UK copyright tweak in June will finally allow ripping of CDs; Guardian, 3/31/14

Charles Arthur, Guardian; UK copyright tweak in June will finally allow ripping of CDs:

"Under the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, it is not in fact legal to transform a piece of copyrighted content from one storage form to another - so turning a CD, which is encoded in one method, into a file formatted as MP3 or Windows Media Audio or AAC and storing it on a computer hard drive or digital music player is, strictly, against the law.

Record labels have known about this for years - but have turned a blind eye, because prosecuting everyone who bought a music player or transferred files to their phone would be both ruinously expensive and terrible publicity.

But, the IPO guidance points out, "it will still be illegal to make copies for friends or family, or to make a copy of something you do not own or have acquired illegally, without the copyright owner's permission. So you will not be able to make copies of CDs for your friends, to copy CDs borrowed from friends, or to copy videos illegally downloaded from file-sharing websites.""

Jack Kirby’s heirs take Marvel copyright fight to Supreme Court; ComicBookResources.com, 4/3/14

Kevin Melrose, ComicBookResources.com; Jack Kirby’s heirs take Marvel copyright fight to Supreme Court:

"Claiming an appeals court “unconstitutionally appropriated” Jack Kirby’s copyrights and gave them to Marvel, the late artist’s heirs have taken their fight with the comics publisher to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a petition filed March 21, and first reported by Law 360, Kirby’s children argue “it is beyond dispute” that the artist’s Marvel work between 1959 and 1963 was not produced as “work for hire” and, therefore, is subject to a clause in the U.S. Copyright Act that permits authors and their heirs to reclaim copyrights transferred before 1978.

The appeal follows an August decision by the Second Circuit upholding a 2011 ruling that Kirby’s Marvel works were indeed made at the “instance and expense” — that term plays a significant role in the heirs’ petition — with the publisher assigning and approving projects and paying a page rate; in short, they were “work for hire.” As such, the courts found, the 45 copyright-termination notices the artist’s heirs filed in 2009 for such characters as the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four and the Hulk were invalid."

Digital Music Pioneer Is Found Liable in Copyright Suit; New York Times, 3/28/14

Ben Sisario, New York Times; Digital Music Pioneer Is Found Liable in Copyright Suit:

"Michael Robertson, a pioneer in the digital music business who has repeatedly clashed with record companies over legal issues, was found liable this week for $41 million in a long-running federal copyright infringement suit.

Mr. Robertson’s latest conflict with the music industry was over MP3tunes, a company he founded in 2005 and shut down two years ago. MP3tunes let its users back up digital music files on remote services on the Internet — an early version of the so-called cloud lockers that technology giants like Apple and Google offer as part of their standard suite of digital music offerings...

During the MP3tunes trial, Mr. Robertson said that the company canceled the accounts of users who abused the locker system. In a statement on Thursday, he accused the music industry of suing his company “to send a message to others not to partner with us or to emulate our business,” and criticized the system of statutory damages for copyright infringement, which led to charges of up to $100,000 per song.

“I’m still holding out hope that the legal system will end up at the right place,” Mr. Robertson added. “Sometimes it takes a while with new technologies.”"

Seeking a Town on the Border of Fiction and Reality; New York Times, 3/28/14

Sam Roberts, New York Times; Seeking a Town on the Border of Fiction and Reality:

"Last week, a reporter for The New York Times noticed a mention on Twitter about fake towns, which mapmakers would invent to guard against copyright infringement. An Internet search turned up Agloe and the Google map, complete with the driving directions. Agloe was a mapmaker’s creation.

“It wasn’t uncommon for cartographers to put something fictitious so if they spotted another work with it they knew it was lifted,” said William Spicer, the president of Maps.com.

Among those countless copyright traps, Agloe achieved a rare distinction: The name stuck. As early as the 1930s, a fishing lodge named Agloe opened nearby (which later helped Rand McNally successfully claim in a lawsuit that the Agloe on its own map had not been copied from Socony’s)."

Ex-Yale President to Join Online Education Venture; New York Times, 3/24/14

Tamar Lewin, New York Times; Ex-Yale President to Join Online Education Venture:

"Richard C. Levin, who stepped down as president of Yale University in June, will next month become the chief executive of Coursera, a California-based provider of online academic courses...

Mr. Levin, who has been an adviser to Coursera since January, has been experimenting with online education for years, beginning in 2000 in a partnership with Stanford and Oxford. In 2007, he started Open Yale Courses to make dozens of classes taught by Yale professors available without cost.

“The main thing we will work on is to establish this model so our partner universities feel that offering large-scale MOOCs is an important part of their mission that helps faculty expand their reach, and benefits the world,” Mr. Levin said.

Mr. Levin, who has extensive experience in China, will also work on expanding Coursera’s presence there. Already, he said, China is the second-biggest source of Coursera enrollment, after the United States."

Steven Tyler tells Congress to walk his way on copyright; Washington Post, 3/25/14

Emily Heil, Washington Post; Steven Tyler tells Congress to walk his way on copyright:

"Onstage, with a view of the Capitol in the background, Tyler capped off a few days of lobbying with renditions of hits like “Cryin’” and “Dream On,” to a crowd of suits who looked like they were reliving their high-school days. The musician spent his visit to Washington meeting with members of Congress to talk about stronger protection for songwriters in the copyright system, including against having their work used, willy-nilly, in samples or mashups by other artists.

Tyler insisted in an interview before the show that he just wants to be a passionate voice in Washington for songwriters — not just the “rich rock stars” like him. “Hopefully, I can touch them, like a modern-day Will Rogers,” he says, evoking the folksy actor-turned advocate of the 1920s and ’30s. “He’d stand up and speak and everyone would listen.”"

Congress should bring copyright law into the 21st century; Los Angeles Times, 3/24/14

Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times; Congress should bring copyright law into the 21st century:

"Congress updated copyright law in 1998 to address the nation's shift from analog devices and packaged goods — think turntables and vinyl records — to computers and e-commerce. Unfortunately, the law it wrote has proved to be a better fit for a dial-up era dominated by America Online, not broadband and the World Wide Web. The tools the law created to protect songs, movies, pictures and books from piracy have been no match for the rampant global bootlegging that new technologies have unleashed. At the same time, innovative entrepreneurs eager to help consumers create, store or share content online complain that the law left too much uncertainty over whether they could be held liable when their users violate copyrights.

These are valid complaints, but Congress isn't likely to address them any time soon because there's no consensus among copyright holders and tech companies on how to rewrite the law. The only help from Washington at the moment is a new effort led by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to broker a deal between the tech and copyright industries on voluntary measures to reduce piracy. Although it won't be easy for them to agree, there are steps both sides could take to make the existing system work better."