[Note: A slightly edited version of this post has been published in Vol.35, No.9 of The Licensing Journal (Wolters Kluwer, October 2015)] A guitarist contacted me recently. He creates arrangements of popular songs and puts the PDFs of the music for sale on his website. The first thing I asked him is whether he got […]
A lot of people are wondering what it means for the music industry since it was reported that the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), the leading trade organization for US music publishers, has sold its wholly-owned mechanical licensing subsidiary, The Harry Fox Agency, Inc. (HFA) to SESAC, Inc., the smallest of the three domestic music […]
On a certain level, the June 18 decision from the Fourth Circuit in Copeland v. Bieber is fairly routine, with only the click-bait of pop star defendants Justin Bieber and Usher setting the case apart from any other copyright infringement case involving music. However, since this is an appellate decision, unlike the jury verdict in […]
In its June 29 opinion in 16 Casa Duse, LLC v. Merkin, the Second Circuit, citing the Ninth Circuit’s en banc decision in Garcia v. Google, held that a director does not have an independent copyrightable interest in a motion picture. In addition to affirming the District Court’s granting of summary judgment in favor of […]
On May 18, BMI’s “Rate Court” judge, Louis L. Stanton of the Southern District of New York, ruled in BMI’s favor in its rate dispute with Pandora. However, it wasn’t until May 28 that Judge Stanton’s 60-page opinion was made public. As my former colleague, BMI’s CEO, Mike O’Neill, reminded me at the BMI Student […]
The Copyright Office recently issued several well-considered studies and recommendations, like the music licensing report. And Register Pallante has been bold in her call to Congress for increased independence and resources so as to best serve all copyright constituents in the digital age. So I take no pleasure in crying foul over the Copyright Office’s […]
On April 29, the head of the Copyright Office, Register Maria A. Pallante, was the sole witness before the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing entitled The Register’s Perspective on Copyright Review. Both her oral and written statements — the latter consisting of a 32-page memorandum with copious footnotes and an appendix of proposed technical […]
Those who don’t practice copyright law might be surprised that the Copyright Office is neither an independent agency nor part of the Commerce Department, the home of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Instead, as the Register of Copyrights, Maria A. Pallante, reminded us in a lengthy letter to the House Judiciary Committee, the Copyright […]
What’s worse than sitting through seven episodes of Three’s Company? Reading a federal district judge’s summaries of them. And yet that CliffsNotes analysis, including delving into the cultural significance of the fluffy sitcom, takes up much of the 56-page opinion recently issued by Loretta Preska, Chief Judge of the Southern District of New York. In […]
The “Copyright and Marriage Equality Act,” as set forth in S.23 and H.R. 238, was sponsored in the Senate by Sen. Leahy (D-VT) and in the House by Rep. Kilmer (D-WA) right after New Year’s. You might ask what does marriage equality have to do with copyrights? After all, if I’m a songwriter, novelist, photographer […]