By , March 02, 2018.

Ensuring Only Good Claims Come in Small Packages: A Response to Scholarly Concerns About a Proposed Small Copyright Claims Tribunal — Sandra Aistars provides the definitive response to criticisms lodged against a proposed small copyright claims process. A bill to implement such a tribunal was introduced last October and would provide copyright owners who can’t afford federal litigation the ability to pursue remedies for their rights.

Fox News Wins Appellate Showdown Against Service That Facilitates Sharing of TV Clips — The Second Circuit issued its long awaited opinion in Fox News v TVEyes this week, and it is a solid win for balanced, common sense fair use. Eriq Gardner for the Hollywood Reporter has more on the decision.

Judge Saris Opines on Copyright Infringement in 3-D Greeting Card Case — Just for fun, a recent decision looking at alleged infringement of 3-d popup greeting cards. The opinion provides an excellent step-by-step analysis of substantial similarity, as the court distinguishes between uncopyrightable ideas and elements and protected expression. The opinion also relies frequently on puns.

Law of Copyright Reinterpretation Project Steers ALI Further Off Course — “ALI has built its reputation in the judicial and legal communities by releasing treatises that add value to an area of law. Re-wording a federal statute and offering commentary on which among many judicial interpretations of that statute’s provisions is ‘right’ doesn’t add such value. A Restatement that introduces greater confusion into its area of focus will not only be ignored by judges and lawyers, it will undermine the credibility of current and future ALI work. The organization should take the advice given to it and either suspend the Restatement project or recast as a Principles project.”

Text & Data Mining Exception For the EU Digital Single Market Proposal — “Text and data mining might well lead to important ativities and research results—and for this reason most STM journal publishers are on record and are strongly supporting academic research projects (some go further, as Dr. Rosati mentions). In fact by working with organizations such as CCC and CrosRef, they are actively enabling the normalization activities that Rosati mentions as still being critical to the technical processes (see also the STM Declaration covering twenty-one leading publishing houses. Other copyright sectors would be rightfully concerned about their works being caught up in an exception intended for scholarly research. Commercial beneficiaries are currently obtaining licenses and permissions, and doing so on a commercial and pragmatic basis, as demonstrated by Dr. Rosati’s own list of IBM Watson projects. It is not at all clear to me why an exception should be applied to an active and growing copyright market for the benefit of large technology companies.”