Antipiracy Enforcement in Malaysia and Jakarta — Researcher Brett Danaher shares some takeaways from a recent trip he took. “If one simply reads online forums, one might get the impression that the debate over piracy is largely about executives at large studios trying to secure even higher paychecks. That was not who I met in Jakarta. I met independent Indonesian film producers (producing films smaller than Hollywood by orders of magnitude) who felt that piracy was one of the biggest limiting factors in growing their national film industry.”
Music Modernization Act Gains Momentum in Senate — Ted Johnson and Paula Parisi of Variety report on Tuesday’s hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee featuring, among others, Smokey Robinson. The Senators on the Committee all seemed supportive of the bill, which would make a number of significant reforms to laws governing music licensing.
Congress, end a longstanding injustice for legacy music creators — “Artists that include the hitmakers of Motown, the people who gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll and the legends of jazz and blues have been forced to chase large, profitable music services across multiple state courts in lengthy and expensive litigation just to get basic compensation for their valuable catalogs. While litigation has resulted in some payments to artists, the process is long and costly, while the payments themselves are temporary and do not include all pre-’72 music creators or recordings.”
Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v Wall-street.com, Brief for the United States as Amicus Curiae — A well-written brief from the U.S. Solicitor General recommends that the Supreme Court grant cert in this case, which concerns when the registration prerequisite for filing a civil action for infringement of a copyright is satisfied. The brief also argues that the requirement is only met after the Register of Copyrights has acted on a registration application, either granting registration of a work or denying registration. Some courts have held that the requirement is satisfied once a registrant has submitted the registration, deposit, and fee to the Copyright Office but before the Register takes any action. While the Court isn’t bound to follow the recommendation of the Solicitor General, it historically does so around eight out of ten times.
Google’s Selfish Ledger is an Unsettling Vision of Silicon Valley Social Engineering — “The Selfish Ledger positions Google as the solver of the world’s most intractable problems, fueled by a distressingly intimate degree of personal information from every user and an ease with guiding the behavior of entire populations.”