The Library of Congress data center that hosts some Copyright Office systems, including the online copyright registration system, remains offline after scheduled routine maintenance (see 1508270016) over the weekend, a CO news release said Tuesday. The Library of Congress attempted to reopen the data center Sunday, “but has been unable to restore access to Copyright Office systems,” the release said. CO staff is unable to access internal shared network resources, it said. “Until service is restored, you will be unable to use the eCO system to file a copyright registration, and Office staff may be unable to access Office records.” Copyright registration can still be filed using a paper registration form during the outage, the office said. “The Library of Congress informs us that it is working to resolve the problems as expeditiously as possible, but we do not have an estimated time for service resumption.”

A recent patent filing from Samsung and Young Eun Cho, a Korean inventor based in the U.K., (US 2015/0235084) tells how a TV, tablet or smartphone screen can be adjusted automatically if the user is having difficulty viewing it. But the patent reveals that the system relies on extensive viewer surveillance. The patent was filed in 2014 but our patent searches showed Samsung has filed for similar ideas dating back a decade or more. The filing describes how the screen is paired with a video camera, which captures a running video image of the viewer’s face, and compares it with previously captured images. Changes in facial shape, eye size and eye-scroll motion, along with any changes in viewing distance and any decision to wear glasses are sent over the Internet to a remote server, the patent says. The server analyzes the data and returns a control signal, which adjusts the display to make viewing easier, for instance, by increasing text font size and increasing brightness or contrast. In 2004, four inventors working for Samsung in Korea filed claims (US 2006/0048189) for a “Method and apparatus for proactive recording and displaying of preferred television programs by user’s eye gaze.” That patent told how the screen watches the room with a camera, which analyzes the viewer’s gaze, and decides whether a program is capturing attention or whether the viewer’s eyes are wandering. When an arbitrary threshold of interest is exceeded, the system checks an electronic program guide and adds a “preferred” program tag, the patent said. When similar programs are subsequently detected in the EPG, the TV makes the decision to display and/or record, it said.

Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation were two of five groups that wrote a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman Monday asking that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement “not include measures restricting adoption of the Copyright Office’s recent proposals regarding orphan works.” Orphan works are books, articles, photos, recordings and other documents that are protected by copyright held by an unknown owner. The Register of Copyrights issued a report in May that included a “variety of proposals to expand access to copyrighted works,” said the letter, also signed by Authors Alliance, Knowledge Economy International and New Media Rights. The proposals aren't law and it’s possible Congress won't act or embrace a new approach entirely, it said. Though the groups that signed the letter vary in their preferences to how the issue should be remedied, all asked that the “TPP not adopt measures that would prevent the Congress from enacting these or other such provisions should they be needed at some point to expand access to orphaned copyrighted works.”

SAG-AFTRA officials reached a tentative three-year successor recording royalties deal Thursday with five major record labels. It includes a “groundbreaking payment formula for online streaming and non-permanent digital downloads that encompasses revenue from these types of exploitations generated outside the” U.S., the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the labels said. The deal with the five labels -- Capitol Records, Hollywood Records, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and affiliates of Warner Music Group -- “is a significant expansion of the obligations the industry undertook in a deal originally struck in 1994, and it represents the first time the labels have included revenue generated outside the United States in any payment streams under the union's contract,” SAG-AFTRA and the labels said. All parties to the proposed deal “recognize the need for change in order to deal with the challenges and opportunities presented by new economic models in the industry,” SAG-AFTRA National Vice President-Recording Artists Dan Navarro said in a news release. “This deal starts us down that road.” SAG-AFTRA members will now need to ratify the deal.

The Copyright Office’s website and other public Library of Congress websites will be offline 7 p.m. Friday through the end of Sunday, the LOC said Wednesday. Congress.gov will be online all weekend, but all data will be current only to Thursday. Updates are to resume Monday, LOC said. Power outages associated with building maintenance will make the website unavailability necessary, LOC explained. The following weekend, the FCC will have its own Web and IT-related outage (see 1508240044).

Congress should ensure that any legislation that revamps portions of the Copyright Act maintains robust fair use and first sale doctrine protections because those exemptions are “as important” to the Copyright Act as the ownership rights the statute creates, said Computer & Communications Industry Association Vice President-Law and Policy Matthew Schruers during a CCIA webcast Tuesday. CCIA officially released a white paper Tuesday detailing its recommendations to the House Judiciary Committee on the contours of possible legislation to address issues the committee has explored in its ongoing Copyright Act review. The CCIA paper said new copyright bills should accommodate innovation in the tech sector and provide certainty to noncontent businesses affected by the Copyright Act, as expected (see 1508240041). CCIA took “no stated opinion” about whether the Copyright Office should be moved from the Library of Congress to another federal agency or become an independent agency, Schruers said. Efforts to concentrate legislative effort on the CO’s future status “in my view is putting the cart before the horse,” he said: “The question we should be asking is what do we need to ensure that the office better executes” its mission. “Where [the CO] belongs is really a secondary consideration that should be driven by how we’re going to modernize,” Schruers said. It’s unclear what revamp legislation is likeliest to emerge from House Judiciary’s work, he said, saying the 1976 Copyright Act revamp took more than 10 years but more targeted legislation has “happened faster than that.”

Rocky Ouprasith, the 23-year-old owner of the file-sharing websites RockDizMusic and RockDizFile, pleaded guilty Friday in U.S. District Court in Norfolk to one count of criminal copyright infringement, the Department of Justice said. Ouprasith admitted to operating RockDizMusic.com between May 2011 and October 2014 via servers in Canada and France. The Recording Industry Association of America ranked RockDizMusic as the No. 2 music piracy website in the U.S. in 2013. The website distributed digital copies of copyrighted songs obtained from “affiliates,” whom Ouprasith paid based on the number of times each file was downloaded from the site. Ouprasith admitted to operating the associated RockDizFile.com via servers in France, the Netherlands and Russia. He also admitted to ignoring complaints in 2013 and 2014 from copyright owners and their representatives and to pretending to take action in response to those complaints. The material on RockDizMusic.com and RockDizFile.com was worth more than $2.5 million, DOJ said. Federal law enforcement shut down the websites in October, while agencies in France and the Netherlands seized servers that hosted the sites’ material. Ouprasith is to be sentenced Nov. 17 and faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Via Licensing Corp. issued a call for patents essential to the practice of the MPEG-H 3D Audio standard. MPEG-H 3D, the latest set of AV compression and transmission technologies to be standardized under the guidance of the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Exports Group (MPEG), specifies the transmission and playback of audio over various speaker arrangements for broadcast and streaming in a range of use cases including home theater, automotive systems, headphones and mobile devices. “For any patent pool, the goal is to create one-stop shopping for implementers of the applicable technology,” said Roger Ross, Via Licensing president, noting the Dolby subsidiary’s success with MPEG-4 High Efficiency AAC and MPEG Surround patent pools. Via Licensing is looking to work with inventors and implementers of MPEG-H 3D Audio “to build a single source for essential MPEG-H 3D Audio patents through an efficient, consolidated offering,” Ross said Friday. Via Licensing invited persons or companies with patents or pending patent applications that they deem essential to the normative portions of ISO/IEC 23008-3 (High Efficiency Coding and Media Delivery in Heterogeneous Environments, Part 3: 3D Audio) to contact Via for information on submitting patents for “essentiality review.”

NAB, the New York State Broadcasters Association (NYSBA) and a group of American University Washington College of Law professors separately urged the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday to allow their amicus briefs in support of Sirius XM in the radio service’s appeal of the U.S. District Court in New York’s decision in Flo & Eddie’s performance royalties lawsuit. Flo & Eddie, who own the copyright to The Turtles' music library, including “Happy Together,” objected to a set of seven proposed amicus briefs from NAB, Pandora and others, saying several repeated Sirius XM’s arguments (see 1508170023). Flo & Eddie’s objections against NAB’s amicus brief only deal with issues raised in the brief’s last four pages, so attempting to strike the entire 30-page brief is “an overreach that this Court should not permit,” NAB said in a filing. “Flo & Eddie should not be permitted to avoid the entire contribution of an amicus who has demonstrated an interest in the case” based on objections to a minor portion of the brief, NAB said. “The majority of NAB’s brief presents its unique perspective, on behalf of the nation’s thousands of radio broadcasters, to the core issues in this case.” NYSBA’s proposed brief “is both relevant and desirable under the applicable standard,” the group said. “This case presents an issue of considerable practical importance, and amicus curiae NYSBA is particularly well-suited to provide additional insight into the broad implications of the decision below for the broadcast industry in New York.”

ZTE applied for more than 50 new “core patents” for its “global flagship” Axon smartphone, it said in a Thursday announcement. “Axon is ZTE’s first global flagship smartphone series, and is our key to becoming a top smartphone vendor in our focus markets across the globe.” Patents it applied for cover the Axon’s audio, camera, antenna, security and touch technologies, it said. The U.S. version of the smartphone, the ZTE Axon Pro, launched last month at just under $450.