Appeals Court Gives Drake a “Fair Use” Win in Sampling Case — The Second Circuit affirmed summary judgment in favor of Drake, finding fair use for a thirty-five second portion of a song incorporated into a new song. The caveat is that the decision is a nonprecedential summary order. It’s also not necessarily a “sampling” case, since the work Drake was alleged to have infringed was the musical composition embodied in the sound recording that was sampled—and Drake had properly licensed the sound recording itself.
AG Campos in Brompton Bicycle advises CJEU to rule that ‘exclusively’ functional shapes do not deserve copyright protection — Shades of Star Athletica. Eleonara Rosati explores the AG opinion here, explaining that “Whilst this conclusion appears reasonable and in line with existing CJEU case law. . . the Opinion appears to go a bit astray from that, at least in one notable respect.”
How SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor Plans to Stand Out In a Crowded Streaming Space: ‘We’re Built In a Totally Different Way’ — “What’s your take on the European Union’s copyright directive that requires content-hosting websites to take responsibility for copyrighted material hosted on their platforms? We follow that quite closely, and we’re a participant in the process. We have a creator-driven mission—respect for copyright goes hand in hand with that.”
Cox Asks Court to Overturn or Lower ‘Shockingly Excessive’ $1 Billion Piracy Verdict — ISP Cox is seeking both judgment as a matter of law and remittitur following a jury verdict that awarded damages of $1 billion against it for enabling massive copyright infringement by P2P users. We haven’t even gotten to the appeals court yet on this one.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act at 22: What is it, why was it enacted, and where are we now — Next Tuesday at 2:30pmET, the Senate IP Subcommittee will hold its first hearing on the DMCA, which you should be able to livestream at this link when it gets underway. This is the first in a series of hearings that Senate IP Subcommittee Chairman Tillis has announced will take place over the course of the year, with the goal of “re-forg[ing] the consensus that originally powered the DMCA and craft[ing] new legislation to modernize the DMCA for today’s internet.”