RESPECT Bill Would Put Golden Oldies Under Federal Copyright; Billboard, 5/29/14

Glenn Peoples, Billboard; RESPECT Bill Would Put Golden Oldies Under Federal Copyright:

"A new bill could help artists and labels collect royalties on the digital performance of older recordings while adding to the royalty expenses of the digital services that play them.

Revealed Thursday, the RESPECT Act was introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and co-sponsored by Rep. George Holding (R-NC) and several other members of the House. The bill would place pre-1972 sound recordings under federal law. Because the performance right for these older recordings currently falls under states' laws, digital music services such as Pandora and SiriusXM do not pay royalties on them. (These services do pay publishers for the performance of the compositions, however.)

Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake."

How does copyright work in space?; Economist, 5/22/13

G.F., Economist; How does copyright work in space? :

"CHRIS HADFIELD has captured the world's heart, judging by the 14m YouTube views of his free-fall rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", recorded on the International Space Station (ISS). The Canadian astronaut's clear voice and capable guitar-playing were complemented by his facility in moving around in the microgravity of low-earth orbit. But when the man fell to Earth in a neat and safe descent a few days ago, after a five-month stay in orbit, should he have been greeted by copyright police? Commander Hadfield was only 250 miles (400 km) up, so he was still subject to terrestrial intellectual-property regimes, which would have applied even if he had flown the "100,000 miles" mentioned in the song's lyrics, or millions of kilometres to Mars. His five-minute video had the potential to create a tangled web of intellectual-property issues. How does copyright work in space?...

J.A.L. Sterling, a London-based expert on international copyright law, anticipated all this in a 2008 paper, "Space Copyright Law: the new dimension", in which he lists dozens more potentially problematic scenarios that could arise, some seemingly risible at first."