One Month Snapshot: How the CCB is Working So Far — It’s hard to believe it’s already been a month since the US Copyright Office launched a small copyright claims tribunal with the goal of making copyright enforcement more accessible and cost-effective for authors and creators. Copyright Alliance presents a look at the CCB’s activity in those first thirty days, including insights on the number of cases, types of claims, and processing times.
Picasso Copyright Case Reversed: The Complexity Of Fair Use — Forbes reviews a decision from the Ninth Circuit last week which examines the application of fair use in the context of recognition of foreign judgments.
Ninth Circuit boosts efforts to sue overseas copyright infringers — Also from the Ninth Circuit, good news for copyright owners. As Courthouse News reports, “In an unanimous decision the Ninth Circuit panel said the judge had jurisdiction over the Vietnamese company, VNG Corp., because it intentionally sought out the music of California producer Lang Van Inc. for its Zing MP3 app and it made the app available in the U.S., where it has been downloaded more than 320,000 times.”
Why Internet Archive is in Legal Trouble and Deserves to Be — “As for Section 109, the IA and its amici will try to argue that because the original, legal purchase of a physical copy extinguishes the rightsholder’s interest in that copy under the “first sale” doctrine, this somehow extinguishes the copyright rights prohibiting the reproduction and distribution of a digital book made from the same physical copy. This is fantasy. Pull a book off your shelf, scan it, and make it available to the public, and you will violate the reproduction right, the derivative works right, and the distribution right of the copyright owner. That IA is engaged in precisely this activity at scale is normally described as enterprise piracy, not library lending.”
Intellectual Property and the Historic Kinship Between Patents and Copyrights — Interesting article from law professors Dennis Crouch and Homayoon Rafatijo, who examine historical evidence that they say undermines the Supreme Court decision in Allen v. Cooper, which held that sovereign immunity barred Congress’s attempt to hold states accountable for copyright infringement.