By , June 29, 2018.

‘Critics of Article 13 are Weaving a Narrative with no Relation to Fact’ — Article 13 is part of a proposed update to EU’s copyright directive and would place more responsibility on certain online service providers providing content to users to make sure that content is authorized by copyright owners. BASCA’s Crispin Hunt responds to the avalanche of hyperbolic nonsense that critics of the article are pumping out, saying, “The reality is that Article 13 is hardly revolutionary. It is a modest proposal that returns some sense of fairness and responsibility to the manner in which internet platforms operate. We have had almost 20 years of experience under the existing regime where platforms have almost no accountability to the public, and in which they are rewarded for wilful blindness and inaction.”

Supreme Court to Resolve Split Over Copyright Registrations — The Supreme Court picked up its first copyright case this term on the last day of the term. The question: given that copyright registration is required before filing a lawsuit, does the statute allow copyright owners to sue once they’ve sent their registration application to the Copyright Office, or must they wait until the Copyright Office has reviewed the application and either granted or denied registration? Courts have split on the question.

Senate Judiciary Committee Unanimously Passes Music Modernization Act — The bill previously passed the House 415-0.

IP Norms’ Dark Side — “The early legal literature on law and social norms tended to paint a rosy picture. Social norms were generally depicted as an optimal set of organically developed rules, informed by the experience of a close-knit community, and thus superior to formal law as a way to regulate behavior. Later scholars came to realize that nothing guarantees the optimality of social norms: they may perpetuate practices that no longer make sense, or they may advance the interests of certain groups but not social welfare. In such cases, formal law holds the promise of overriding suboptimal norms and moving society to a better place.”

Putting “Fair” Back in “Fair Use” — “Partly to blame perhaps for an expansion of the boundaries of fair use was the lack of a coherent economic framework for evaluating secondary uses under the ‘transformative’ concept. A new academic paper entitled Fair Use in the Digital Age by scholars at the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies and Auburn University’s Economics Department in the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. (65 J. Copyright Soc’y U.S.A. 1 (2018)) offers a practical economic framework closely tied to the statute, judicial precedent, and Judge Leval’s ‘transformativeness’ idea. The analysis in this article is rich, but it generally points to two key steps in analyzing fair use disputes.”