SCOTUSBlog Petition of the Day: Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v Wall-Street.com — The US Copyright Act requires a copyright owner to register her copyright with the US Copyright Office before she can file an infringement lawsuit. But courts are split on whether that requirement is satisfied when the registration application is received by the Copyright Office, or whether the copyright owner must wait until the Copyright Office has processed the application and issued a registration certificate (which currently can take 6-8 months). This appeal presents the issue to the Supreme Court; will it grant cert and resolve the split?
Kodi Addon Developers Quit Following Threats From MPA, Netflix, Amazon — A coalition of film and television producers have begun cracking down on developers and distributors of Kodi Addons that facilitate and encourage infringement. Torrentfreak reports that the efforts are beginning to pay off. Just this morning, the site reported another developer shutting down.
Copyright Small Claims: A Solution for Many Creators — David Newhoff writes of H.R. 3945, which would establish a streamlined, easy to use process for resolving small copyright claims, “It won’t solve every problem, but it should make a tangible difference for a significant population of creators who currently do not avail themselves of any enforcement procedure, but would if the barriers were lower. And frankly, copyright critics and internet-advocates (the ones who claim to care about creators) should actually support this bill because it establishes a forum for narrow, voluntary, and limited resolution between a rights holder and an alleged infringer without creating even a hint of a new liability implication for investing in web platforms.”
The End of Internet Exceptionalism – Or Why the Pirates Bet on the Wrong Horse — “In 2017, everything changed. It turns out that the Internet was not that different after all. It did not bring democracy, but election manipulation. Not free speech, but fake news. Not pluralism, but monoculture. Not quality, but algorithmic idiocy. Not grassroots, but skyscrapers. The surveillance state did indeed come, but not from copyright but from the internet companies. The pirates bet on the wrong horse: it was not Hollywood that broke the Internet, it was Silicon Valley.”