Other Barks and Bites for Friday, December 19: UK High Court Defines Scope of RAND Obligations; Senators Welch and Blackburn Introduce Copyright Reform Bill; and Global Value of Music Copyright Doubles Since 2015

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This week in Other Barks & Bites: Will Page’s Global Value of Music Copyright report shows that industry revenues have doubled since 2015 despite slowing growth as pandemic impacts are no longer felt; the Federal Circuit rules that it lacks jurisdiction to hear an appeal of an $8 million bond set under an Idaho state law prohibiting bad faith patent assertions; Micron expects the market for high-bandwidth memory chips to reach $100 billion by 2018; Senators Peter Welch (D-VT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduce the Visual Artists Copyright Reform Act into the U.S. Senate; the UK High Court issues a landmark decision finding that Nokia’s offer of a license to video decoding SEPs conditioned upon entering arbitration does not meet RAND licensing obligations; and the EU’s highest court okays a national procedural rule on copyright litigation requiring the participation of co-holders of copyright in infringement litigation involving those works.

Bites

CAFC Nixes Apple’s Appeal of PTAB Loss – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Friday, December 19, upheld a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) finding for patent owner Smart Mobile Technologies, affirming the Board’s decision that Apple had not shown Smart Mobile’s claims to be unpatentable. The court agreed with the PTAB that Apple and Smart Mobile agreed upon the adopted claim construction and that substantial evidence supported its finding that the challenged claims had not been shown to be obvious over the prior art.

UK High Court Awards Interim License to Nokia’s Video Decoding SEPs in Ruling – On Thursday, December 18, the United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice issued a ruling granting applications for an interim license to patents (SEPs) owned by Finnish telecommunications company Nokia covering video decoding technologies that have been declared as essential under the H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC standards developed by the International Telecommunication Union to implementers Acer, Hisense and ASUS. In giving its first substantive decision on the scope of reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing obligations, the UK High Court rejected Nokia’s contention that its good faith negotiations met its RAND obligations, finding that Nokia was required to make an offer capable of acceptance by the implementers and not offering a license conditional upon entering arbitration, and awarded an interim license to Nokia’s SEPs at a rate to be adjusted at a later RAND trial.

CAFC Sidesteps Appeal of $8M Bond Issued Under Idaho’s Bad Faith Assertion Law – On Thursday, December 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in Micron Technology, Inc. v. Longhorn IP LLC dismissing Longhorn’s appeal of an $8 million bond entered by the District of Idaho under the Idaho Bad Faith Assertions of Patent Infringement Act, which allows courts to award such bonds that must be paid before the patent infringement claim can be litigated if the court finds a reasonable likelihood that the patent assertion is made in bad faith. The Federal Circuit found that it lacked jurisdiction to hear Longhorn’s appeal as the bond decision was not a final judgment, it did not have immediate and irreparable consequences to support interlocutory review, it was not separate from the merits of the action to support jurisdiction under the collateral order doctrine, and no mandamus jurisdiction because Longhorn did not apply for waiver of the bond at the district court. 

Senators Welch, Blackburn’s VACRA Would Create New Photo Registration, Annual Copyright Subscription –  On Thursday, December 18, U.S. Senators Peter Welch (D-VT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) announced that they introduced the Visual Artists Copyright Reform Act (VACRA) into the Senate to ease the copyright registration process and reduce costs for high-volume visual artists. If enacted, the bill would direct the Register of Copyrights to establish a process by which a single author can register a group of up to 3,000 photos through a single application, adopt a deferred registration option for those applications, and establish an “all-you-can-eat” annual subscription for copyright registrations for pictorial, graphic and sculptural works.

CJEU Okays France’s Procedural Rule Requiring Copyright Co-Holder Participation in Suit – On Thursday, December 18, the Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) issued a judgment finding that EU law does not preclude EU member states from establishing procedural rules that would require all co-holders of copyrights to a cinematographic work to participate in copyright litigation regarding that work in order for the proceeding to be admissible. The ruling comes after a question was referred to the CJEU from the Court of Paris regarding the compatibility of EU law with such a national rule stemming from copyright infringement litigation over a series of five films made between 1967 and 1974 by French film director Claude Chabrol and French screenwriter Paul Gégauff following a defense raised by film distributor Panoceanic Films SA that the action requires the participation of all copyright holders or their successors in title.

Global Value of Music Copyright Doubles in Past Decade, But Pandemic Boost Slows – On Wednesday, December 15, economist Will Page, formerly Chief Economist of Spotify and PRS for Music, issued the latest version of his annual Global Value of Music Copyright report showing that the worldwide value of music copyright reached $47.2 billion in 2024, doubling in value over the past decade. However, that total represented only a 5.2% increase from music copyright’s global value in 2023 with growth slowing in large part due to 2024 being the first year in which the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts were not felt, which had caused streaming revenues to surge while decimating revenues earned for public performances.

Only 3% of Respondents Back UK’s Preferred Data Mining Exception in AI Consultation – On Monday, December 15, several British government agencies including the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) issued a progress statement pursuant to the Data (Use and Access) Act of 2025 including a report on responses received by the UKIPO during its consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence, which closed this past February. Of the 11,500 responses received by the UKIPO during the consultation, only 3% supported a data mining exception that allows rights holders to reserve their rights, the government’s preferred option for potential changes to UK copyright law to support artificial intelligence development, while 88% of responses supported an option to strengthen copyright law by requiring licenses for all uses of copyrighted content to train AI models.

Barks

Copyright Office Creates New Group Registration for Two-Dimensional Artwork – On Friday, December 19, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a final rule creating a new group registration option, Group Registration for Two-Dimensional Artwork (GR2D), which allows artists to register up to 20 two-dimensional artworks that are published within a one-year period, with the final rule taking effect on February 17, 2026.

EPO, OECD Joint Study Shows Five-Fold Increase in Quantum Patenting Since 2015 – On Wednesday, December 17, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the results of a joint study into quantum computing patent application filing activity, which showed that international patent families for quantum inventions increased five-fold since 2015 thanks in large part to 16-fold growth in quantum communication patent filings over that same period. 

Nintendo Wins Rare Damages Order for Controller Patent Infringement in Germany – On Tuesday, December 16, European patent litigation firm Bardehle Pagenberg announced that it had secured a favorable ruling for Nintendo in a patent infringement case involving game controllers for the Wii console, including an order by the Mannheim Regional Court that defendant BigBen Interactive must pay €4 million in damages and another €3 million in legal costs, an award that Bardehle Pagenberg notes is rarely issued by German courts.

Judge Olguin Finds Lada Gaga’s Mayhem Tour, Album Artistically Relevant Under Rogers – On Monday, December 15, U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin of the Central District of California issued an order  denying plaintiff Lost International’s motion for preliminary injunction against Stefani Joanne Germanotta, the American pop star who performs as Lady Gaga, after finding that the title of Germontta’s Mayhem tour and album is artistically relevant and does not explicitly mislead consumers and thus Lost International’s trademark claims cannot be sustained under the Rogers test.

Access Advance’s Via Acquisition Leads to HEVC, VVC Video Technology Patent Pool – On Monday, December 15, technology licensing company Access Advance announced that it had purchased a portfolio of HEVC and VVC video technology patents from Via Licensing Alliance, which Access Advance will use to create a patent pool for licensing HEVC and VVC technologies across all implementations.

Eric Ryder Files Another Copyright Suit Against Avatar Movie Franchise – On Monday, December 15, animator Eric Ryder filed a lawsuit in the Central District of California against filmmaker James Cameron and several film production companies involved with the 2022 film Avatar: The Way of Water, alleging new acts of copying a highly specific narrative mechanism involving an animal-based substance that extends human life that Ryder created for his work KRZ, which he claimed was copied in a previous lawsuit targeting the first Avatar film that was dismissed by the court.

This Week on Wall Street

Micron Bullish on High-Bandwidth Memory Market While Reporting Big Earnings Beat – On Thursday, December 18, chipmaker Micron Technology reported earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal year, beating analyst expectations on earnings per share ($4.78 vs. $3.95 expected) and quarterly revenue ($13.64 billion vs. $12.84 billion expected) and adding during an analyst call that the company expects the market for high-bandwidth memory chips to reach $100 billion by 2028.

VC Firm Reportedly Backs Out of Oracle Project for 1GW Data Center in Michigan – On Wednesday, December 17, Financial Times reported that venture capital firm Blue Owl Capital, one of the largest financial partners on data center projects planned by cloud computing giant Oracle, has decided not to invest in a planned 1-gigawatt data center for construction in Saline Township, MI, with strict leasing terms and concerns over potential project delays being cited by sources close to the decision.