A SMART New Approach to Combatting Piracy — Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid examines new copyright legislation introduced by Senators Tillis and Leahy, which would create a process for the Library of Congress to designate technological measures for identifying or protecting copyrighted works that must be implemented by online service providers.
WIPO’s Pirate Site Blocklist Expands to 4,042 Active Domain Names — Torrentfreak reports, “WIPO, which is part of the United Nations, was founded more than 50 years ago with the aim of protecting intellectual property. This includes combating online piracy, something it hopes to facilitate with its “WIPO Alert” blocklist. The goal of the project is simple; allow stakeholders from member states to report problematic sites and share the resulting list with advertisers, so they can block bad apples. This should result in less money going to pirate sites, making it harder for them to generate profit.”
Social Justice Meets IP at Howard Law Clinics Tackling Diversity — Bloomberg Law visits Howard University School of Law to take a close look at the schools patent and trademark clinics, which “tackle[] diversity issues in intellectual property in two ways: encouraging more people of color to enter the traditionally white, male intellectual property field and providing legal assistance to people who are underrepresented in inventorship and trademark registration applications.”
State Laws Forcing Publishers to License Ebooks to Libraries Are Unlawful [PDF] — A new white paper from Free State Foundation explains, “As the District Court in AAP v. Frosh recognized, under Section 106 of the Copyright Act, copyright owners possess exclusive rights to decide who can distribute or make available their copyrighted works and on what terms and conditions. State laws that force publishers to license copyrighted works to libraries clearly conflict with federal law.”
Europe Takes Aim at Big Tech With Digital Markets Act — “The new law, set to take effect next year, sets out a list of dos and don’ts that outlaw many of what are currently core business practices among major tech companies. Apple, for example, will have to allow alternatives to its App Store for downloading apps and allow payment methods for the App Store other than Apple’s own. (Apple charges a 30 percent commission on all Apple App Store payments.) Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will no longer be able to offer targeted ads across multiple platforms — using data gathered as users move between services owned by the same company, YouTube and Google Search, for example, without receiving explicit consent. Amazon will be barred from using data collected from outside sellers on its services to offer competing products, a practice already the subject of a separate EU antitrust investigation.”