Judge: Company must pay $684k for suing Life360 in “exceptionally weak” patent case; ArsTechnica.com, 12/2/15

Joe Mullin, ArsTechnica.com; Judge: Company must pay $684k for suing Life360 in “exceptionally weak” patent case:

"Family networking service Life360 won a patent trial earlier this year against a Florida company called Advanced Ground Information Systems (AGIS) that sued it for patent infringement. Now it has won a significant chunk of its legal fees for fighting the case.

Yesterday, US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks ordered AGIS to pay Life360 the sum of $684,190.25. That amount represents the legal fees paid from November 21, 2014, when Middlebrooks issued a claim construction order, through the end of the trial on March 13, 2015."

Sharing of television news clips hangs in the fair-use balance; ArsTechnica.com, 12/2/15

David Kravets, ArsTechnica.com; Sharing of television news clips hangs in the fair-use balance:

"Fox News is winning more than just the news network ratings wars. It's also winning the battle against copyright's fair use doctrine.

In August, a federal judge sided (PDF) with the news station's copyright-infringement lawsuit against a television and radio clipping service known as TVEyes, which charges as much as $500 a month for its service. A New York federal judge ruled that wanton sharing, time searching, and downloading of Fox News' news segments is not fair use. Then in November, US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled TVEyes could not allow its clients—like the White House, American Red Cross, members of Congress, and others—to download Fox News clips. The judge also ordered TVEyes to block users from searching Fox News clips and from allowing them to share them on social media...

All of this begs the question of what is fair use. It's complicated, and there is no bright-line rule."

COPYRIGHT OFFICE NEEDS MORE TECH AND DATA EXPERTS; NextGov.com, 12/2/15

Hallie Golden, NextGov.com; COPYRIGHT OFFICE NEEDS MORE TECH AND DATA EXPERTS:

"To keep pace with the demands of the digital age, the U.S. Copyright Office needs fewer file clerks and more techies, Maria Pallante, the office's director, told lawmakers on Wednesday.

“It used to be catalogers, now it needs to be technology and data [experts],” Pallante described the agency’s hiring needs. “I don’t know how we can administer the law without it.”

Every year, the Copyright Office's staff examines and register hundreds of thousands of copyright claims submitted by book authors, music artists, software manufacturers and other creators of intellectual property.

The office needs to restructure its workforce, Pallante told members of the Committee on House Administration during a hearing on the office’s tech plans. The office would like to eventually “morph” about a third of its staff -- 150 employees -- into tech and data experts, she said.

“These experts should not merely be assigned or on-call from another part of the agency, but rather be integrated into the copyright office mission where they can work side by side with legal and business experts,” she said."

Library of Congress, Copyright Office butt heads over IT vision; FedScoop.com, 12/2/15

Whitney Blair Wyckoff, FedScoop.com; Library of Congress, Copyright Office butt heads over IT vision:

"During the hearing, U.S. Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante reiterated a call for more autonomy over her agency’s technology. She referenced a report her agency released Tuesday that laid out a five-year plan that heavily focused on technology improvements.

“What we’re asking for is the autonomy to make sure that IT is intertwined with our business and legal expertise,” Pallante said. (Some House lawmakers have been shopping a draft bill to make the office an independent agency, but the legislation has yet to be introduced.)

Pallante also underscored the need to update the office’s 10-year-old copyright registration system, called eCO — which she said was “probably outdated by the time it was implemented.” The system, she said, simply replaced rather than improved upon paper copyright registration forms. It doesn't have a digital interface that is interoperable with the private sector technology and isn't flexible enough to be updated as copyright law evolves, she said...

“Your predecessor did many wonderful things in his long career,” Lofgren said to acting Librarian Mao. “Being a techie was not one of his fine points. So you have your work cut out for you.”"

Copyright Register: IT outage shows why agency must modernize; FedScoop.com, 11/30/15

Whitney Blair Wyckoff, FedScoop.com; Copyright Register: IT outage shows why agency must modernize:

"U.S. Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante still grimaces at the mention of a major IT outage that struck her agency this summer.

What started as routine data center maintenance shuttered critical Library of Congress IT systems — including those at the Copyright Office — for nine days. Pallante said it forced her staff, who were unable to fix the problems directly, to field angry calls from customers unable to register their songs, books or other creative works online.

“This is an illustration of the fact that my IT, and my databases, are in the hands of people who are not statutorily responsible for that information,” she told FedScoop, speaking in a Copyright Office conference room lined with the portraits of past registers. She added, "I just really feel that people who work on Copyright Office IT should be in the Copyright Office, in the mission, working side by side with the other experts."

It’s a point alluded to in the Copyright Office's five-year strategic modernization plan, finalized and released Tuesday. The 65-page document includes overarching goals that span from building a robust and flexible technology enterprise to recruiting a diverse workforce. But woven into the report is the need to tailor the office's technology to the needs of the people it serves.

“I think the main message of this is that the Copyright Office has to be directly involved in technology — for one, we can’t administer the law without having control of tools to allow us to do that,” said Pallante, who spent nearly 10 years as intellectual property counsel and director of the licensing group at the Guggenheim Museums before coming to her current job in 2011."

Scholars Unveil New Edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’; New York Times, 12/1/15

Alison Smale, New York Times; Scholars Unveil New Edition of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ :

"Not since 1945, when the Allies banned the dubious work and awarded the rights to the state of Bavaria, has Hitler’s manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” been officially published in German. Bavaria had refused to release it. But under German law, its copyright expires Dec. 31, the 70th year after the author’s death.

That allows a team of historians from a noted center for the study of Nazism, the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, to publish its two-volume, 2,000-page edition, a three-year labor complete with about 3,500 academic annotations.

The intention is to set the work in historical context, to show how Hitler wove truth with half-truth and outright lie, and thus to defang any propagandistic effect while revealing Nazism."

James Bond goes to Ottawa in For Your Eyes Only remake; Guardian, 12/1/15

Andrew Pulver, Guardian; James Bond goes to Ottawa in For Your Eyes Only remake:

"A duo of low-budget Canadian film-makers have announced plans to remake the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, thanks to a loophole in copyright laws.

Lee Demarbre and Ian Driscoll, whose back catalogue includes the Mexican-wrestler thriller The Dead Sleep Easy and comedy musical Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, say they are planning to take advantage of Canada’s 50-year copyright limit to start work on a new adaptation of Ian Fleming’s 1960 short story. Unlike most other major film markets, Canada does not enforce the Berne convention that extended authors’ copyright to 70 years after death, meaning that Fleming, who died in 1964, is in the public domain in the country...

The film-makers concede that copyright regulations mean they would be unable to release the proposed film in the US, limiting potential investment, but suggest that the restriction would not apply to “China and most of Asia”."