Here’s How De La Soul Cleared The Samples For Their Classic Catalog’s Streaming Debut — This week witnessed the tragic loss of David Jolicoeur, one of De La Soul’s core members. The sad news came just weeks before the group’s sample-heavy discography was finally set to become available for streaming. Here, Okayplayer reporter Shawn Setaro speaks with Deborah Mannis-Gardner, the music clearance expert who was responsible for ensuring the legal rights of everyone involved were respected.
The European Commission decides to refer 11 Member States to the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to fully transpose EU copyright rules into national law — The referral comes nearly two years after the deadline for implementing the EU’s newest directive on copyright law has passed.
Fayetteville’s Blackbeard shipwreck filmmaker fires back in new court case — The Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Allen v. Cooper did not end Rick Allen’s lawsuit against the state of North Carolina for using his copyrighted footage of the famed pirate ship without his permission. Allen has now filed an amended complaint that alleges his claims against the state in light of the Supreme Court’s holding on state sovereign immunity.
State Mandates for Digital Book Licenses to Libraries are Unconstitutional and Undermine the Free Market — “Ultimately, the state bills imposing compulsory licensing on library e-books are based on arguments that do not withstand legal, commercial, or economic scrutiny. Instead, advocates for these state bills simply recast customary licensing practices and ordinary business decisions that companies in the creative industries all engage in as inherently unfair and discriminatory practices. They then abruptly conclude that library e-book lending licenses must be regulated by the government with unprecedented, intrusive price controls and mandates of other license terms. But merely asserting that there is a problem, and using heavy-handed rhetoric that demonizes copyright owners, does not in fact prove there is a market failure that requires government intervention.”
The Quixotic Battle Over Controlled Digital Lending Heats Up — “[Internet Archive] ridiculously claims that its Open Library causes no market harm to the Publishers because they have already been paid for the physical books that IA digitizes and distributes online…. This self-serving position ignores the fact that IA is usurping a different market—the thriving one for ebook licensing with which Controlled Digital Lending directly competes.”