The HEVC Advance patent pool for H.265 intellectual property licensing took the opportunity of announcing its first new member to disclose it's getting some industry pushback to its plan to charge high royalty fees on the licensing of H.265 content and devices. HEVC Advance is "actively soliciting input from market participants and considering adjustments to arrive at a royalty structure that enables continued and rapid adoption of HEVC and brings the associated benefits to stakeholders within the media and technology industries," the company said Wednesday. “We have received significant market feedback, particularly on content fees, and will adjust fees to support widespread use of HEVC,” CEO Pete Moller said in a statement. That HEVC Advance will charge a royalty on HEVC content and come to market with a high-priced, two-tier structure for royalty treatment in different parts of the world are but two of many stark differences that set it apart from the alternative HEVC patent pool run by MPEG LA when HEVC Advance announced its licensing regime in late July (see 1507220001). In contrast to HEVC Advance, MPEG LA charges only a 20-cents-per-unit hardware royalty across the board for the use of HEVC codecs with no delineation for the type of device, and allows a hardware supplier licensee its first 100,000 units royalty-free, said a summary of the HEVC license agreement posted this month at the MPEG LA website. MPEG LA also caps a supplier’s royalty obligation at $25 million a year, the summary said. As for HEVC Advance's new member, it's MediaTek, the prominent manufacturer of systems-on-a-chip semiconductors for mobile and home entertainment devices. “The addition of MediaTek will substantially enhance the value of the HEVC Advance patent pool for our customers and is a significant step in realizing our goal of bringing HEVC to the global market by providing an efficient and transparent means to acquire necessary and high quality patent rights, at scale, in a fair, reasonable and balanced manner,” said Moller. “We continue to make great strides in building a substantial portfolio of high-quality HEVC essential patents available for license as we march toward our official launch in the fourth quarter.”

Warner/Chappell Music and other companies that have claimed copyright since 1935 on the “Happy Birthday” song have never actually held a valid claim, U.S. District Judge George King ruled late Tuesday in Los Angeles. Filmmaker Jennifer Nelson and other plaintiffs had jointly challenged Warner/Chappell's copyright of the song in 2013 after the company sought royalties for all performances of the song for commercial purposes. Warner/Chappell had charged Nelson $1,500 for a synchronization license to use “Happy Birthday” in a documentary about the song. Warner/Chappell has claimed copyright on “Happy Birthday” since 1988, following its purchase of the Beech Tree Group, successor to original copyright claimant Clayton F. Summy Co. Summy bought the rights to “Good Morning to You” from original composers Mildred Hill and Patty Smith Hill. The original 1935 copyright claim that Summy filed in 1935 pertains only to certain piano arrangements of “Happy Birthday's” music, originally titled “Good Morning to You,” rather than the general song's melody or its lyrics, King said in his ruling. There's “no one, really, who can claim an ownership” to the “Happy Birthday” song since Mildred Hill and Patty Smith Hill “didn't convey the rights to Summy Co.,” King said, noting that it's unclear whether the Hill sisters still held common-law copyright over the lyrics by the time they sold the rights to Summy in 1893. The alternative “Happy Birthday” lyrics to “Good Morning to You” appeared in songbooks only beginning in 1911, when those lyrics appeared without an authorship credit. “A reasonable fact finder could also find that the Happy Birthday lyrics were written by someone else” and that Patty Smith Hill's claim to authorship of the alternative lyrics “was a post hoc attempt to take credit for the words that had long since become more famous and popular than the ones she wrote for the classic melody,” King said. Nelson and other plaintiffs have sought restitution of all licensing fees that Warner/Chappell has collected for use of “Happy Birthday” since 1988, though a spokesman for the plaintiffs said that issue will be resolved later. Warner/Chappell said it's “looking at the court's lengthy opinion and considering our options.”

The GroupM media buyer said Wednesday that it will begin requiring all of its digital partners to become certified as providing services compliant with the Trustworthy Accountability Group's (TAG) anti-piracy guidelines or use a TAG-certified provider's services to participate in GroupM's Trusted Marketplaces. GroupM said it also endorsed TAG's anti-piracy guidelines, which in conjunction with its TAG certification requirement will “make a significant impact on pirated content trafficking worldwide.” TAG's anti-piracy program prevents ad placement on websites that facilitate the distribution of pirated content. GroupM is “vigilant for clients' brand safety,” said GroupM Connect Chairman John Montgomery in a news release. “Our work with TAG in the development and now full adoption of anti-piracy guidelines is a major leap forward.”

Pandora said Wednesday that its all-time royalties payments total more than $1.5 billion, which it called a “major milestone for ad-supported music streaming." The milestone shows Pandora is “achieving significant momentum,” CEO Brian McAndrews said in a news release. “It took us nearly nine years to generate the first billion dollars in royalties, and just over a year to increase that total by 50 percent. We are partnering with music makers to fully tap into Pandora's people, data and technology to unleash the music industry's full potential.” Pandora said the rise in royalty payments stems from its combined income from ad-supported and subscriber-supported versions of its streaming service.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) may have hindered watchdogs from finding Volkswagen’s use of software in its diesel vehicles to mask higher emissions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Monday in a blog post. The Environmental Protection Agency claimed Friday that Volkswagen had used the software on its diesel vehicles between 2008 and this year to reduce emissions toxicity during tests, allowing the vehicles to emit toxins above legal limits. EFF is urging the Copyright Office to grant an exemption to DMCA’s Section 1201 to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures on software installed in motor vehicles to allow researchers to look at the software's code. The proposed exemption would “make it crystal clear that independent research on vehicle software doesn’t violate copyright law,” EFF said. EPA and manufacturers have opposed the proposed exemption because it could be used to violate emissions laws. “The EPA is undermining its own ability to issue nuanced regulation in this space, as well as its ability to learn about large-scale violations of the law committed by manufacturers,” EFF said. “When you entrust your health, safety, or privacy to a device, the law shouldn’t punish you for trying to understand how that device works and whether it is trustworthy. We hope the Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress agree when they rule on our exemptions next month.”

If patent litigation reform legislation is “left unresolved,” that will continue to drain startups of “precious resources,” Bronwyn Flores, CEA policy and industry communications coordinator, said Friday in a blog post. “Growing a startup is tough enough,” Flores said. “But lawyers and shell companies that contribute nothing to the innovation economy -- we call them ‘patent trolls’ -- are taking advantage of loopholes in the current patent system to legally extort startups, draining $80 billion a year from our economy.” Enactment of patent litigation reform legislation in the House and Senate will mean that “the tech community can send patent trolls back under the bridge,” she said. Such firms “have been abusing the system for years, but recent data shows they’re more aggressive than ever,” she said. “Troll lawsuits are up 500% since 2005, and 2015 is on its way to becoming a record-breaking year for frivolous patent lawsuits.” Such firms “are in the legal extortion business, and business is good,” she said. “Their actions are low-risk and high-reward -- under the current patent system, there are no disincentives.”

Some two dozen retailers and online distributors of USB hubs, including big names like Amazon, Belkin, Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples and Walmart, are in violation of U.S. patent 5,675,811, which describes a “method for transmitting information over an intelligent low power serial bus,” alleged the patent owner, Minero Digital, an Allen, Texas, firm, in a federal complaint. The patent was granted in October 1997 and originally assigned to General Magic, the now-defunct developer of personal communications handhelds, said the complaint, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas. Representatives of the defendants didn’t comment.

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.”

Switzerland, the U.K., Sweden, the Netherlands and the U.S. are the world’s five most “innovative nations,” according to the 2015 Global Innovation Index report released Thursday by the World Intellectual Property Organization, Cornell University and the French business school INSEAD. China, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda “are among a group of countries outperforming their economic peers,” the report said. The top 25 performers are all “high-income economies,” and the list “remains largely unchanged from past editions, illustrating that the leaders’ performance is hard to challenge for those that follow,” it said. The U.S. and the U.K. are two economies that “stand out” in terms of “innovation quality,” the report said, defining that as a measure of “university performance, the reach of scholarly articles and the international dimension of patent applications.” The U.S. and the U.K. “stay ahead of the pack, largely as a result of their world-class universities, closely followed by Japan, Germany and Switzerland,” it said. “Top-scoring middle-income economies on innovation quality are China, Brazil and India, with China increasingly outpacing the others.”

Google sued Local Lighthouse for making false and misleading claims during telemarketing calls, among other claims, said a court document filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The Internet giant had telegraphed the move in an advisory that day to consumers about ways to avoid robocalls (see 1509160048). Google's lawsuit alleged the search engine optimization company's sales agents claim they're calling on behalf of Google, are affiliated with Google or have been contracted by Google to provide search engine optimization services. Local Lighthouse replied to a letter from Google in August 2014, denying Lighthouse used robocalls to market services or that it harassed consumers with unwanted phone calls, the filing said. Even though the letter said the company would take a look at its practices, Google still received complaints about the calls, the filing said. Google also alleges Local Lighthouse is engaging in false advertising and federal trademark infringement by claiming to be a Google subcontractor and using Google's logo in its own marketing. Local Lighthouse didn't comment.