Music Licensing Study — Yesterday, the Copyright Office released a comprehensive, 245 page report examining the music licensing landscape in the US and offering a set of nearly 30 recommendations that should more fairly compensate creators, make the licensing process more efficient, provide market participants with “access to authoritative data to identify and license sound recordings and musical works”, and provide rightsholders with greater transparency of payment and usage information. (And it cites to Copyhype, pg. 52, n.246.)
Intellectual property and trade: Moving in the right direction — “Last Friday, Senator Orrin Hatch, the new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, spoke at AEI about his approach to trade legislation in 2015. The chairman’s remarks foster hope that Congress will make positive steps on trade policy and international intellectual property rights in the coming year.”
CPIP Supports Guidelines for the Protection of Fundamental IP Rights — This week, the Center for Protection of Intellectual Property, along with over 60 other organizations and individuals, published a letter affirming the protection of IP rights. The letter noted that the “Founding Fathers understood that by protecting the proprietary rights of artists, authors, entrepreneurs, innovators, and inventors, they were promoting the greater public welfare. The continued protection of these fundamental rights is essential to American innovation and competitiveness.”
Media Institute Files Brief in U.S. Supreme Court Supporting Stronger Copyright Protections for Photographers — A cert petition filed by the photographer in Kienitz v. Sconnie Nation has attracted its first amicus brief, from the Media Institute. The Institute argues the Supreme Court should take the case to, in part, reaffirm “the fundamental distinction between parody and satire.”
My Amazon bestseller made me nothing — “This past summer, my novel, ‘Broken Piano for President,’ shot to the top of the best-seller lists for a week. After Jack Daniel’s sent me a ridiculously polite cease and desist letter, the story went viral and was featured in places like Forbes, Time magazine and NPR’s Weekend Edition. The New Yorker wrote one whole, entire, punctuated-and-everything sentence about me! My book was the No. 6 bestselling title in America for a while, right behind all the different ’50 Shades of Grey’ and ‘Gone Girl.’ It was selling more copies than ‘Hunger Games’ and ‘Bossypants.’ So, I can sort of see why people thought I was going to start wearing monogrammed silk pajamas and smoking a pipe.”
Nigam: Can Google end investigation before it starts? — “Google’s motion to shut down Attorney General Hood’s effort to ask questions in the public interest goes before the judge in the next month. His ruling could set a precedent for consumers and corporations around America. We could see a whole new class of company that is, quite simply, too big to scrutinize.” Google’s motion has, however, garnered support from a number of organizations. Of this support, the Trichordist points out in Bring Out Your Shills: Google’s Shill Mill Attacking Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood for Having the Audacity to Investigate Google, “the two amicus briefs filed in support of Google’s attempt to stop a criminal investigation were filed solely by organizations that receives funding from Google both directly and indirectly and in some cases has received that funding for many years.”