The Patent and Trademark Office’s 2018-22 plan Thursday prioritizes strengthening the PTO. Director Andrei Iancu's goals include "optimizing patent quality and timeliness" and "trademark quality and timeliness," and "domestic and global leadership to improve IP policy, enforcement, and protection worldwide.”
U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken in Manhattan ordered sealed Wednesday an unspecified contract complaint that LG Electronics filed against St. Lawrence Communications, owner of patents germane to the adaptive multi-rate wideband (AMR-WB) speech codec for cellphones, court records (in Pacer) show. SLC filed 10 patent infringement complaints against various carriers and smartphone OEMs since 2014, all but one in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, records show. In a November 2014 complaint (in Pacer), SLC accused LG of violating five patents on AMR-WB-enabled HD Voice technology. LG countersued (in Pacer) in August 2015 seeking declaratory judgments that it was innocent of infringement and accusing SLC of licensing its patents on terms that weren't fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory. LG and SLC appeared to settle that dispute in January 2016, records show. Neither company commented Wednesday.
MPEG LA continues to "move forward" toward forming an ATSC 3.0 patent pool, "with hopes of having a pool license out early next year," emailed spokesperson Tom O'Reilly Tuesday. More than a dozen companies expressed interest in joining a 3.0 pool, O'Reilly told us earlier this year (see 1802170001). MPEG LA announced a call for 3.0-essential patents, the first step in the patent pool formation process, nearly 16 months ago.
Music Modernization Act notice of inquiry comments split between those urging the Copyright Office to make it easy for the public to search sound recordings to determine if they are available for noncommercial use and those wanting a more complex search process. MMA establishes a safe harbor for noncommercial use of pre-1972 sound recordings. Comments were posted Tuesday in docket COLC-2018-0008. Public Knowledge Policy Council Meredith Rose urged the CO to make an MMA checklist “accessible and comprehensible to non-specialists, and to make it as simple as allowed by the statute.” While PK proposed the CO require users “search no more than one to two services,” the American Association of Independent Music and RIAA proposed “dividing the various sources that users should search into different categories and then requiring all users to search in all categories (until a match is found).” The MMA process “doesn’t allow for any negotiation between the user and rights owner,” the groups said, urging it be used as “last resort.” SoundExchange endorsed the A2IM-RIAA comments. Noting noncommercial users under statutory licenses differ from noncommercial use in the context of fair use, RIAA said CO guidance should be clear. IFPI said to protect sound recordings originating outside the U.S. the process should include searches in “the country of origin of the sound recording in question” and in the language of origin. The Internet Archive recommended the process “entail performing a few high quality searches on a small number of large services rather than performing a low quality search across a large number of services.” Also filing were the Music Library Association, Library Copyright Alliance, Association of American Universities, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Copyright Alliance.
The Copyright Royalty Board published a final rule Monday setting January 2019-December 2023 royalty rates for making ephemeral copies of sound recordings for transmission to business establishments. It sets royalty fees at 12.5 percent for 2019, increasing by 0.25 percent each year.
Better protecting U.S. intellectual property rights should be a high priority in negotiating a new trade agreement with Japan, tech groups urged the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in comments posted this month in docket USTR-2018-0034. USTR sought comment in late October to develop U.S. negotiating positions with the aim of addressing “both tariff and non-tariff barriers and to achieve fairer, more balanced trade.” A “flexible” and “balanced” IP “regime” is critical “for the continued growth of the digital economy,” said the Computer & Communications Industry Association. A U.S.-Japan free trade agreement “should reflect the two trading partners’ commitments to preserving limitations and exceptions in copyright law needed to further innovation,” said CCIA. U.S. trade policy “has long reflected domestic copyright principles by including necessary intermediary protections for online services in trade agreements dating back to 2003,” it said. The “single most important part” of the semiconductor manufacturing industry is its IP, said SEMI, the industry’s top supply-chain trade group. Continued technological development “requires significant resource commitments, and as such, strong global intellectual property protections are a top priority,” it said. “The ability to leverage this intellectual property means that companies in this industry can engage in trade and reinvest revenue into research.” SEMI strongly supports efforts to better protect IP, “and encourages greater enforcement of trade and investment rules,” it said. A Semiconductor Industry Association top negotiating priority is a U.S.-Japan trade deal that ensures access to encryption products, said SIA. “We recommend that all U.S. trade agreements contain specific commitments preventing parties from placing discriminatory restrictions on commercial foreign products with encryption,” said SIA. It also wants a trade agreement that bolsters protections of trade secrets, which remain “extremely vulnerable, especially in jurisdictions with weak laws and/or enforcement practices," it said. SIA warned about "misappropriation of trade secrets enabled or encouraged" by government industrial policy. Comments were due by midnight Monday. The U.S. Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator received comments last week as it looks to put together its next three-year joint strategic plan (see 1811260014).
Given the time and resources the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, spent on previous copyright litigation against Cox, it makes sense for it to handle similar civil claims brought by music labels (see 1808020009), Judge Liam O'Grady said in a docket 18-cv-00950-LO-JFA memorandum opinion (in Pacer) Monday denying a Cox motion to transfer the case. O'Grady said though Cox claims the court's decision in the BMG suit on Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbor protection won't be relevant to the new suit by Sony Music and others, that ruling "will at the very least touch on the issues presented here." Conversely, the Northern District of Georgia, where Cox seeks transfer, hasn't had occasion to examine the DMCA issue, he said. Cox didn't comment Tuesday.
The Copyright Office extended comments to Nov. 26 for a rulemaking on “noncommercial use of pre-1972 sound recordings that are not being commercially exploited” (see 1810160023). Replies are due Dec. 11, the office said Tuesday.
It’s “not resolved” whether CTA members have the will to file a lawsuit to block tariffs on Chinese imports before they rise to 25 percent Jan. 1, CTA President Gary Shapiro told us at CTA Unveiled New York Thursday. The association hired Akin Gump to draft a court complaint and is shopping it to other trade groups seeking support (see 1810290025). “It will take an action” from the Trump administration to stop the hike, Shapiro told us. President Donald Trump and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping agreed to meet later this month, and “one report said they’re even going to have dinner” together, Shapiro noted. “If it’s a very successful dinner, we can avoid a depression. We’re hoping there’s some sort of deal cut or delay.”
Google efforts to fight online piracy include building an advertising blocker into the Chrome browser that filters ads from web pages that don't comply with industry quality standards, and recent launch of its Copyright Match Tool for finding near-identical re-uploads of creator videos on YouTube, the company said Wednesday. It said it has launched multiple initiatives to provide legitimate alternatives as part of search results. The five principles in its anti-piracy efforts are creating "convenient, legitimate" piracy alternatives; "rooting out and ejecting" pirate sites from its advertising and payment services; using scalable copyright removal processes; guarding against false infringement allegations; and providing transparency. It said search isn't a major driver of traffic to pirate sites, and search can't eradicate pirate sites, while whole-site removals "are ineffective and over-censor content." The company reported YouTube paid $3 billion to rights holders for video content, and October 2017-September 2018 it paid $1.8 billion in advertising revenue for the music industry. It removed 3 billion URLs from search for infringing copyright.