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.

ABS Entertainment, which owns the copyright on recordings of Al Green and the rest of Hi Records’ catalog, said it’s suing CBS, Cumulus Media and iHeartMedia for unpaid royalties on Hi Records’ pre-1972 recordings. The suit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles seeks damages from the radio stations based on allegations of “despicable” infringement of ownership rights, misappropriation of those rights and conversion. ABS said it’s also seeking an injunction against the radio stations from further use of its pre-1972 recordings. “Pre-1972 recordings comprise the historical backbone of the music industry,” ABS said in its complaint. It said CBS, Cumulus and iHeartMedia know “the value of pre-1972 recordings to its music service but [have] ignored the obligation to obtain licenses to exploit those recordings.” The case will be heard by District Judge Percy Anderson. ABS cited Flo & Eddie’s class-action suit in the Los Angeles federal court as precedent for also seeking class action status so the company can seek “injunctive relief and monetary damages sustained by Plaintiff and the Class because the Defendants have delivered music content through broadcast radio channels, HD radio channels, the Internet and mobile devices without consent of or licenses” from the class. CBS, Cumulus and iHeartMedia didn’t comment.

Public Knowledge Vice President-Legal Affairs Sherwin Siy agrees with SoundExchange board member David Byrne that the recording industry continues to lack transparency, he said. “In the end, no one knows where all the money goes,” Siy said in a blog post Friday. Byrne raised concerns about transparency issues in the recording industry in an Aug. 2 New York Times opinion article. Individual artists and companies may disclose some information, but “pretty much none of these accounts give their numbers in equivalent values,” Siy said. “You’ll hear about a per-play value here, an aggregate value there, an average in one place, the pennies or millions of outliers in another.” Transparency has been “lacking” in the recording industry because there are incentives not to disclose payment information since sometimes “transparency could make someone look bad, revealing disparate payments that could upset business partners,” Siy said. “Other reasons likely include the perception that the data could be monetized somehow, and that others should be paying for that. And some parties might simply balk at the cost of gathering data they’ve never had to gather before." RIAA had no immediate comment Tuesday.