The EU’s 16-step digital single-market (DSM) strategy for promoting pan-European e-commerce is likely to affect U.S. copyright stakeholders and has the potential to further spur the U.S. House Judiciary Committee to advance its burgeoning Copyright Act review, but the extent of that effect will remain unclear until the EU takes more concrete action on the proposals, copyright stakeholders told us in interviews. The DSM strategy released Wednesday proposes harmonizing copyright laws across all 28 EU member nations, particularly as they relate to third-party websites’ dissemination of copyrighted work and enforcement against “commercial-scale” copyright infringement. The EU proposal is also getting considerable attention from U.S. telecom stakeholders (see 1505060038).
ICANN's cross-community working group on ICANN accountability (CCWG-Accountability) released its draft accountability proposal, which recommends that ICANN community members have additional power to influence decisions made by the ICANN board. CCWG-Accountability has been developing its recommendations on a parallel track with work on the ICANN Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship working group (CWG-Stewardship), which released a revised draft proposal for an IANA transition plan in late April (see 1504280060). The CCWG-Accountability and CWG-Stewardship proposals are now “increasingly and effectively reliant” on one another’s recommendations to be effective, said CWG-Stewardship Co-Chairman Jonathan Robinson during an ICANN webinar Wednesday.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit affirmed two of U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote’s decisions related to Pandora’s license for American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) works for 2011-2015. Cote had issued a summary judgment in New York in September 2013 that Pandora had the right to perform all compositions in the ASCAP repertoire (see report in the Sept. 19, 2013, issue). Cote subsequently set a “headline rate” in March 2014 of 1.85 percent of revenue for Pandora’s license for ASCAP works (see report in the March 17, 2014, issue).
New America's Open Technology Institute (OTI) urged the U.S. Copyright Office to disregard arguments by BSA/The Software Alliance, the Software Information Industry Association and other opponents of proposed exemptions to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 1201 for software and medical device security research. The proposed software and medical device security research exemptions are among 27 proposed exemptions that the CO is considering as part of its sixth triennial rulemaking process for Section 1201, which prohibits the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs). Other proposed exemptions include one allowing resellers to unlock eligible cellphones on behalf of a selling customer or on the reseller’s own behalf and one that would allow smart TV owners to circumvent TPMs that prevent the installation of user-supplied software. Comments on the proposed exemptions, which were due Friday, were limited to responses to previous filings. CO officials told us they anticipated the comments would be available Tuesday, but none had been posted online at our deadline.
The Copyright Office issued a final order Monday that copyright royalty judges (CRJs) have jurisdiction to clarify the meaning of regulations included in royalty regulations for pre-existing satellite digital audio radio services (SDARS) for the period between 2007 and 2012 and that their jurisdiction didn’t expire with those SDARS I rules. The CRJs issued new royalty rates and regulations for satellite radio in 2013 to cover 2013 to 2017 (SDARS II). SoundExchange petitioned the CRJs in November to clarify the definition of gross revenue under SDARS I as part of its lawsuit against SiriusXM for allegedly underpaying royalties beginning in 2013 "by improperly excluding some of its revenue from its gross revenue calculations," including revenue from pre-1972 sound recordings, said the CO order. The CRJs sought a CO ruling to determine that the CRJs had authority to clarify the definition of gross revenue under SDARS I, the office said in Monday's Federal Register.
Broadcasters and wireless carriers have substantially shifted their position on spectrum sharing in recent years, particularly after the AWS-3 auction process, industry executives said Thursday at an FCBA event. Executives compared their shift to the November 2013 joint agreement between the Department of Defense (DOD) and NAB on spectrum sharing, which they noted has been widely seen as a major shift in DOD’s attitude to spectrum sharing. The DOD-NAB agreement involved DOD's agreeing to partially vacate the 1755-1780 MHz band, relocate affected systems to the 2025-2110 MHz band and accommodate broadcasters’ needs on the 2025 MHz band (see report in the Nov. 26, 2013, issue).
China and India will remain among the 13 countries on the U.S. Trade Representative’s priority watch list this year for copyright and other IP rights violations, the USTR office said Thursday in its annual special 301 report. China and India have improved their IP policies, but other new policies have become a cause for concern, said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Robert Holleyman on a conference call with reporters. Other nations on the priority watch list are Algeria, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela. The report placed another 24 countries on the USTR’s lower-tier watch list: Barbados, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Greece, Guatemala, Jamaica, Lebanon, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Romania, Tajikistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The 2014 special 301 report included 10 countries on the priority watch list and 27 on the regular watch list (see 1405020082).
Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante urged the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday to detach the Copyright Office from the Library of Congress and make it an independent agency, saying legislators should move this Congress to decide how to restructure the CO. Pallante has backed making the CO an independent agency and that suggestion received backing from many members of House Judiciary during a Feb. 26 committee hearing (see 1502260057). House Judiciary ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich., billed Wednesday's session as the committee's final hearing on its two-year-long Copyright Act review. House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said the committee will now reach out to all copyright stakeholders on the myriad issues the Copyright Act review identified.
The ICANN Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship cross-community working group’s (CWG-Stewardship) revised proposal for an IANA transition plan is an improvement over CWG-Stewardship’s original proposal, but several portions require additional work, industry stakeholders told us. The revised plan, released last week, recommends ICANN create a legally separate subsidiary, called the Post-Transition IANA (PTI), to handle the IANA transition. An ICANN-selected board would govern PTI, while the Customer Standing Committee and the IANA Function Review Team (IFRT) would handle current federal oversight functions, CWG-Stewardship said in the proposal. The IFRT could propose completely separating PTI from ICANN under extraordinary circumstances, the revised proposal said (see 1504270053). Stakeholders had said CWG-Stewardship’s earlier proposal was too bureaucratic and lacked sufficient clarity (see 1412240048).
A recent hacking of the FCBA’s website underscores the importance of lawyers improving their cybersecurity, said industry attorneys and security experts during an FCBA event Monday. Lerman Senter attorney Deborah Salons, a member of FCBA’s Privacy and Data Security Committee, said she discovered Thursday that FCBA’s website was hacked after a friend alerted her. FCBA’s standard website had been replaced by images and music indicative of a connection with the terrorist group ISIS, though there’s no official confirmation that ISIS or an affiliate was responsible for the incident, Salons said. It’s likely the attack isn’t attributable to ISIS but instead to a group “just spreading the word,” said Wade Woolwine, cybersecurity firm Rapid7 manager-strategic services.