By , July 12, 2019.

Why do copyright laws matter? — House IP Subcommittee Ranking Member Martha Roby writes, “Many, many more people and entities besides just big-name celebrities are involved in creating music, television shows and movies. In fact, these creative industries support thousands of indirect jobs that most of us probably wouldn’t even think of. Consider a movie set, for example. From a personnel standpoint, all types of professionals are necessary to make a movie happen, from camera crews and lighting specialists to script writers, makeup and hair artists, florists, caterers, seamstresses and the men and women who perform manual labor to build and take down sets.”

Why the U.S. Copyright Office Chose the Mechanical Licensing Collective — On Monday, the Copyright Office published its decision selecting an entity to administer the blanket licensing of mechanical licenses by digital music services, a process created by the Music Modernization Act. Billboard explores that decision.

More information and better tools to resolve manual Content ID claims — YouTube announced this week that it has rolled out two major changes to improve its copyright claims made by its manual claiming tool, which allows select copyright owners to manually make claims on viceos that were not automatically made by its Content ID matching system. First, copyright owners must now provide timestamps for exactly what part of the video is being manually claimed, and second, claim recipients can use YouTube’s editing tubes to remove the content claimed manually in their videos and automatically release the claims.

Magazine Says Its Stolen Cover Photo Was a Stock Photo… of the Photo — “Renowned photographer Nadav Kander was recently surprised to find one of his portraits used without permission on the cover of a magazine. When confronted with this, the magazine’s explanation was that the image was purchased as a stock photo — a stock photo of the copyrighted photo in an exhibition.”