Weekly Copyright Update

April 29, 2016

Prince’s Last Words: Stop Stealing My Music

BY PAUL RESNIKOFF: Prince was a tireless and tenacious crusader against exploitation by record labels, streaming services, ISPs, and Google. But is Prince’s war now dead? Just hours after Prince’s death, Google constructed a massive, search-driven homage to the pop superstar. … It was an ironic monument, reminiscent of a band of pioneers naming their town after the Indian chief they just scalped. Google, after all, was the focus of a massive legal war by Prince, based on their refusal to systematically remove his content. READ MORE…

Inside Taylor Swift Anti-Piracy Battle: Massive Effort To Block Pirates

HYPEBOT.COM: A Universal Music Group filing with the U.S. Copyright office designed to bolster the case that Safe Harbor standards need an overhaul, reveals the lengths that the company went to limit piracy on Taylor Swift’s 2014 release ‘1989’, 210,000+ Takedowns. In the last 18 months, teams working for UMG, label Big Machine, the RIAA and the IFPA have issued 66,000 notices to sites hosting unauthorized copies of ‘1989.’ They’ve also blocked nearly or issued take downs for nearly 150,o000 uploads to YouTube and SoundCloud. READ MORE…

How Playlists Are Redefining Music Listening

MusicIndustryBlog.com: Later this week we’ll be publish a new report in the MIDiA Research Music report and data service: ‘After The Album: How Playlists Are Re-Defining Listening’. In it we explore the changing role of streaming playlists and in particular how they are impact albums both as a consumption format and as a revenue model. The full 18 page report includes half a dozen graphics and a couple of sheets of excel, including a detailed revenue model. I want to share with you here one of the key themes we explore in the report… READ MORE…

Getty Images Accuses Google of Copyright Infringement

BY KISHALAYA KUNDU: When it rains, it pours. That saying holds true for Google now more than ever before, and not in a good way either. Even as the company continues to fight against all the allegations leveled against it at the European Commission, it keeps getting targeted with complaints and lawsuits from newer fronts with alarming regularity. Getty Images, the Seattle, Washington-based stock photo agency, is now the latest entity to join the long list of companies, organizations and governments to have now come up with an objection to the way Google goes about its business. According to a complaint received by the European Commission from Getty, Google’s policy of scraping full-screen, high-resolution, copyrighted images from websites and displaying them on its own site is a breach of copyright laws in Europe. READ MORE…

U.S. Supreme Court Hears Arguments in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

BY RAJIT KAPUR: April 25, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., No. 15-375. The Court’s ruling in this case ultimately may affect the circumstances in which attorney’s fees are awarded to prevailing parties in copyright infringement cases. This case began more than 10 years ago, when Kirtsaeng, a native of Thailand, developed a successful business in which he obtained foreign-edition copies of English-language textbooks abroad below their U.S. market prices and resold them in the U.S. at a profit. Wiley sued Kirtsaeng for copyright infringement in 2008, alleging that Kirtsaeng violated Wiley’s exclusive rights in distributing its copyrighted works and in preventing unauthorized importation of its copyrighted works.