Pondering Updates To Copyright Law In Digital Era

With Congress considering copyright reform and digital streaming upending the music business, the U.S. Copyright Office has announced it is studying the effectiveness of the music-licensing system. In an effort to assist Congress, the Copyright Office said it is looking for public input on Copyright Act of 1976 provisions that established government-regulated music-licensing regimes.

Specifically, the agency is curious about the public's views on the Copyright Royalty Board's royalty rate setting and the licensing processes for musical works and sound recordings, among other issues. The agency is accepting comments until May 16.

“While the Copyright Act reflects many sound and enduring principles, and has enabled the Internet to flourish, Congress could not have foreseen all of today's technologies and the myriad ways consumers and others engage with creative works in the digital environment,” the Copyright Office said in a Federal Register notice. “Perhaps nowhere has the landscape been as significantly altered as in the realm of music.” See, “Music Licensing Study: Notice and Request for Public Comment.”'

Proposed Legislation

The House Judiciary Committee under its chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), has held several hearings on the Copyright Act since April 2013 as part of a comprehensive review of the statute. See, http://1.usa.gov/1eJPwwS. Last month, the panel had a hearing on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a Copyright Act update intended to better protect copyrighted material in the digital age. See, http://1.usa.gov/OVD2Zt.

In February, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), a member of the house panel, introduced legislation intended to help songwriters, composers and publishers receive fair market royalty rates for their music. The Songwriter Equity Act (H.R. 4079) would update Copyright Act procedure and rate provisions that American Society of Composers, Authors and Publisher President and Chairman Paul Williams said create “a dramatic disparity between the compensation of music copyright holders.”

As policymakers in Washington, DC, are determining ways to better combat online piracy, NBCUniversal Inc. and other copyright holders gathered last month to discuss the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and called for flexible solutions to protect their content. Representatives of the Comcast Corp. subsidiary, along with Copyright Alliance, Artists Rights Society and other organizations, said a single approach to improving the current system under the 1998 copyright law wouldn't work for every content provider and Internet business.

Industry Gets Into the Act

NBCUniversal Vice President David Greene, Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars and Artists Rights Society advocate Bruce Lehman offered their opinions as part of a forum hosted by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force. The group is looking at ways to reform the process for removing infringing online content under the DMCA.

Aistars said policymakers must be cognizant of the differences between the online infringement of art and written work, for example. And Lehman noted a copyright enforcement mechanism that might work well for a large company might not help members of his group, which includes artists who identify themselves as sole proprietors. “We can't really have a one-size-fits-all system because there are huge differences in various categories of stakeholders,” said Lehman, a former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) commissioner.

Greene also said a common notice system to alert online businesses of infringement might have problems. “There may be a particular notice that works very well for [Internet Service Providers], but that notice may not work for search engines, and that kind of notice might not work for cloud services,” he said.

Technology industry representatives offered their thoughts on fighting online piracy, too. Fred von Lohmann, legal director for copyright at Google Inc., said his company has worked to standardize notification forms for copyright infringement, helping it better address copyright violations. “I think I speak for many service providers when I say getting us out of a world where we receive e-mails and dozens or hundreds of different forms with attachments and potentially dozens of different formats, that has yielded huge efficiency gains and improvements in turnaround time,” he said.

The forum came out of the Commerce Department's green paper “Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy,” http://1.usa.gov/1oZP9ll. The July 2013 report recommended tackling issues that include the operation of the DMCA notice and takedown system for infringing online content, the role of government in online licensing and the legal framework for making remixes.

Angela Simpson, the deputy assistant secretary of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA; www.ntia.doc.gov), said the forum was only the beginning of a process to improve DMCA. “I'm not guaranteeing that it'll always be easy,” she said. “But by sitting down together to work through these challenges, [stakeholders] can create solutions that can be both effective and workable.”

Shira Perlmutter, chief policy officer and director for international affairs at the PTO, said the Obama administration's work on DMCA improvements isn't meant to conflict with congressional efforts or other discussions on copyright reform.

“Our process is intended to be complementary to all of their work,” she said.

Andrew Ramonas writes for Corporate Counsel, an ALM sibling of Entertainement Law & Finance.

With Congress considering copyright reform and digital streaming upending the music business, the U.S. Copyright Office has announced it is studying the effectiveness of the music-licensing system. In an effort to assist Congress, the Copyright Office said it is looking for public input on Copyright Act of 1976 provisions that established government-regulated music-licensing regimes.

Specifically, the agency is curious about the public's views on the Copyright Royalty Board's royalty rate setting and the licensing processes for musical works and sound recordings, among other issues. The agency is accepting comments until May 16.

“While the Copyright Act reflects many sound and enduring principles, and has enabled the Internet to flourish, Congress could not have foreseen all of today's technologies and the myriad ways consumers and others engage with creative works in the digital environment,” the Copyright Office said in a Federal Register notice. “Perhaps nowhere has the landscape been as significantly altered as in the realm of music.” See, “Music Licensing Study: Notice and Request for Public Comment.”'

Proposed Legislation

The House Judiciary Committee under its chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), has held several hearings on the Copyright Act since April 2013 as part of a comprehensive review of the statute. See, http://1.usa.gov/1eJPwwS. Last month, the panel had a hearing on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a Copyright Act update intended to better protect copyrighted material in the digital age. See, http://1.usa.gov/OVD2Zt.

In February, Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), a member of the house panel, introduced legislation intended to help songwriters, composers and publishers receive fair market royalty rates for their music. The Songwriter Equity Act (H.R. 4079) would update Copyright Act procedure and rate provisions that American Society of Composers, Authors and Publisher President and Chairman Paul Williams said create “a dramatic disparity between the compensation of music copyright holders.”

As policymakers in Washington, DC, are determining ways to better combat online piracy, NBCUniversal Inc. and other copyright holders gathered last month to discuss the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and called for flexible solutions to protect their content. Representatives of the Comcast Corp. subsidiary, along with Copyright Alliance, Artists Rights Society and other organizations, said a single approach to improving the current system under the 1998 copyright law wouldn't work for every content provider and Internet business.

Industry Gets Into the Act

NBCUniversal Vice President David Greene, Copyright Alliance CEO Sandra Aistars and Artists Rights Society advocate Bruce Lehman offered their opinions as part of a forum hosted by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force. The group is looking at ways to reform the process for removing infringing online content under the DMCA.

Aistars said policymakers must be cognizant of the differences between the online infringement of art and written work, for example. And Lehman noted a copyright enforcement mechanism that might work well for a large company might not help members of his group, which includes artists who identify themselves as sole proprietors. “We can't really have a one-size-fits-all system because there are huge differences in various categories of stakeholders,” said Lehman, a former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) commissioner.

Greene also said a common notice system to alert online businesses of infringement might have problems. “There may be a particular notice that works very well for [Internet Service Providers], but that notice may not work for search engines, and that kind of notice might not work for cloud services,” he said.

Technology industry representatives offered their thoughts on fighting online piracy, too. Fred von Lohmann, legal director for copyright at Google Inc., said his company has worked to standardize notification forms for copyright infringement, helping it better address copyright violations. “I think I speak for many service providers when I say getting us out of a world where we receive e-mails and dozens or hundreds of different forms with attachments and potentially dozens of different formats, that has yielded huge efficiency gains and improvements in turnaround time,” he said.

The forum came out of the Commerce Department's green paper “Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy,” http://1.usa.gov/1oZP9ll. The July 2013 report recommended tackling issues that include the operation of the DMCA notice and takedown system for infringing online content, the role of government in online licensing and the legal framework for making remixes.

Angela Simpson, the deputy assistant secretary of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA; www.ntia.doc.gov), said the forum was only the beginning of a process to improve DMCA. “I'm not guaranteeing that it'll always be easy,” she said. “But by sitting down together to work through these challenges, [stakeholders] can create solutions that can be both effective and workable.”

Shira Perlmutter, chief policy officer and director for international affairs at the PTO, said the Obama administration's work on DMCA improvements isn't meant to conflict with congressional efforts or other discussions on copyright reform.

“Our process is intended to be complementary to all of their work,” she said.

Andrew Ramonas writes for Corporate Counsel, an ALM sibling of Entertainement Law & Finance.