Rights

Launching in Q4 2021, Musixmatch says that Musixmatch Pro is aimed at providing a self-service platform “for all music creators and professionals” where they can “verify music credits, claim and administrate copyrights, distribute music, and get paid”. Musixmatch says that the new service will act as a “one-stop-shop” for distribution and will feature tools to verify and distribute music, lyrics, visual assets and related metadata.

Source: Over 500,000 artists manage their lyrics through Musixmatch. Now it’s expanding into distribution.

The United States Copyright Office has officially released a report designed “to recommend best practices” for the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) as it works to resolve unmatched royalties and make an inaugural unclaimed royalties distribution, including a far-reaching recommendation pertaining to the timetable associated with the entity’s first such distribution.

Source: Mechanical Licensing Collective to Delay Unclaimed Payout, Says USCO

One of the copyright mechanisms available to ensure people can use copyright protected content for purposes like freedom of expression, access to information and right to education are ‘exceptions and limitations to copyright’. In order for these exceptions to be functional in the context of online use, they need to be uniform throughout the EU, which at present, they are mostly not.

Source: The EU Copyright Reform’s great disservice to free use for educational purposes | Europeana Pro

The court ruled as follows: To be registered as a patented sign, a sound must like any other registered sign have something distinctive about it, to distinguish it from all others. It is not distinctive to attempt to register ‘fizzy drinks can’ any more than it would be to copyright ‘music using notes on a 12-step scale’.

Source: European Court: You can’t copyright the sound of a fizzy drink

Riot Games has released a copyright-free album of lo-fi music designed for online creators to use while streaming. The 37-track album is titled Sessions: Vi, and it gives streamers music to play without fear of copyright strikes. Riot Games has made the album available on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. The move comes as game developers are working around Twitch’s current limitations.

Source: Riot Games Releases Copyright-Free Lo-Fi Album for Streamers

Few book authors have filed termination notices, and those that have tend to be the most famous. This might indicate that even with new technologies, books have a very short shelf-life (far shorter than 35 years!). The list of authors filing termination notices under § 203 is a who’s who of bestsellers: Francine Pascal (Sweet Valley High), Ann M Martin (Babysitters Club), Nora Roberts, Steven King, Isaac Asimov, Philip Roth, and David Eddings.

Source: Who is terminating their copyrights? New research and open access datasets from the Author’s Interest Project

A California police officer played Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” in an attempt to prevent a Black Lives Matter activist from uploading a video to YouTube — in the belief that the platform’s copyright-detection system would block it. It didn’t work.

Source: Cop Played Taylor Swift Song Hoping YouTube’s Copyright System Would Block BLM Protestor’s Video, Ploy Backfires

Roblox signed a deal with Sony Music Entertainment under which the companies plan to feature more Sony artists in the popular massively multiplayer online game. The companies said the partnership will “offer a range of new commercial opportunities for Sony Music artists” to reach new fans and generate new revenue streams around virtual entertainment.

Source: Roblox Inks Deal With Sony Music to Bring More Artists Into Its Game

One of the key messages Borghino touches on is that although the world publishing industry needs copyright regulation to remain stable, dependable, and supported by enforcement, there are times and opportunities for flexibility—as has been seen during the COVID-19 pandemic when educational publishers opted into special permissions that allowed teachers to use copyrighted texts in online teaching.

Source: As WIPO’s 41st Copyright Talks Close: José Borghino on IPA’s Focus

The Supreme Court ruling was a mixed bag that many observers are still parsing. In a 6-2 decision, justices sided with Google and its argument that the company’s copying of 11,500 lines of code from Oracle’s Java in the Android operating system was fair use. At the same time, though, the court appeared to be operating under the assumption that APIs are copyrightable.

Source: Months later, we’re still making sense of the Supreme Court’s API copyright ruling