Copyright Royalty Board Asked to Approve 32% Increase on Mechanical Royalties for Physical Products, Downloads — The motion comes from members of the major labels, music publishers, and NSAI, and if approved by the CRB, would boost royalties for songwriters and publishers in an area, thanks in no small part to a resurgence in vinyl album sales, “remains a dominant format with no sign of a slow-down.”
Examining Copyright — Copyright scholar Zvi Rosen has published a draft of his long-awaited study on examination of copyright applications by the US Copyright Office. As Rosen writes, the article “presents a history of copyright examination, empirical data and findings on what has been rejected over the past sixty years, and a proposal based on these findings for improving the efficiency of the copyright registration system going forward.”
Movie, Music, Gaming & Publishing Groups Join ISPs in Deal to Block Piracy — Torrentfreak reports that rights groups in Sweden have teamed up with ISPs in the country “to operate a simplified and more efficient process to handle [site] blocking orders.” Furthermore, “The parties to the agreement have also agreed to jointly strive for new and clear legislation for administrative blocking in Sweden.”
U.S. Court Orders Pirate Site Blocking. Internet Should Break Any Day Now. — And in the US, after ruling against a group of pirate streaming entities in a copyright infringement lawsuit, a federal judge has ordered US ISPs to block access to the websites operated by the entities. David Newhoff observes in his piece here, “Ordering an unnamed third party in a complaint to cease facilitating harmful conduct is not groundbreaking law, which is one reason why all the shouting about that legislation ten years ago was so ridiculous.”
Can You Copyright a Dress? — “In the late 1920s, French haute-couture houses lost approximately the equivalent of a billion US dollars (based on 2011 numbers) due to piracy of designs. French designers, who considered their work a form of art, tried many times and methods to close down avenues of access to their original thinking, even going so far as to call the police on alleged copyists in the interwar period.”