The value of industries that depend on the fair use doctrine and other copyright exceptions tripled since 2002, making “balanced” copyright law language “as important as ever,” reported the Computer & Communications Industry Association Friday. CCIA said “fair use industries” contributed $2.8 trillion to the U.S.’ gross domestic product in 2014 and accounted for 16 percent of the economy. “The more we know about the fair use economy, the better Democrats and Republicans can formulate policies for economic growth,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., during a CCIA webcast. Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, said the right balance in copyright law helps protect innovation while allowing consumers to resell products that they own. “As the U.S. considers trade agreements and other policies, objective data quantifying the economic benefit of balanced copyright is critically important,” said CCIA Vice President-Law and Policy Matthew Schruers in a news release. “Fair use protections are crucial here at home and would promote U.S. exports.”

The European Parliament's Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee approved an opinion Thursday aimed at a compromise on the European Commission's proposed copyright directive for the digital single market. The opinion rejected language that would require service providers to monitor content uploaded by subscribers to ensure it's not copyright-protected and on intermediaries' liability. The opinion didn't address a proposed pan-EU ancillary copyright aimed at allowing publishers to claim royalties from news aggregation services like Google News. The Computer & Communications Industry Association believes the opinion is a "sensible compromise" but EU policymakers should "go even further by rejecting all provisions that undermine the e-Commerce Directive and create new exclusive rights for press publishers," said Europe Public Policy Manager Maud Sacquet in a statement.

Patent and Trademark Office Director Michelle Lee resigned Tuesday, an administration source confirmed, and later, the Department of Commerce confirmed. Lee didn't indicate the reason for her abrupt departure in an email sent to all PTO employees that began circulating at our deadline. “I am tremendously proud of all that we have accomplished together” since Lee took the reins at PTO in 2014, she said. "I am confident that the leadership team in place will serve you well during this transition." The Senate confirmed Lee the next year (see 1503100031). Lee's resignation followed PTO's belated March confirmation that President Donald Trump planned to retain her as the office's director, after months of uncertainty over her status (see 1701190046 and 703290072). The White House didn't comment.

IP rights and U.S. enforcement of antitrust laws are “compatible” and “reinforce each other,” even though that relationship usually is overlooked, said Free State Foundation President Randolph May and Senior Fellow Seth Cooper in a paper to be published Tuesday. The Supreme Court shifted some jurisprudence about that relationship over time toward “maximizing consumer welfare based on economic analysis” and in recent years “overruled or limited the holdings of older decisions that expressed skepticism toward IP licensing practices, such as those involving tying and resale price maintenance agreements,” the paper said: DOJ-FTC's revised IP antitrust guidelines (see 1704060048) rejected “the older antitrust jurisprudential presumption that possession of a patent or copyright conferred market power on the IP rights holder, and thereby posed likely threats of anticompetitive harm.”

June 20 is the deadline for comments on a Copyright Royalty Board proposal to require covered cable systems to pay a separate per-telecast royalty called a sports surcharge above other royalty payments required of them under Section 111 of the Copyright Act, it said in a notice in the Federal Register .

Lawyers for songwriter Sammy Cahn and four music publishers have until June 26 to retrieve six sealed documents filed in the July 1990 complaint (case 1:90-cv-04537) they brought to stop Sony from importing and selling digital audio tape recorders in the U.S. Clerks at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan will destroy the documents, which remain sealed, if they’re not picked up by the deadline, said court notices (in Pacer) posted May 25. Cahn and his fellow plaintiffs -- JAC Music, Fort Knox Music, Trio Music and Peer International -- with support from the National Music Publishers’ Association and the Songwriters Guild of America, sued Sony for contributory infringement on grounds that the company's digital audio tape recorders produced perfect copies that would inhibit future sales of commercial sound recordings. The complaint was terminated a year later after the consumer electronics industry reached the compromise legislative deal with the recording industry, music publishers and songwriters that became the framework for the Audio Home Recording Act. President George H.W. Bush signed the AHRA into law in 1992. Cahn died in 1993.

The Supreme Court ruled in​ Impression Products v. Lexmark International Tuesday against the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on domestic and international patent exhaustion. “A patentee’s decision to sell a product exhausts all of its patent rights in that item, regardless of any restrictions the patentee purports to impose or the location of the sale,” said Chief Justice John Roberts. The Supreme Court voted 8-0 to overturn precedent for domestic patent exhaustion and 7-1 to nix international exhaustion precedent. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented on international exhaustion, contending a company retains overseas patent rights at sale. Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t take part. The Federal Circuit had said a company could choose to exhaust only some of its patent rights at the time of a product’s sale, opening up the possibility of an infringement lawsuit if a user violated a company's reserved rights. The “misstep” in Federal Circuit “logic is that the exhaustion doctrine is not a presumption about the authority that comes along with a sale; it is instead a limit on ‘the scope of the patentee’s rights,’” the Supreme Court ruled. It's a disappointment but confirms that Lexmark’s “return program agreement remains clear and enforceable under contract law,” said General Counsel Bob Patton in a statement. Impression is happy the court "reaffirmed important limits on the scope of patent rights,” said counsel Andrew Pincus of Mayer Brown. The decision “is a strong recognition that consumer rights have primary importance,” said Public Knowledge Patent Reform Project Director Charles Duan.

The operators of YouTube channel The Cartoon Channel will remove a video containing Looney Tunes content for which ComedyMX is the copyright holder, said a notice (in Pacer) of conditional settlement filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. ComedyMX, which operates its own YouTube channels, sued The Cartoon Channel and its principals in 2015. YouTube is part of Alphabet/Google.

Facebook added products for digital piracy to its banned commerce list this month. It's including "products or items that facilitate or encourage unauthorized access to digital media" to goods and services not allowed to be sold via Facebook, it confirmed Friday. Facebook's commerce policy also bans sale of animals, tobacco items and alcohol.

Samsung must send the Patent and Trademark Office a “disclaimer” by late November saying it makes no claim “to the exclusive right to use ‘HDR10'” apart from the “HDR10 Plus” term it’s seeking to register as a trademark, said a notice: HDR10 is in “widespread” use “to refer to the industry standard format used in a wide variety of devices and in connection with streaming services, specifically transmission and streaming of programming in the HDR10 format.” Company representatives didn’t comment Thursday.