Copyhype

Not a good week for Sirius XM:

While the Court is largely unpersuaded and sometimes baffled by Sirius XM’s repetitive or off-point theories about how reasonable jurists might read an unwritten exclusion into §980(a)(2), the Court will not analyze the potential grounds for difference of opinion because certification of this Order suffers from an even more basic deficiency.

Disney’s global success with ‘Frozen’ took lots of translation, investment — “The company put a huge investment into making the animated film as accessible in Beijing as in Buenos Aires. The movie is translated into 41 languages, which included an international cast of more than 900 people. They worked on 1,300 recording sessions.”

Top 113 Congressional Copyright Review Moments — While the 113th Congress still has a few more days in session before the end of its term, there are no more copyright review hearings planned. Here is a look back at some of the top moments of the past year.

Landmark Trade Deal at Risk Without Strong Intellectual Property Laws — “The nature of the TPP’s IP provisions matter greatly to the United States because America’s competitive advantage in the global economy increasingly lies in innovation-based industries—such as life sciences (pharmaceuticals and medical devices), information and communications technologies, digital services, music and film, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing—that at their core depend on the production, and protection, of intellectual property.”

Fair Use and Market Harm: Use It or Lose It? — Thomas Young has an in-depth look at the Eleventh Circuit’s troubling conclusion concerning market harm in the GSU e-reserves case, one of the issues the publisher plaintiffs are asking the full bench to review in their petition for an en banc rehearing.

Social Media Bots Offer Phony Friends and Real Profit — “‘This all points to social media advertising being one giant bubble,’ said Tim Hwang, chief scientist at the Pacific Social Architecting Corporation, a research group that focuses on bots. ‘Everyone is really happy to say, ‘Look at the numbers that we got, it must have been successful,’ even though the retweets and favs are inflated by bots.'”

The Creepy New Wave of the Internet — Sue Halpern says in the New York Review of Books, “In other words, as human behavior is tracked and merchandized on a massive scale, the Internet of Things creates the perfect conditions to bolster and expand the surveillance state.”

Go back forty-four years, to 1970, when NJ Representative Cornelius Gallagher said much the same thing: “By weaving a web of data representing all of an individual’s experience, it seems to me that we are creating a suffocating sense of surveillance in this country.” ¹Fair Credit Reporting Hearings on H.R. 16340 Before the H. Subcomm. on Consumer Affairs of the Comm. on Banking and Currency, 29, 91st Cong. (1970) (Statement of Rep. Cornelius E. Gallagher). Gallagher went on to say, “Files which are economically unfeasible to computerize now will undoubtedly yield to further generations of computing machines in a vast nationwide, even worldwide network of information. The question is no longer science fiction.”