ISP Grande Loses Safe Harbor Over ‘Utter Failure’ to Terminate Pirating Customers — Torrentfreak reports on the Western District Court of Texas decision, saying, “Grande didn’t terminate any subscribers between October 2010 and May 2017. This, despite receiving over a million copyright infringement notices, and tracking over 9,000 customers in its DMCA ‘Excessive Violations Report.'” Just in time for the US Copyright Office’s public roundtable on Section 512, scheduled for April 8.
Courts Being Led Down Rabbit Hole in Photograph Copyright Case — David Newhoff discusses the appeal in Brammer v. Violent Hues Productions, involving a lower court decision finding fair use. The Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments in the appeal on Tuesday.
CRB Appeal: Inside The Battle For Fair Streaming Rates — The Recording Academy’s Todd Dupler writes, “Last year, songwriters won a historic victory from the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), the three-judge panel that sets the royalty rates for mechanical licensing. … Then this month, Spotify, Amazon, Google, and Pandora all filed notices of appeal of that CRB decision. These would be the first appeals ever of a CRB determination for music publishing rates under Section 115 of the Copyright Act.”
Hollywood Employs More Workers Than Mining and Farming, MPAA Says — “The entertainment industry has spread across the U.S., beyond Southern California where the warm, sunny climate drew filmmakers to build the first production companies at the turn of the 20th century. Other states — including Georgia, Louisiana and Illinois — have used subsidies to draw production away from California to create their own thriving hubs.”
SXSW 2019 Keynote: T Bone Burnett — The producer of the O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack (among many other projects) tells you what he really thinks about tech platforms: