CASE Act Bills Introduced in Congress to Create Copyright Small Claims — Big news for small claims this week, as both the House and Senate introduced the CASE Act, which would create an inexpensive, streamlined process within the US Copyright Office to adjudicate low-value infringement claims and help individual creators and small businesses who can’t otherwise afford to protect their rights in federal court. The text of H.R. 2426 is available here; the identical Senate bill, S. 1273, is here.
Ensuring Only Good Claims Come in Small Packages: A Response to Scholarly Concerns About a Proposed Small Copyright Claims Tribunal — I’m rerunning this article from Sandra Aistars which, though it was written last year, addresses many of the claims that critics of the CASE Act are making about the bill. A good read; it’s also worth noting that the bills introduced this week have some additional tweaks to ensure the fairness of the process.
50 States of Music — This week, a number of music associations—A2IM, ASCAP, BMI, RIAA, and SoundExchange—unveiled a useful tool that shows the value of the music business in each of the 50 states.
“Fair Use is Not Designed to Protect Lazy Appropriators†Rules Court of Appeals — Stephen Carlisle takes a look at last Friday’s Fourth Circuit decision in Brammer v Violent Hues Productions. The court reversed a troubling district court decision finding fair use.
Google Appeal in Oracle Copyright Suit Gets Supreme Court Inquiry — On Monday, we learned that the Supreme Court has called for the views of the Solicitor General in Google v Oracle. Google is appealing two Federal Circuit decisions arising out of Oracle’s lawsuit against it for copying Java software code and using it in its Android operating system. The SG weighed in after the first Federal Circuit decision, saying it was decided correctly and recommending against cert.