initiated proceedings at the CCB, as well as opt-out procedures for libraries, archives and any claimants who are notified of class action litigation filed in U.S. district court covering their own copyright claim.”

US appeals court sides with Google in Genius lyrics theft case — The Second Circuit rejected Genius’s arguments that contract and unfair competition claims are categorically exempt from federal preemption of copyright law.

Game Developers Go Quiet On NFTs As Trading Volume Plummets — “The backlash has also been accompanied by a wider downturn in the overall NFT market, which you can chalk up to crypto’s recent turmoil in the wake of global instability, or what I would argue is just a general fading away of interest in the concept of NFTs. OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT platform, has seen daily trading volume drop by 80% and the average price of NFTs fall 48% since its peak in November, right before all these game companies launched these project ideas.”

By , March 11, 2022.

Katy Perry Wins in ‘Dark Horse’ Copyright Appeal — The Ninth Circuit lays down a speed bump in front of music infringement cases, affirming a trial court judge’s decision that elements of a song popstar Katy Perry allegedly copied in her hit Dark Horse were not protectable expression under copyright law. In what may become a frequently cited phrase by copyright lawyers, the Circuit called the combination of elements that plaintiffs identified as copied a “manifestly conventional arrangement of musical building blocks” that lacks the requisite originality to be protected by copyright.

Cox Moves to Overturn $1 Billion Music Suit — “A Virginia federal court awarded 53 music publishers, including Sony Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music and others, $1 billion in December 2019, agreeing with claims that despite complaints and warnings from the music publishers, Cox continued to allow its broadband subscribers to illegally download music. All in all the publishers found 10,017 instances of infringement by Cox customers, and a jury assigned a value of $99,830.29 to each one, for a total of $1 billion.”

ResearchGate dealt a blow in copyright lawsuit — “A landmark court case in which two major academic publishers sued the popular website ResearchGate for hosting 50 of their copyrighted papers has come to a close — although both sides say that they will appeal. The court in Munich, Germany, has not only prohibited ResearchGate from hosting the papers, but also ruled that it is responsible for copyright-infringing content uploaded on its platform. The decision has the potential to set a precedent for further restrictions on the site, which has 20 million users worldwide.”

Here’s the difference between Jeff Bezos and me — “Amazon’s retreat from the physical bookstore business underscores what those of us in it know all too well: It isn’t easy. It requires superb customer service, dedicated staff who provide knowledgeable advice about what to read, an inviting environment in which to browse and shop, and literary activities that connect patrons directly to authors through book talks and other programming. Most of all, it demands a deep commitment to the local communities that sustain us.”

By , March 04, 2022.

Delete Your Account, Internet Archive – No One is Burning Digital Books — Writing at the Centre for Free Expression, John Degen takes aim at a recent op-ed by Internet Archive’s Chris Freeland: “Because a demand for someone else’s property is an unjustifiably selfish act, the champions of ‘gimme’ like to disguise their motivations by styling themselves as freedom fighters. Their rhetoric is silly and disingenuous, self-aggrandizing and laughable. Occasionally though, it wanders into the realm of the truly bizarre and dangerous.”

Two Years After Allen, SCOTUS Poised to Revisit Copyright Infringement by State Entities — At IPWatchdog, Steve Brachmann looks at recent developments regarding copyright and sovereign immunity. The primary focus is on the cert petition in Jim Olive Photography, which the Supreme Court is set to consider March 18. The plaintiff there is asking the Court “to grant the petition, vacate the Texas Supreme Court’s decision and remand the case for further consideration under Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021).”

Kenya is changing its copyright law. Why this is bad for sports — “Piracy has many effects. Firstly, the local licence holder will lose revenue, and therefore motivation to buy a licence next time. If this happens in many countries, the international sports organiser will lose out eventually. In turn, national sports bodies will not get any money from international bodies. In the long run, sports development can be hampered.”

IBPA Position Statement on Maryland eBook Law and Its Impact on Small Publishers and Authors — IBPA, the Independent Book Publishers Association, released a position statement this week supporting the preliminary injunction against Maryland’s recently enacted law mandating ebook licensing to libraries. Says IBPA, “The importance of the issues raised by the Maryland eBook Law cannot be overemphasized. If not successfully challenged in the courts, this law, and laws like it, will directly affect the primarily small and mid-sized publishers in IBPA membership.”

Pro-Codes bill filed to preserve safety code copyright — “NFPA alone develops more than 300 safety standards through an open, consensus-based process, and that’s just our organization. If SDOs were no longer able to carry out our work, there would be a disjointed and expensive patchwork of safety standards in the U.S. and around the world. Standards would probably be updated less frequently, if they were created at all. It’s no exaggeration to say that lives and property would be lost.”

By , February 25, 2022.

Justices require actual knowledge that application was erroneous to invalidate copyright filing — Writing at ScotusBlog, Ronald Mann takes a look at Thursday’s decision in Unicolors v. H&M, so far the only copyright case taken up by the US Supreme Court this term, and likely Justice Breyer’s last copyright opinion. The result is a good one: copyright owners don’t lose their ability to defend legitimate infringement claims because of inadvertent mistakes made on their registration application.

Appeals Court Revives Copyright Lawsuit Over ‘Servant’ — “The decision in favor of Gregorini is at least the third from the federal appeals court since 2020 reversing a federal judge’s decision to toss a copyright lawsuit. In each of the cases, the 9th Circuit cautioned lower courts against imposing their views on what are supposed to be subjective inquiries requiring further arguments and expert testimony.”

Authors Guild Statement on AAP’s Win in Maryland E-book Licensing Case —  “‘Public libraries deserve and require more public funding to meet the growing needs of library patrons, including the ability to purchase an adequate number of e-book licenses,’ [Authors Guild CEO Mary] Rasenberger added. ‘Mandatory e-book licensing laws don’t address this issue, and unfairly target authors and publishers. Moreover, the publishing industry depends on a system of stable, consistent rules, including federal control over copyright law. ‘If we let all 50 states make up their own copyright laws, authors and publishers would need to comply with different requirements in each state.'”

Sorry, Your NFT Is Worthless: The Copyright and Generative Art Problem for NFT Collections — Franklin Graves writes at IPWatchdog, “If software is used to autonomously create 10,000 musical compositions based on a set of four cords, should those compositions be eligible for copyright protection? Does it make a difference if an AI or machine learning model was used? What if the model was trained using the top songs from the Billboard charts to mimic popular music styles?”

Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto — An engaging interview with crypto skeptic Molly White. “Towards the end of 2021 I started to see so much web3 hype, everywhere: on social media, in conversations with friends, in technical spaces, in the news. When I went to look up what ‘web3’ even was, I found no end of articles talking about how one company or another was doing something with web3, or how some venture capital firm was setting up a web3 fund, or how all the problems with the current web were going to be solved by web3… but very few that would actually succinctly describe what the term even meant.”

By , February 18, 2022.

Publishers Win Preliminary Injunction Against Maryland Law that Requires Licensing Digital Works to Libraries — “While the State argued that leaving the law in place would serve the public interest by expanding access to e-books, AAP claimed, and the court ultimately agreed, that ‘digital lending in public libraries, including Maryland public libraries, was alive and well before the Maryland Act took effect,’ with a reported 31% increase in customer access to digital materials in FY 2020. AAP also argued that it is only through the protection of copyright that such works can be created and distributed at all, and that the law would undermine the Copyright Act’s incentive in this regard.”

US Copyright Office refuses to register AI-generated work, finding that “human authorship is a prerequisite to copyright protection” — Eleonara Rosati discusses a recent decision from the US Copyright Review Board denying copyright registration of a work claimed to be “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine.” On a second request for reconsideration of the refusal, the Review Board reiterated that “human authorship is a prerequisite to copyright protection in the United States and that the Work therefore cannot be registered.”

US Govt Identifies Top Pirate Sites and Other ‘Notorious Markets’ — “The US Government has published its annual list of problematic piracy websites and other ‘notorious markets.’ This year’s overview includes usual suspects such as The Pirate Bay, FMovies, and Rapidgator, but hosting companies and an advertising service are mentioned as well. The USTR hopes that by highlighting the threats, platform operators or foreign authorities will take action.”

Apple defeats copyright lawsuit over racially diverse emoji — Reuters’ Blake Brittain reports, “Cub Club said Parrott discussed a potential partnership with Apple representatives in 2014, and that Apple created its own set of multiracial emoji after declining to work with her. It said Apple’s emoji infringed its copyrights and trademark rights, arguing they copied iDiversicons’ five skin tones and other features.”

The Great Gapsby? How modern editions of classics lost the plot — “Experts are warning that the freedom for anyone to reproduce or reimagine books once they are out of copyright is corrupting classic texts – all for the sake of making a quick buck. The Great Gatsby of 1925 is the quintessential novel of the hedonistic jazz age, the story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. It entered the public domain on 1 January 2021, after 95 years of copyright protection.”

By , February 11, 2022.

Copyright Historical Record Books Collection Available Online — “The first 500 record books in the digitized Copyright Historical Record Books Collection are now available online. This collection is a preview of digitized historical record books that the Copyright Office plans to add to its Copyright Public Record System. This first release is part of a multi-year digitization project and includes applications for books registered with the Office from 1969 to 1977. The collection is being digitized in reverse chronological order.”

Families of Robin Williams and George Carlin Say Pandora Needs To Pay Up for Streaming — “‘While it is commonplace in the music industry for companies like Pandora to enter into public performance licensing agreements with performance rights organizations like BMI and ASCAP for musical compositions, these entities do not license literary works. Therefore, it was the responsibility of Pandora to seek out the copyright owners and obtain valid public performance licenses,’ the lawsuits filed in federal court in Los Angeles state.”

Traders are selling themselves their own NFTs to drive up prices — “The NFT marketplace is rife with people buying their own NFTs in order to drive up prices, according to a report released this week by blockchain data firm Chainalysis. Known as ‘wash trading’, the act of buying and selling a security in order to fool the market was once commonplace on Wall Street, and has been illegal for nearly a century. But the vast, unregulated NFT marketplace has shown to be a golden opportunity for scammers.”

A Bored Russian Museum Guard Damaged a Prized Avant-Garde Painting by Doodling Cartoon Eyes Onto Two Faceless Figures — Moral rights protect against the defacement of copyrighted works, but what happens when a work is refaced?

Publishers Association launches new industry video — The new video from the UK based Publishers Association “aims to help communicate the publishing industry’s personal, social, economic and innovative value to a range of audiences including policymakers.”

By , February 04, 2022.

BeIN First to Use New Anti-Piracy Law to Block 18 Pirate Streaming Sites — Torrentfreak reports on the outcome of new French legislation that went into effect January 1, creating effective and proportionate remedies against illegal conduct. As noted, “Broadcaster beIN Sports has become the first company to obtain a pirate streaming site blocking order under new French legislation. The injunction requires local internet service providers to block access to 18 sites that offer live sporting events to the public without appropriate licensing. Any mirror sites that subsequently appear will be quickly blocked too.”

State Compulsory eBook and Audiobook Licensing Is Wrong on Law and Policy — Devlin Hartline writes, “there is an alarming new trend of states pursuing laws that would force publishers, many of whom are also authors, to grant licenses to public libraries for access to their digital works, such as eBooks and audiobooks. . . . Proponents of state compulsory licensing complain that libraries are being unfairly discriminated against, but this gets it wrong on both law and policy. More fundamentally, these proponents ignore the other side of the equation—the rights of publishers that undergird the creative ecosystem and ensure that libraries have works worth lending.”

Gloria Estefan presses House Judiciary on radio royalties bill — “The ‘Rhythm is Gonna Get You’ singer appeared at a virtual House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday to push lawmakers to pass the American Music Fairness Act, which would require radio stations to pay performers if they play their songs. ‘Each of the songs that are precious and meaningful to you was a labor of love for the songwriters, the artists, the musicians and producers that brought it to life. They poured their own hearts and souls into its creation. But when their music is played on the radio, artists don’t get paid, only the songwriters,’ Estefan, 64, said.”

Research Report Shows Negative Impact of Big Tech on Minority-Owned Media — “News Media Alliance Executive Vice President & General Counsel, Danielle Coffey, said, ‘We are currently facing a crisis in which our valued news publications are suffering from a dire lack of financial resources needed to survive. Two dominant tech companies – Google and Facebook – are forcing everyone to play by their rules, using news publishers’ content to fill their platforms without offering fair or adequate compensation. Without immediate intervention to correct this market imbalance, we run the risk of these publications – including minority-owned outlets – fading into history, their legacy forgotten, their future ability to provide critical, high-quality news to underrepresented communities going with them.”

HitPiece takes its NFT music platform down following artist outrage — “A website called HitPiece that has been selling music-related NFTs has temporarily closed after artists accused it of appropriating their work without permission, Rolling Stone has reported. Outraged social media posts were issued recently from artists including Jack Antonoff, Eve 6, and Sadie Dupuis. ‘Any [Bleachers] NFTs are fake,’ Tweeted Jack Antonoff. ‘I do not believe in NFTs so anything you see associated with me isn’t real.’ The HitPiece website is apparently built on top of Spotify’s API. Before shutting down, it appeared to be offering NFTs of songs and albums from the likes of John Lennon and BTS, including photos and album artwork, according to the Internet Archive.”

By , January 28, 2022.

Breyer’s Rulings Shaped By Wariness Of Intellectual Property — Law360’s Ryan Davis examines Justice Breyer’s legacy on copyright and IP issues during his 27 year tenure on the Supreme Court, following Breyer’s retirement announcement this week.

Former wrestling coach Jim Gibbons urges lawmakers to strip Iowa PBS copyright — “Gibbons is the primary proponent of House File 579, a bill that states all ‘records, videos, electronic storage, documents, tapes, and other information’ kept by the Iowa public broadcasting board would be considered public records. That would include everything from high school sports to broadcasts of the Des Moines Metro Opera — and the 1986 Cyclone-Hawkeye duel.” Takings Clause?

States Should Follow New York’s Rejection of Mandatory eBook Licensing — “Lastly (in one of the many eyebrow raising arguments), the State accuses publishers of exploiting ‘the rapid advancement of digital technology to discriminate against public libraries when licensing e-books and audiobooks,’ noting that the first sale doctrine has not kept pace with digital works to upset the balance between publishers and libraries. It seems strange to invoke a federal copyright law doctrine as a justification to enact an overreaching state law and to also claim that there is no preemption problem.”

Zillow ordered to pay $1.9 million in copyright case — “The case has wound its way through the courts since VHT sued in 2015. In 2017, a federal jury ordered Zillow to pay $8.3 million, but the court reversed a portion of that verdict and both sides appealed. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals later sided in part with Zillow and a portion of the case was returned to the lower court.”

By , January 21, 2022.

Crypto Bros Spent $3 Million Thinking They Bought the Rights to Dune — A quick read of 17 U.S.C. § 202 could have saved them some cash.

How Instagram Changed Its Embedding Feature—and What That Means for Photographers and Publishers — Alicia Calzada, Deputy General Counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, writes, “In mid-December of 2021, Instagram quietly let it be known that it had added a feature to its service that allows users to disable its commonly misused and misunderstood embedding feature.”

2022–2026 Strategic Plan: Fostering Creativity and Enriching Culture — The U.S. Copyright Office this week published its Strategic Plan for the next five years. Among its priorities, the Copyright Office says, “A key focus will be ensuring that the copyright system is accessible to all, welcoming diversity and ultimately enriching the cultural landscape.”

Adblocking Does Not Constitute Copyright Infringement, Court Rules — Torrentfreak’s Andy Maxwell reports on this week’s decision from the Hamburg District Court in Germany, in litigation brought by publishing house Axel Springer against adblocking company Eyeo, and the reasoning the court used to reach its result.

Trade relieved but cautious as government delays decision on UK copyright changes — “The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) launched a consultation last summer which considered a weakening of copyright rules used for exporting books around the world. Changing the way these rules, known as copyright exhaustion, work would present ‘serious dangers for the health of the books industry’, according to groups including the Publishers Association (PA) which set up a Save Our Books campaign to fight the changes.”