Author Archives: Bill Rosenblatt
Copyright Office’s Section 512 Report Finds the Balance Askew
Five years ago, the U.S. Copyright Office commenced a study on Section 512 of the copyright law, the section that defines limitations of copyright liability (“safe harbors”) for online service providers, arguably the most important part of American copyright law in the digital age. Last week the Office released the results of the study in […]
Wiley Reaches Detente with Academic Social Network ResearchGate
Academic and scientific researchers have their own social networks. One of the biggest differences between these services and LinkedIn or Twitter is that researchers are interested in other researchers’ content as much as they are in social interactions. This has led academic social networks to find ways of getting users to post their papers and […]
The Internet Archive’s Copyright Emergency
Sometime last year, I was chatting about digital first sale and e-lending with a highly respected copyright lawyer, someone who is deeply knowledgeable about those issues. We were talking about the library community’s longstanding attempts to get a lending right for digital files in law. We noted that those folks have apparently given up on […]
Plugging Another Analog Hole in Music Royalties
While many areas of the music industry have digital infrastructure in place to facilitate royalty payments more or less accurately, a few analog corners remain. These are for music uses where royalties are calculated based on incomplete information using statistical samples and other “black box” methods. One of them is terrestrial AM/FM radio: performance rights […]
STM Publishing’s Identity Management Problem
Most of the talk about copyright and technology issues in the world of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing these days focuses on two issues: Open Access and Sci-Hub. For STM publishers, these represent the Scylla and Charybdis of losing control over copyrights. Open Access is about replacing paywalls and traditional copyright licensing with Creative […]
Journal Article on Blockchain and Music
I have an article in the latest issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, “The Future of Blockchain Technology and the Music Industry.” The article explains the basics of blockchain technology, then evaluates proposed applications of the technology to music mainly by addressing the question of whether they solve known, current […]
Conference Coming Up January 15; Program Changes
A reminder that our eleventh annual Copyright and Technology Conference is coming up on Wednesday, January 15 at Fordham Law School in NYC, co-produced by the Copyright Society of the USA and sponsored by the good folks at the Fordham Intellectual Property Institute. Online registration is still available. I’d like to announce a couple of […]
EU High Court Rules Against Digital Resale; We’ll Talk About This at the Conference
This week the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a landmark ruling that digitally downloaded files are not subject to exhaustion (the EU equivalent of first sale in U.S. law). This means that consumers don’t have the right to resell (or give away, lend, or rent) ebooks and other digital files. This […]
What’s a Major Record Label Doing in Podcasting?
Sony Music announced last week that it is taking an ownership stake in Neon Hum, an LA-based podcast production company that currently produces 15 podcasts and partners with the likes of Spotify, Stitcher, Luminary, and the Los Angeles Times. This isn’t Sony Music’s first foray into podcasting: it formed a joint venture with two veteran […]
Libraries Take E-Book Lending Fight into Antitrust Territory
The U.S. library community has gotten involved in the investigation that Congress recently opened into possible anticompetitive behavior by Big Tech. The American Library Association, the advocacy group for public and academic libraries, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last week complaining of unfair behavior from Amazon as well as Big Five trade […]
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