Ruling Warhol Art Infringed Prince Pic Stands, 2nd Cir. Says — The court was asked to revisit the decision denying fair use to the Andy Warhol Foundation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Google v. Oracle decision. It held that application of Google leads to the same conclusion.
Ninth Circuit sides with Sirius XM in dispute over pre-1972 music royalties — “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found Monday that satellite radio station Sirius XM does not have to pay royalties to the band The Turtles for playing their pre-1972 recordings. Unlike typical AM and FM radio stations, digital and satellite radio must pay royalties if they broadcast a song from after 1972 on their airwaves. Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, the founding members of The Turtles, started Flo & Eddie to have control over their recordings and first sued Sirius XM Radio in 2013. They argued that their ‘exclusive ownership’ under California copyright law entitles them to royalties when their pre-1972 songs are played on-air. A federal judge in California agreed.”
The Federal Circuit Must Correct Texas Court’s Misapplication of Copyright Law in SAS Institute Appeal — Steven Tepp writes, “WPL did not try to compete with SAS by building a different or better product. Instead, it ordered copies of SAS’s products under the guise of an educational license, but with the true intent to reverse-engineer and copy key elements, including the selection and arrangement of its outputs, and even the manuals licensed users receive from SAS. The result is that WPL produced a clone, taking the exact same input and producing the exact same output that SAS does. Avoiding the years of investment and fine-tuning that SAS undertook to create its market-leading software, WPL undercut SAS’s price in the market and lured away SAS’s customers.”
NC Court Grants Motion in Allen v. Cooper to Reconsider Takings Claim — David Newhoff writes a briskly paced recap of state sovereign immunity and the latest development involving the district court in Allen v. Cooper reviving two of the plaintiff videographer’s claims against the state of North Carolina following remand from the Supreme Court, which held his copyright infringement claim barred by the Eleventh Amendment.
CJEU in C-597/19 Mircom: users of P2P networks might be infringing the making available right if duly informed — “After the C-610/15 Ziggo ruling on the operation of an online sharing platform indexing torrent files, it was only a matter of time until the CJEU had to rule on whether users of P2P networks make works available to the public, even if they do not possess a complete file. In the line of previous development, the judgment allows a finding of infringement of copyright where users of P2P networks automatically upload pieces of files containing a protected work. However, it must be established that that user actively chose to use sharing software by giving consent after being duly informed of its characteristics, so they ought to be informed in some way about the automatic upload of already downloaded pieces.”