Posts in Copyright

The meeting will now be held on December 12, 2013 from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. ET at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, VA and the period for post-meeting comments has been extended. The deadline for filing pre-meeting comments is November 13, 2013.

The meeting will be held on October 30, 2013, in Washington, D.C. The IPTF intends to hold the public meeting in the Amphitheatre of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. The Green Paper, the IPTF proposes five copyright policy issues to address, and the meeting will provide an opportunity for discussion that will be used to formulate the IPTF’s views and recommendations regarding copyright policy. The five issues include: (1) establishing a multistakeholder dialogue on improving the operation of the notice and takedown system for removing infringing content from the Internet under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); (2) the legal framework for the creation of remixes; (3) the relevance and scope of the first sale doctrine in the digital environment; (4) the application of statutory damages in the contexts of individual file sharers and of secondary liability for large-scale infringement; and (5) the appropriate role for the government, if any, to help improve the online licensing environment, including access to comprehensive databases of rights information.

As of the writing of this article the USPTO website remains up and appears to be fully functional. So if the USPTO can keep its website full of publicly available, free information up during a government shutdown why did the Copyright Office need to remove everything from its website and pretend that this is required by a government shutdown? For crying out loud they have the funds to keep the website live on the Internet and post this ridiculous notice.

Recently I was driving around between appointments and flipping through radio stations on Sirius XM. I came across a song that at first I thought was the summer hit by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams – Blurred Lines. But that wasn’t the song at all, rather is was Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give it Up. I knew it would only be time before reading about some kind of settlement between Marvin Gaye’s family and Thicke/Williams, but Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams suing the family of Marvin Gaye asserting that they are not infringing the copyright in Got to Give it Up would be hilarious if it weren’t so utterly ridiculous.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Commerce today released a green paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy (Green Paper) to advance discussion on a set of policy issues critical to economic growth. The Green Paper discusses the goals of maintaining an appropriate balance between rights and exceptions as the law continues to be updated; ensuring…

Doctors and researchers are quietly acquiescing to the demands of those asserting copyright in medical tests, for fear of becoming entwined in lengthy and expensive legal proceedings that could result in a costly judgment. Such fear could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it prompts the creation of an industry norm for licensing medical tests. Courts and legislators have been known to defer to industry custom, even when they harbor some doubts about the wisdom of the underlying logic. The challenging thread running through all of this is that medical tests of this kind stand at the boundary between patent and copyright, raising the mind-bending question of how to conceptualize a process, which is the purview of patent, when that process consists of nothing more than words, which is normally the purview of copyright.

Copyright is important in all forms of media because it provides legal ownership over the work someone produces. This allows the author, artist, etc. control over how their work is used. Without copyright laws, content could be stolen from one creator and used by someone else; thus, a profit could be made by someone other than the creator from content that they put no effort into. Since it is the copyright holder’s responsibility to ensure that a copyright has not been infringed upon, it is vital to keep a close eye on your content and how it is used by others on the internet.

As briefly discussed above, Peteski brought this action against Deadspin because Deadspin copied the Dr. Phil show that had an exclusive interview with Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Tuiasosopo is the brains (and voice) behind the hoax that was played on Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o. What was the hoax? A fake online girlfriend for the football player. On the first part of Dr. Phil’s two-part show, Tuiasosopo talked about how the hoax worked, and toward the end of the show, Dr. Phil asked Tuiasosopo to demonstrate the telephone voice that he used. Tuiasosopo acted like he didn’t want to do it; so the end of that first episode was “the cliffhanger”–can Dr. Phil get Tuiasosopo to “do the voice” on the next episode?

The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) recently announced that it is joining the other cast of characters who have filed a class action complaint against Google, claiming (as the other plaintiffs have) that Google’s “Google Book Search” program violates the copyrights of several photographers and visual artists. The other plaintiffs include individuals Leif Skoogfors, Al Satterwhite, Morton Beebe, Ed Kashi, John Schmelzer, Simms Taback and Gail Kuenstler Living Trust, Leland Bobbe, John Francis Ficara and David Moser, and associations The American Society of Media Photographers, the Graphic Artists Guild, the Picture Archive Council of America, the North American Nature Photography Association, the Professional Photographers of America, and American Photographic Artists.

Over 850 delegates from more than 100 countries are attending the three-day meeting from 24 to 26 April that is being chaired by the World Customs Organization (WCO) and hosted by Turkish Customs with the support of the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey. United around a common goal to stop the trade in counterfeit and pirated products, the organizers and participants aim to share experiences and devise strategies to counteract this global phenomenon and the harm these goods can have on consumer health and safety, as well as intellectual property rights (IPR).

Firefly was a briefly lived television show that aired on Fox in 2002. It only lasted for a few months before Fox yanked the plug (a most egregious decision that I shall never EVER forgive them for). In the years that followed, Firefly – the best space western you didn’t watch – gained a cult following that gives Trekkies a run for their money. In one of the episodes, the character Jayne Cobb receives a care package from his mother containing a homemade orange and yellow poofball hat. The hat wasn’t a focal point of the episode but fans of the show, known as Browncoats, can easily be identified at conventions by wearing this most cunning hat. Now FOX wants unauthorized sellers to cease and desist.

The Copyright Office has told Congress that the copyright laws are showing their age and need Congressional attention. With the prospect of comprehensive copyright reform on the horizon the familiar battle lines are being drawn between those who absolutely need copyright protection to survive and create versus those who are a part of the infringement culture. Without a solution to the growing culture of infringement original creation of copyrightable works will continue to experience downward pressure, which will ultimately curtail original creation by all those other than corporate conglomerates that have the resources to police and enforce. Do we really want to see the market squeeze out independent content creators due to copyright laws that don’t function given the new age technological realities?

Tuesday, in Kirtsaeng v. John W. Wiley and Sons, Inc., the Supreme Court held 6-3 that the first sale doctrine of Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act trumps a copyright owner’s right under Section 602(a)(1) to bar importation of copies when they were made and sold outside the United States. The Court appropriately rejected a cramped geographic reading of “lawfully made under this title,” but largely gutted the right of copyright owners under Section 602(a)(1) to bar importation of copies. Along the way, the Court unequivocally adopted international copyright exhaustion without a lick of statutory support or evidence of Congressional intent. Given the Court’s willingness to find international exhaustion even in the face of statutory language limiting parallel imports under the Copyright Act, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the Court fully embrace international patent exhaustion in the future, since there’s even less statutory basis to bar its adoption.

Opponents of effective copyright laws are attempting to leverage the success of the petition into a wide-ranging assault on section 1201 of the DMCA — and, no doubt eventually, on copyright law itself. Along with Khanna, a coalition consisting of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Mozilla, Reddit, and others have launched fixthedmca.org, the ultimate goal of which is to repeal section 1201 in its entirety. These efforts are misguided. Section 1201 is not only required by international obligations, it has also enabled a variety of successful business models — from DVDs to Netflix to Pandora — that have benefited consumers and creators alike in a digital age.

After receiving Royal Assent on June 29, 2012, the provisions of Bill C-11 came into force on November 7, 2012. Titled the Copyright Modernization Act, it has garnered the nickname “Canada’s SOPA” by some media outlets (1), referring to the highly contentious Stop Online Piracy Act bill introduced in the US House of Representatives that led to both physical and digital(2) protests. Yet despite such bold claims, the Canadian amendment to the copyright act is a largely innocuous piece of legislation that falls in line with its stated objectives.