By , March 16, 2018.

Sara Hickman — “There were many reasons why I retired from music last year. I’ve never explained them or felt the need to, so I’m not going to start today.”

AAP Pleased with Bipartisan Support of Marrakesh Treaty — Yesterday, a bill to implement the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled was introduced in the U.S. Senate. The treaty requires parties to adopt appropriate exceptions to copyright allowing authorized entities to reproduce and distribute literary works in accessible formats. The Treaty was adopted in 2013 and transmitted to the U.S. Senate in 2016.

U.S. Border Seizures of DMCA Circumvention Devices Surges — Torrentfreak reports, “New data released by Homeland Security shows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized significantly more DMCA circumvention devices in 2017. The seizures, which includes mod chips for gaming consoles, increased 324% compared to the year before, although the actual number remains fairly low.”

Fair Is Fair But Politics Is Complicated: Why Congress Must Pass the CLASSICS Act (Column) — Rob Levine pens an op-ed in favor of legislation that would update transitional rules to enable the owners of sound recordings made before 1972 to be paid for digital streaming under statutory licenses. The bill makes sense if you think artists should get paid for their work.

Piracy and Malware: There’s No Free Lunch — Researchers Michael Smith and Ruth Telang conducted a study to see if piracy harms consumers by exposing them to malware and other malicious code. “The results were clear. The more our users visited piracy sites, we found, the more often their machines got infected with malware. Specifically, whenever they doubled the time they spent on piracy sites, they increased the number of malware processes running on their machines by 20 percent.”