THE COPYKAT

The Verge have published a new article on the role and implications of AI - artificial intelligence - in the 'authorship' of musical works - although the same thoughts must surely apply to artistic, literary and dramatic works . In 'WE’VE BEEN WARNED ABOUT AI AND MUSIC FOR OVER 50 YEARS, BUT NO ONE’S PREPARED' Dani Deahl asks some interesting questions - and find very few answers! As AI begins to reshape how music is made, how are our legal systems going to answer some messy questions regarding authorship. Do AI algorithms create their own work, or is it the humans behind them? What happens if AI software trained solely on Beyoncé creates a track that sounds just like her? Just a few of the thoughts in there!  Jonathan Bailey, CTO of audio tech company iZotope, seemed to most concisely sum up the issue “I won’t mince words,” he told The Verge. “This is a total legal clusterfuck.”

Bloomberg reports that a US photographer could lose some or all of a $450,000 jury award because he didn’t establish that the allegedly infringing business owner willfully infringed his copyrights by hiring a web developer who used unlicensed images. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit April 16 reversed part of a jury verdict in favor of photographer Jim Erickson in his 2013 lawsuit against Kraig Rudinger Kast holding that Erickson failed to show Kast financially benefited from the infringement or went beyond negligence into willfulness, remanding those issues back to the lower court: “Negligence is a less culpable mental state than actual knowledge, willful blindness, or recklessness, the three mental states that properly support a finding of willfulness”. And more on in a similar vein from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the case between BWP Media and e-commerce website Polyvore - digested by the New York Law Journal here. 

The US government has published its annual piracy report from the US Trade Representative which highlights where the US feels IP rights are most at risk. Both of America's closest neighbours, Canada and Mexico, appear on the list of countries that should be doing more to protect IP rights but special mention goes to Algeria, Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Venezuela. In a statement the UTSR said  "These trading partners will be the subject of increased bilateral engagement with USTR to address IP concerns. For such countries that fail to address US concerns, USTR will take appropriate actions". Drilling down into where the problems lie,The Pirate Bay gets a mention but the report acknowledges that other forms of piracy are now out-performing file-sharing. The report notes that "pirate streaming sites continue to gain popularity, overtaking pirate torrent and direct download sites for distribution of pirated content". The USTR says that the aim of its annual piracy bad boys list is "to motivate appropriate action by the private sector and governments to reduce piracy and counterfeiting".

A US federal appeals court has rejected a fair use ruling by a lower court in a case that focuses on what can and cannot be considered when applying the doctrine. The District Court in Brammer v. Violent Hues had found that the unauthorised use of a photograph qualified as fair use, even though it was a commercial use that did little to give any new meaning to the original photograph. At the time of the ruling US District Judge Claude M Hilton was widely criticised by legal observers and photographers’ trade groups who disagreed with his ruling that Violent Hues’s use of Brammer’s photo was “transformative” because Brammer had created the image for “promotional” purposes, while Violent Hues used it for “informational” purposes. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has emphatically reversed the lower court’s ruling saying “What Violent Hues did was publish a tourism guide for a commercial event and include [Brammer’s] Photo to make the end product more visually interesting. Such a use would not constitute fair use when done in print, and it does not constitute fair use on the Internet” adding “If the ordinary commercial use of stock photography constituted fair use, professional photographers would have little financial incentive to produce their work” and that " “fair us is not designed to protect lazy appropriators". 

Today the CopyKat pokes a ponderous paw at politics

Stan McCoy, the assistant US Trade Representative who oversaw the creation of the copyright provisions in ACTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership has left the Obama administration for a job at the film industry's lobbying group, the MPAA. The Obama administration has headhunted software industry lobbyist Robert Holleyman  (who supported SOPA) to take over his job. More on this revolving door between the US government and content owners' lobby groups and trade associations on Vox here.

Karl Marx

An unusual copyright spat has caught the attention of a number of blogs who noticed that the radical publishing house Lawrence & Wishart - at one time was connected to Great Britain's Communist Party - was demanding the removal from the Marxists Internet Archive of the "Marx-Engels Collected Works" - a series of US $25-$50 hard cover books - because the texts were their translations - and they had copyright in those translations. The archive has posted a message to its readers informing them that Lawrence & Wishart's material would be removed by April 30 although that "English translations of Marx and Engels from other sources will continue to be available." The Socialist Worker asks "Should Marx and Engels be copyrighted?" quoting an opinion from Andrew Leonard who says  'I wonder — just how angry would Karl Marx get if he learned that the publisher of his collected works, in the name of maximizing profits, was using copyright law to hinder the cause of “equipping the working-class movement with the scientific ideology… for the realization… of communism” ?' More here: http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2014/04/26/should-marx-and-engels-be-copy

Reed on oh great minister

Popular Bulgarian musicians have delivered proposals for amendments to the Bulgarian Copyright Act at the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture in Sofia to Bulgarian Minister of Culture Petar Stoyanovich and Deputy Minister of Culture Vasil Vasilev by symbolically handing over their proposals written on papyrus. The proposals for amendments concern five articles of the Bulgarian Copyrights Act: Article 21 (cable re-transmission); Article 26 (free carriers); Article 40 (tariffs regulation); Article 58; and Article 98. At the meeting it was agreed to hold another meeting in two weeks. Different Bulgarian musicians have united under the motto “For REVIVAL of the Bulgarian culture” supporting the cause of establishing stable legal preconditions for development of the Bulgarian culture and the wish of Bulgarian artists to declare their will for the establishment of an optimal mechanism for protection of their rights. The ministers expressed readiness to do their best to establish a normal environment where the Bulgarian artists can work and create. 

Trevor Clarke, Assistant Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has told a conference in Tehran that although Iran has taken concrete steps to protect the intellectual property rights, it should join the Universal Copyright Convention. Iran joined the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2001 and approved the Lisbon Agreement for the Protection of Appellations of Origin and their International Registration in 2005.

And the United States has removed the Philippines from its blacklist of countries which fail to properly protect U.S. copyrights and patents, the U.S. Trade Representative said on Monday.
Whilst the Philippines had introduced laws to better protect intellectual property rights and also beefed up enforcement, there was more to be done with the USTR stating "Although significant challenges remain, the commitment of Philippine authorities and the results achieved merit this change in status". 

And finally, PCWorld lets us into a leak from the European Commission which reveals that EU lawmakers believe that micro-licensing could solve copyright problems related to user generated content (UGC). The document, which pre-dates the latest public consultation on EU copyright reform, takes the view that although there are problems with UCG, “legal certainty” may be provided through micro-licences: The document says that “There remain technological obstacles to the ability of UCG generators to identify themselves and reap economic reward for their work”.