Publishers Sue WeLib for Copyright Infringement — The new lawsuit comes quickly on the heels of a default judgment against similar pirate site Anna’s Archive. According to the complaint, the illicit site boasts over 43 million books and 98 million papers, attracts over 80,000 active monthly users, and offers premium access starting at $7 month.
The Real-World Implications of the Supreme Court’s Cox Decision — Does the recent Supreme Court decision in Cox v. Sony upset the balance Congress struck between protecting authors and creators online and limiting exposure to liability for intermediaries? Keith Kupferschmid thinks it might, and writes here that “Congress should be watching carefully to ensure bad actors don’t exploit Cox.”
Reconstructing the Author, Not Re-Privatising the Text: The EU concept of work after Institutul G. Călinescu — A discussion of a recent decision from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) which considered a dispute over a critical edition of a public domain work, “involving collation, corrections, additions, comments and a critical apparatus.” The CJEU examined the issue through the lens of the EU’s originality threshold and, according to the author of this article, “consolidates the autonomous EU concept of work, applies the personality-based originality standard to derivative scholarly production, and sensibly permits the critical edition to be assessed as an integrated whole.”
Japan passes copyright reform giving performers and record companies royalties when recordings play in public, including overseas — The nation was one of the small number of OECD countries that did not extend protection to performers and labels for the public performance of sound recordings in public venues. With this legislative fix, Japaneses performers and labels will not only begin to receive royalties for such performances in their own country, but also begin to receive reciprocal payments from other countries where their works are publicly performed.
Journalistic Work Must Be Paid, but the Public’s Right to Information Will Still Be Guaranteed — Indonesia’s Press Council recently called attention to the sustainability of that country’s journalism and media ecosystem and proposed that any use of journalistic works for commercial purposes must be licensed and subject to royalty payments as part of the revision of Indonesia’s Copyright Law. As elsewhere around the world, the emergence of AI has increased pressure on the industry.