Bits and pieces

If ever there was a photo
that called for a witty caption,
this is it ...

Today's the day the European Commission is expected to introduce legislation to bolster the digital music market in Europe by streamlining the way that agencies collect royalties on behalf of copyright holders. Michel Barnier, the Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, is expected to propose a law aimed at resolving problems at the 250 collecting societies that operate in the European Union, some of which are said to be are holding back growth in the digital music market. Says Barnier:

“Collecting societies need to modernize their operations to meet the challenges of a fast-evolving digital economy. An underlying problem is the insufficient transparency and control of the way collecting societies are managed”. 

Thanks, Bob, for the link.

The Alliance Against Intellectual Property Theft has a new chairman: it's Richard Mollet. Richard, Chief Executive of the Publishers Association, takes over from the Alliance's founder Lavinia Carey, Director-General of the British Video Association. The Alliance has 21 member organisations that span a wide variety of sectors.

Not all readers of the 1709 Blog follow the IPKat, so I thought it might be a good idea to mention the Katonomist Nicola Searle's solo debut post for that blog, "Starstruck with the Audio Visual Treaty", which examines, through the spectacles of an economist, the likely beneficiaries of the Beijing Treaty. You can read her analysis here. Nicola can be seen modelling her economics spectacles on the right.

Bits and pieces: some recent news

The United Kingdom's Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) has announced the launch of a new online title search tool for legal professionals. The tool, which licensees can play with to their heart's content here -- enables customers to find out whether they can lawfully photocopy, scan or digitally reproduce from a publication under their firm’s CLA licence.  The idea is that each title search allows licensees to confirm quickly whether the activity is compliant with the terms of their CLA licence. The title search, developed in response to research with customer groups, is designed to complement existing website support for included and excluded licence material.

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Last Friday Neil J. Wilkof posted an article on the IPKat weblog, "Government Intervention in the Publishing Industry: Say It Isn't True!", which in hindsight might have been better placed on the 1709 Blog, given its relevance to the copyright-based publishing industry. Neil is particularly keen to hear from correspondents in jurisdictions where the market for publications in the local language is small and intervention is seen as having a cultural or political dimension to it which transcends, rightly or wrongly, the notion that the best conditions for commercial exploitation are those which are dictated by the open market.  You can read Neil's piece here.

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Here's a reminder to readers that there are two rather appealing events coming up in London next month, each of which comes with a substantial discount for readers of this weblog.  They are as follows:

• 11 July 2012: Half day workshop, "Design Rights", hosted in Central London by LexisNexis Conferences and Training. Further particulars of the programme and registration details are available here. To qualify for a 10% registration discount fee as a blog reader, quote code L11290/IPKAT.
• 11 July 2012: Half day workshop, "IP and the Creative Industries", hosted in Central London by LexisNexis Conferences and Training. Further particulars of the programme and registration details are available here. To qualify for a 10% registration discount fee as a blog reader, quote code L11290/IPKAT.

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Polish blogger and IP enthusiast Tomasz Rychlicki has posted this piece on an unusual episode involving the actual or deemed date of death of an author.  Children's book author, humanitarian and educator Henryk Goldszmit (better known as Janusz Korczak), was believed to have died in the Treblinka concentration camp in 1942 but, for obvious reasons, no eye-witness evidence was available. The County Court in Lublin, in an order of 30 November 1954, considered Korczak’s death to have been 9 May 1946, with the consequence that his works would be expected to be available in the public domain from 1 January 2017. This outcome has now been challenged by the Modern Poland Foundation, as Tomasz explains.

Bits and pieces

For those living outside the European Union, the prospect of pan-European copyright -- and pan-European licensing practice -- is intriguing. After all, there is a single market in which there is a dual system of national rights and pan-European rights in place for registered trade marks, registered designs and plant variety rights, and the pan-European patent right is now a matter of 'when', rather than 'whether', so what's holding up the pan-European copyright with its corollary, the pan-European licence. This makes even more sense where the licensed territory is exploited via the internet, a medium for which national borders were inappropriate ab initio and even more irrelevant as time marches on.  Anyway, a reader from outside the EU has written to me to ask about public performance rights in the EU:

"What is the current position regarding the regulated collection of royalties for public performances that are delivered over the internet in an integrated manner in the EU?"

Offhand, I couldn't think of a good answer, and ten minutes on my favourite search engine didn't leave me any better able to respond.  The question has a competition dimension to it as well as a copyright one. Can any reader suggest some worthwhile links and/or supplementary reading materials that will aid an "alien"?

Another reader, Sandra Alvera (Panasonic Europe), who has been closely following copyright levy issues, writes to draw our attention to Commissioner's Barnier's announcement about appointing Antonio Vitorino a mediator to address the process of stakeholder dialogue which, if we are lucky and he is successful, might just lead to the solution of some of the problems associated with copyright levies. Thanks, Sandra, for this link. The full text of the Commissioner's speech can be read here. He concludes with the following words:

"The fact that authors and other rightholders must receive fair compensation for the use of their work is not at issue. The issue is that all schemes used for the collection of this compensation should be organised in the most efficient way possible".

Fairness and efficiency make uncomfortable bedfellows, though, since efficiency has a deep and meaningful relationship with another powerful personality in the world of copyright -- arbitrary convenience.  Let's see how this troika works out ...

The ever-industrious Howard Knopf (Excess Copyright) has compiled a list of factums in the fair dealing cases which are currently before the Supreme Court of Canada: (i) SOCAN v. Bell et al (the “iTunes previews” case) SCC #33,800 and (ii) Province of Alberta et al v. Access Copyright (the K-12 “education” case) SCC #33,888. You can access them here.

From Andy Johnstone comes this link to a dispute between Singapore Press Holdings (publisher of The Straits Times) and Yahoo! in what he suspects might become "Singapore's Meltwater moment". Noting that the legislation has some similarities to the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 but also some notable differences, Andy prudently declines to call the odds on the outcome of this little spat over Yahoo!'s copying of editorial content into its aggregator: that's a job for one of our Singaporean readers (any volunteers?)

Bits and pieces

A quick reminder: the "Music and Intellectual Property" conference, which CLT Conferences is running on 8 December in Central London, is filling up nicely.  Subtitled "Identifying, Protecting and Enforcing Rights in Music", the programme features a double input from the 1709 Blog: Ben Challis (General Counsel, Glastonbury Festivals Ltd) speaks on "The Glastonbury Tales: the Practicalities of Festival Life and IP", while Jeremy Phillips takes the chair for the day. You can see the full programme here.  The "If music be the food of love, then copyright is ..." competition has received some hilarious entries -- though not all of them will escape the censor, I'm afraid. Details of the competition, for which the prize is free admission to this conference, can be found here.  More conference details can be found here.

Copyright Clearance Center has expanded its presence in Europe, the better to meet the needs of multinational corporate customers with the opening of its European subsidiary, called RightsDirect. This entity is intended to enable rightsholders and users in Europe to have access to voluntary licensing systems that have been available in the US for many years. Its Multinational Licence includes the rights to share content worldwide from millions of information sources. You have been warned ...

"If you're goin' to San Francisco,
Be sure to wear a flower in your hair ..."

Meanwhile, let's not forget Creative Commons.  This organisation is offering a Senior Counsel position which may appeal to readers of this weblog.  In short, while the details sound very American, the position is open to non-American lawyers. Indeed, the 1709 Blog has been given to believe that someone with a good knowldege of EU database law [well, that should reduce the field a bit!] would be very helpful.  European attorneys who wish to apply do not need to have a JD ("Educational Requirements" heading) or be admitted to practice in the US ("Other Qualifications" heading) at the time of application. However, they must be eligible and willing to sit for the California Bar Exam within the next year, and must be willing to relocate to San Francisco for the position ("Job Environment" heading). Everything else on the job posting is the same.

Bits and pieces

A new podcast has arrived at the headquarters of the 1709 Blog from Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond the Book site. It features Sree Sreenivasan (Dean of Student Affairs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism; former technology reporter) discussing about new media and innovation in the realm of copyright. He focuses on the topics of Hulu [note for non-US readers -- Hulu is a website offering commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies from NBC, Fox, ABC, and many other networks and studios; these videos are currently offered only to users in the United States and, to ensure that no international users outside the US have access to them, Hulu blocks many anonymous proxies and virtual private networks] and new media copyright (podcast here; transcript here).


Also from the Copyright Clearance Center comes news of this article in Ad Age which offers a thorough yet concise summary of the CCC's OnCopyright conference -- an event designed to explore how copyright applies in the digital age. Judy Shapiro, author of the article, highlights sessions with Google’s Senior Copyright Counsel Bill Patry, entrepreneurs, artists and media people who are all coping with working within a copyright compliant manner while being able to monetise their works (photo, left, by Duncan Davidson).


"Copyright's Private Domain" is the title of the Fifth Annual international Intellectual Property Lecture (funded by the Herchel Smith bequest), which will be held on Tuesday, April 27 5.30 pm for 6 pm. The speaker is Professor Graeme W. Austin (University of Arizona). What's this all about? Explains the publicity information:

"The public domain is valorised as the repository of raw material that makes all creativity possible, but it is not the only counterpoint to copyright's system of exclusive rights. With the current emphasis on the public domain in copyright commentary and political activism, we risk losing sight of the importance to creative processes of private imaginative activity, including private engagement with copyright-protected works. This lecture will examine ways that copyright and privacy law work together to create a "private domain," in which intellectual, imaginative and artistic experimentation and creativity can occur, away from public scrutiny and judgement. In the era of YouTube and MySpace and the like, with their relentless encouragement of public dissemination and display, it is useful to recall the importance of private contemplation and experimentation to the "learning" that copyright is meant to encourage.

Key copyright doctrines and policies map out copyright's private domain: copyright's protective attitude toward unpublished manuscripts, its exclusion of "private" performances from copyright owners' exclusive rights, defences for research and study, private copying provisions. On the privacy side, there are venerable links with copyright: copyright's solicitude toward privacy interests contributed to the development in some jurisdictions of a common law privacy right. Copyright's private domain is not a substitute for the public domain. Even so, recognition of the links between copyright and privacy, including of the ways that both foster creative and imaginative activity, might usefully contribute to debates about how best to fashion copyright law in a manner that serve the interests of both owners and users of copyright-protected works".

This lecture is by invitation only. Those wishing to receive an invitation should write to Carol Hosmer here.


A reminder for our readers: judgment will be given on Thursday 15 April in Case C-518/08 Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Visual Entidad de Gestión de Artistas Plásticos v Société des Auteurs dans les arts graphiques et plastiques, Juan-Leonardo Bonet Domenech, Eulalia-María Bas Dalí, María Del Carmen Domenech Biosca, Antonio Domenech Biosca, Ana-María Busquets Bonet, Mónica Busquets Bonet, a reference to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling on the legitimacy of the French provisions relating to the artist's resale right. The questions which the court is asked to address are:

"1. Can France, subsequent to [Directive 2001/84/EC] of 27 September 2001, retain a resale right allowed only to the heirs to the exclusion of legatees or successors in title?
2. Do the transitional provisions of Article 8(2) and (3) of [Directive 2001/84/EC] of 27 September 2001 allow France to have a derogation?".

The Advocate General's Opinion, delivered on 17 December last year, can be found here (noted by the IPKat here).