Recent attempts to link stolen MPAA copyright-related documents via the Sony Pictures Entertainment data breach with web censorship are “intentionally and cynically misleading,” Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, said in an op-ed for The Hill Thursday. The stolen copyright documents, which purportedly showed collaborative efforts between the entertainment industry, law firms and ISPs, provoked accusations from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups that the former parties were seeking measures similar to the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (see 1412170050). “Adhering to the old political adage that you never let a serious crisis go to waste, we now see the anti-copyright crowd cynically attempting to use this attack as an excuse to weaken efforts to combat online piracy,” Spiwak said. “Seeking to pursue all lawful means to protect valuable intellectual property is not the moral equivalent of Web censorship,” he said. The Sony documents show that MPAA and other movie studios “are still pursuing the goals of SOPA,” Mitch Stoltz, EFF staff attorney, said in an interview. “That was true before the Sony hack and it’s true now,” he said. Spiwak’s argument is “typical” of those who defend MPAA’s “censorship strategy,” in that they usually fail to “wrestle with or acknowledge the harms that come with more draconian” copyright enforcement, Stoltz said. “Examples abound” of copyright being used to “suppress speech on the Internet for any number of illegitimate reasons,” he said. “That’s the definition of censorship.”

Apple-watchers spotted a new U.S. patent (8,922,530) filed in January 2010 and granted Tuesday for a “communicating stylus,” and it has many guessing that this may mean that an iPen smart pen device is on the horizon. A close read of the patent listing Aleksandar Pance, of Saratoga, California, as the inventor and Apple as the assignee confirms that Apple is talking about an electronic pen that captures handwriting or drawing, on any surface or in 3D space, and sends it to a computer for display on a screen. But that same close read also reveals a marked shortage of hard technical facts on how this is actually achieved. The Livescribe family of pens already offers very accurate handwriting capture, but specialized paper is needed. The paper has micro-marks on the surface that form a near-invisible map. An infrared light sensor in the pen uses the map to keep accurate track of its movement over the paper. In the patent, Apple says this approach is a “problem” and aims for “a stylus that can enter data into a computing device, regardless of the surface with which it is used.” The Apple stylus will contain a “position sensing device such as an accelerometer,” which tracks position “with respect to an initial or zero point,” the patent says. This sounds similar to the error-prone “dead reckoning” used by navigation systems before GPS became available. Apple’s patent documentation offers little help on how accuracy will be improved sufficiently to capture handwriting legibly, other than to suggest the use of multiple sensors and “time stamped” radio or sonic waves, with or without “triangulation” and with or without a magnetometer to register “magnetic north.” Apple representatives didn’t comment.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a statutory royalty rate decision by the Copyright Royalty Board, in a ruling Friday. The court denied appeals by SoundExchange, which said the CRB’s rates and terms for satellite digital audio radio services and pre-existing subscription services (PSS) were too low. Music Choice and SiriusXM also appealed the 2-year-old decision, saying the rates were too high. “For Sirius XM, the rates set by the decision increased from 9% [of gross revenue] in 2013 to 11% in 2017, reflecting slight .5% rate increases each year during the term,” David Oxenford of Wilkinson Barker said in a blog post Monday. “The Music Choice royalty for PSS services went from a previously negotiated 7.5% up to 8% in 2013 and 8.5% of gross revenues through 2017,” he said. The court also decided to “leave in place the CRB’s determination that Sirius XM should be able to deduct from its royalty payments a percentage of its revenue equal to the percentage of pre-1972 sound recordings played by the service,” Oxenford said.