New Fees Proposed for U.S. Copyright Office Services — No one likes it when fees go up, but it’s often a necessity to ensure that services can continue to recover costs. The US Copyright Office this week published its new fee schedule, which, unless disapproved by Congress, goes into effect 120 days from now. The fee schedule is modified in a number of ways based on public comments received by the Office after it published a proposed fee schedule last year, and the Office should be commended for the tough task of finding ways to minimize the burden on individual creators—the fee increase on the standard and single applications, which many individual creators use, has been cut in half due to public comments, and the fee for group registration of photographs, which was initially set to increase, will now remain the same.
Advocacy group launches effort to fund freelance stories by laid-off journalists about Big Tech — “The Save Journalism Project, an advocacy group that works to expose how tech companies have harmed the journalism industry, on Tuesday told The Hill it is launching an effort to fund freelance stories about Big Tech’s effect on vulnerable communities.”
How The Music Modernization Act Has Already Benefited Legacy Artists — The Recording Academy writes, “One of the most talked-about benefits of the Music Modernization Act, which was signed into law on Oct. 11, 2018 and recently celebrated its one-year anniversary, has no doubt been the closure of the ‘pre-1972’ loophole. Put simply, this means that digital services are now paying legacy artists for sound recordings fixed before Feb. 15, 1972. Prior to the MMA being signed, the quirk in the law denied older artists from receiving compensation for their work and had to be eliminated to ensure level compensation regardless of when an artist first laid down a track.”
Monarch of All I Survey…Copyright Excepted (What are the Purposes and Limits of Government Copyright?) — Hugh Stephens discusses a recent Canadian Supreme Court decision, Keatley Surveying v. Teranet, Inc., which touched on the issue of Crown copyright. Stephens also considers some of the parallels with a pair of US Supreme Court cases currently pending which also deal with government ownership of copyrighted works (Georgia v. Public.Resource Org) and government infringement of copyrighted works (Allen v. Cooper).
The CASE Act: Your Questions Answered — The Authors Guild has a handy resource answering common questions regarding the CASE Act, which would establish a sorely needed small claims process within the Copyright Office.