Posts Tagged: "copyrights"

You may have heard that on January 1, 2022, Winnie-the-Pooh and the other characters from the Hundred Acre Wood are now in the public domain. But did you know that not all of Christopher Robin’s friends are treated the same in the eyes of copyright law? The characters have multiple authors, including A.A. Milne who first published Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, and The Walt Disney Company, which brought the stories to the screen. Milne’s characters from his 1926 books entered the public domain at the beginning of this year, but Disney’s iteration remains copyright protected for now.

If you follow Reese Witherspoon on Twitter, you may notice she has been tweeting about non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, a lot. She currently features an NFT as her Twitter profile picture (abbreviated “pfp” for those in the know). In October 2021, Witherspoon became a partner in an NFT art collection called World of Women, or WoW, which was created and illustrated by the artist Yam Karkai. Through an auction-style bidding process, the WoW collection is currently available on OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces. As of publication, an individual WoW NFT auction starts at around 7 Ethereum (ETH), the cryptocurrency used to purchase on OpenSea, which currently equates to approximately USD 20,000.

Publishers scored a win yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland when the court granted their request for a preliminary injunction enjoining enforcement of the Maryland Act, which essentially calls for compulsory licensing of electronic literary works to libraries on “reasonable terms”. The law went into effect on January 1, 2022. The lawsuit was brought by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) against the state of Maryland and charged that the Maryland Act was preempted by the U.S. Copyright Act. The Maryland Act requires publishers to 1) offer to license copyrighted electronic literary products, such as eBooks and digital audiobooks, to public libraries, and (2) to ensure the terms of such licenses are fair. The goal was to avoid up-charging and stringent licensing restrictions on libraries.

The ability of copyright owners to experiment with different marketing strategies is fundamental to copyright law. Indeed, the U.S. Copyright Act promotes the public good by granting exclusive rights to copyright owners that incentivize the creation and dissemination of new works on their own terms. These exclusive rights are the reason why copyright owners invest time, energy, and money into creating new works, and why they have a chance to recoup expenses and perhaps make a profit. The Copyright Act has always celebrated the right and ability of copyright owners to choose whether, how, when, and where their works are distributed to the public. And under our dual system of government, where federal law reigns supreme, it is well-settled that the states are powerless to interfere in ways that conflict with the nationwide scheme established by Congress. Nevertheless, there is an alarming new trend of states pursuing laws that would force publishers, many of whom are also authors, to grant licenses to public libraries for access to their digital works, such as eBooks and audiobooks.

How does it make any sense that fixing something, which you bought and paid for, is a violation of the manufacturer’s copyright? It’s not, and here’s why. Fixing things is legal under multiple sections of Copyright Law. Repair doesn’t modify books, music, videos or licensed software, so it’s absurd that copyright law is even being used to restrict repair.

On January 13, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) will hear oral argument in SAS Institute, Inc. v. World Programming, Ltd., a copyright infringement suit with far-reaching consequences for American creativity. SAS is a North Carolina-based software company, well known for its highly successful analytics software. World Programming, Ltd (WPL) is a British software company that, by its own admission, set out to “clone” SAS’s creative and popular software. The litigation that followed has been lengthy and stretched from North Carolina to the U.K. and back. While WPL largely prevailed in its home court, the litigation in North Carolina resulted in a verdict that WPL engaged in fraud and unfair and deceptive trade practices. The litigation in North Carolina did not decide the copyright infringement issues, so SAS was forced to file a separate suit, this time in Texas. But the judge in that case made a critical error, which is now on appeal.

A recent recommendation by the U.S. Copyright Office allowing for the bypassing of technological protection measures (TPMs) in medical devices for purposes of repair, maintenance and service has been adopted and immediately put into effect. This is bad news for patient safety. At a time when we’re loudly and publicly debating the relative merits of the Build Back Better Act, the U.S. Copyright Office’s announcement, deep inside the Federal Register and written in very user unfriendly dense government jargon, landed not with a bang, but with a whimper. On purpose. Hiding in plain sight. This terrible ruling offered without a comment period or any other appeals mechanism, will have a profoundly negative impact on America’s public health.

As of today, the 2022 Supreme Court docket is light on intellectual property cases, with the Court having granted review of only one copyright case. However, one other major case lurks in the background on an issue—patent ineligibility—upon which the Supreme Court has already demonstrated its interest. These two cases are examined in greater detail below.

Last week, IPWatchdog selected five significant patent developments in Europe, examining what has happened this year and what can be expected in 2022. Here, we review five of the top trademark and copyright decisions and legislative changes across Europe and what’s coming up in the new year. One of the most significant trademark decisions of 2021 came in a case over Hasbro’s EUTM registration for MONOPOLY. The registration, for goods and services in classes 9, 16, 28 and 41, was declared invalid by the EUIPO Second Board of Appeal on the basis that Hasbro had acted in bad faith. On April 21, the EU General Court upheld that decision.

One of the greatest attributes of copyright law is the never-ending abundance of exciting new developments, including those in Congress, the courts, and at the Copyright Office. On the surface, copyright seems straightforward in that it advances the public good by securing property rights to authors. But underneath this simple veneer lies centuries of debate about how best to balance the rights of authors with the public interest, where each distinct issue presents a veritable rabbit hole of metaphysical distinctions. For the copyright connoisseur, keeping up with the latest events can be an exhausting endeavor, though the thrill of solving new puzzles makes it intellectually rewarding. Thankfully, one need not be a member of the copyright cognoscenti to appreciate the major developments in copyright law this past year. From the Supreme Court’s decision in Google v. Oracle to the implementation of a small copyright claims tribunal to attempts to rein in state infringements, 2021 has certainly provided many wonderful events worth highlighting.

In Part I of this series, we discussed the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) case against Everalbum as just one example where companies may be required to remove data from their machine learning models (or shut down if unable to do so). Following are some additional pitfalls to note. A. Evolving privacy and data usage restrictions Legislators at the international, federal,…

The Andy Warhol Foundation has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to review a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit holding  that Andy Warhol’s Prince Series did not constitute fair use of Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph. The Second Circuit held in March that “the district court erred in its assessment and application of the fair-use factors and the works in question do not qualify as fair use.” The Court of Appeals further concluded that the Prince Series works were substantially similar to the Goldsmith Photograph “as a matter of law.” The Supreme Court petition argues that “the Second Circuit’s decision…creates a circuit split and casts a cloud of legal uncertainty over an entire genre of visual art.”

On November 30, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) wrote a letter  addressed to President Joe Biden asking Biden to withdraw the nomination of Gigi Sohn, a co-founder of the open Internet advocacy group Public Knowledge, to serve as a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Tillis is one of a growing number of Republican lawmakers who are speaking out strongly against Biden’s nomination of Sohn, who previously served as a senior staffer to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler during the Obama Administration. Tillis’ letter to President Biden certainly pulls no punches in assessing the likely impact of Sohn’s nomination on copyright owners especially. “[Sohn] is a radical open-content activist with no respect for intellectual property rights,” Tillis wrote. “As an activist, Ms. Sohn has consistently worked against commonsense measures that would crack down on illegal piracy. She has even testified before Congress that ‘piracy has absolutely no effect on [music] prices whatsoever.’”

On November 15, Houston-area aerial photographer Jim Olive Photography filed a petition for writ of certiorari asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up an appeal from the Texas Supreme Court, which had denied Olive’s copyright claims against the University of Houston System on sovereign immunity grounds. In the petition, Olive requests that the Supreme Court simply grant certiorari, vacate the lower decision and remand for reconsideration of the issues in light of the Court’s decision this summer in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, which was issued just a few days after the Texas Supreme Court ruled against Olive.

Picture this: A paparazzo snaps an unauthorized photo of a celebrity and sells it to a media outlet, making a tidy profit. As unfair as that may sound to the celebrity, most stars are well-aware of the established law that a photograph—even an unwanted one—can be monetized by the paparazzi. The law also is clear that, absent permission, the celebrity cannot monetize the photograph herself. Photographs, like other works of art, can be copyrighted by the paparazzi and, as with copyright, the owner possesses the famed “bundle of rights,” including the right to prohibit others from displaying the photograph for money.