Participants in a House Judiciary Committee copyright roundtable in Nashville Tuesday rallied around high-level concepts like equitable royalties compensation for songwriters and performers, but couldn’t agree on specific solutions, industry stakeholders who attended the roundtable said in subsequent interviews. House Judiciary had set the roundtable as part of a planned “listening tour” on copyright issues to follow up on earlier hearings related to the committee’s Copyright Act review (see 1509110063). The Nashville roundtable was intended to focus on music licensing issues, with participants largely coming from music publishers and other well-established industry entities.
The Copyright Office handed Pandora a procedural victory late Friday in the Internet service's quest to have the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) consider its past deals with independent music label rights consortium Merlin and independent label Naxos as possible benchmarks for CRB’s 2016-2020 webcasting rate-setting proceeding. The 2009 Webcaster Settlement Act (WSA) doesn’t prohibit the admissibility of direct licenses like Pandora’s Merlin/Naxos deals that are clearly influenced by WSA terms, Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante said in the ruling. Copyright royalty judges are normally barred from considering alternative rate structures authorized by WSA in rate-setting proceedings since they aren’t set by CRJs, but direct licenses don’t fall under that prohibition, Pallante said.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. District Court in Miami was correct when it ruled in 2014 that blogger Irina Chevaldina's use of an unflattering photo of Miami Heat minority owner Raanan Katz in a blog post critical of Katz's business practices constitutes fair use. Katz had sued Chevaldina for copyright infringement, prompting outcry from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups. Katz had also sued Google for not complying with a takedown notice related to the photo but later dropped the search engine company from the lawsuit (see 1505080057). A three-judge 11th Circuit panel -- Judges Susan Black, Gerard Tjoflat and Charles Wilson -- affirmed the 2014 ruling by Magistrate Judge Chris McAliley in Katz v. Chevaldina, with the panel saying Thursday that use of the photo of Katz in Chevaldina's blog posts “was of a primarily educational, rather than commercial, character. Chevaldina unabashedly criticized and commented on the dealings of Katz, his businesses, and his lawyers. Chevaldina’s blog posts sought to warn and educate others about the alleged nefariousness of Katz, and she made no money from her use of the photo.” Chevaldina's use of the photo can also be considered transformative, because “in the context of the blog post’s surrounding commentary, she used Katz’s purportedly 'ugly' and 'compromising' appearance to ridicule and satirize his character,” the 11th Circuit panel said. It admonished Katz for “improper” motivations for pursuing his case. “Instead of using the law for its intended purposes of fostering ideas and expression, Plaintiff obtained the photograph’s copyright solely for the purpose of suppressing Defendant’s free speech,” the 11th Circuit said. “People who go around trying to buy up bad pictures of themselves in the hope they can suppress them won't succeed,” said Center for Individual Rights General Counsel Michael Rosman, who represented Chevaldina at the 11th Circuit, in a blog post. Katz lawyer Alan Kluger didn't comment. EFF, which filed an amicus brief on Chevaldina's behalf, said the 11th Circuit's ruling is significant because “although copyright law is frequently misused as a tool to censor speech, it rarely makes it into court to be challenged. And here, the court stopped the plaintiff in his tracks.”
NTIA should assess the planned transfer of oversight of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions to ICANN based on concrete frameworks, GAO recommended Friday. House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and other House Commerce Committee Republicans ordered the report to aid NTIA in determining its criteria for evaluating the IANA transition. The agency's evaluation should be based on frameworks that “incorporate leading practices to help organizations obtain reasonable assurance that their goals and objectives will be met or that they will meet certain requirements,” GAO said.
Federal lawmakers and regulators should be careful to regulate bitcoin and other applications that use blockchain distributed database technology by function, rather than lumping all blockchain-based applications together as currencies requiring financial regulation, stakeholders said Friday during a Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee event. Federal agencies are becoming increasingly interested in regulating bitcoin, with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission defining bitcoin and other virtual currencies Thursday as commodities in its settlement of charges against bitcoin exchange Coinflip for operating a commodities exchange without complying with agency regulations.
Stakeholders in the current debate over a possible revamp of U.S. copyright policies can draw encouragement and lessons from the process of creating and passing the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), said stakeholders in the DMCA process and the current copyright debate Thursday during an American University Washington College of Law (WCL) event. “There's nothing new under the sun” in legislative efforts to revamp portions of the Copyright Act or other current copyright rulemakings, said Jonathan Band of the law firm policybandwidth. “All of the issues and debates that we had” in the 1990s “are still ongoing. They sometimes take on a different coloration, but they're basically the same essential issues.” Current copyright policy focuses include the House Judiciary Committee's ongoing Copyright Act review, the Copyright Office's triennial DMCA Section 1201 exemptions rulemaking and the Department of Justice's ongoing review of consent decrees against the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI).
Tech-sector stakeholders urged the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday to reject the federal government's proposal for an exemption to some provisions in a possible revamp of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, with Google Director-Law Enforcement and Information Security Richard Delgado telling the committee that agencies' objections to current revamp proposals are ultimately “really just distractions.” Department of Justice, FTC and SEC officials continued to oppose provisions in current ECPA revamp bills like the ECPA Amendments Act (S-356) that they believe will hinder law enforcement efforts. The Wednesday hearing was Senate Judiciary's first on ECPA legislation since 2011, though the committee advanced an earlier version of the ECPA Amendments Act in 2013 (see report in the April 26, 2013, issue). Senate Judiciary ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., previously proposed attaching S-356's language as an amendment to the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (S-754).
Two recent disputes over the use of popular 1980s rock songs during Republican-led rallies are increasing the visibility of perennial issues with music licensing for political events, stakeholders said in interviews. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe responded via Twitter to oppose the use of “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” at a Sept. 9 rally against the U.S.’s Iran nuclear deal that involved GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.
ICANN’s board proposed its alternative for guaranteeing enhanced powers to the ICANN community Friday. The nonprofit told the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability’s (CCWG-Accountability) that the board’s “Multistakeholder Enforcement Mechanism” (MEM) would deliver “on the objective of the community to create an enforcement mechanism.” CCWG-Accountability had been collecting comments through Saturday on its revised proposal for changes to ICANN’s accountability mechanisms, which include giving the ICANN community the power to veto board-passed budgets and to recall board members. The ICANN board has repeatedly raised concerns about CCWG-Accountability’s proposed single member model for enforcing the proposed new community powers (see 1509030025).
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) “requires copyright holders to consider fair use before sending a takedown notification,” in Lenz v. Universal, affirming a U.S. District Court ruling against motions for a summary judgment in the case. “Failure to do so raises a triable issue as to whether the copyright holder formed a subjective good faith belief that the use was not authorized by law,” said Judge Richard Tallman in the three-judge panel’s opinion Monday. Judges Mary Murguia and Milan Smith also heard the case.