Rights

The pandemic has required us to reorganise our lives and rethink how several laws operate. While much of the intellectual property rights (IPR) debate  has been about patents in the medical context, the boundaries of copyright are being tested as well. With teaching moving online, there have been many questions on how copyright laws and “fair use” provisions extend to online uses.

Source: Digital libraries and copyright confusion

Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier was not able to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.

Source: MIT, guided by open access principles, ends Elsevier negotiations

Twitch plans to start automatically scanning clips of live streams for copyrighted music following a wave of takedown requests on years-old videos, which has frustrated streamers over the last week. Twitch says it will automatically delete clips with copyrighted music in them and that it will not penalize streamers — under its current rules, streamers can get strikes for copyright violations that could ultimately lead to a ban.

Source: Twitch will begin scanning and deleting clips that contain copyrighted music

Set up to serve visitors in both English and Italian, the New Italian Books site will showcase titles with metadata provided directly by publishers. Each listing is to have a short extract in translation as well as the original Italian, a biographical profile of the author, and contact details to reach relevant rights holders.

Source: New Books From Italy: Launching an International Rights Sales Program

A forthright message from BMG’s CEO Hartwig Masuch, on the topic of anti-racism and the treatment of black artists, landed in the inbox of performers and their managers via BMG’s my-BMG app on Tuesday (June 9). In it, Masuch said: “Mindful of the music industry’s record of shameful treatment of black artists, we have begun a review of all historic record contracts.

Source: BMG pledges to review historical record contracts ‘mindful of the music industry’s shameful treatment of black artists’

Publishing industry revenue from 2019 was $3,719,796,271, representing an 11.55% growth rate from 2018 to 2019. Breaking that revenue down, performance continued to be the most dominant category with 52.30%, followed by sync with 22.69%, mechanical with 18.53% and miscellaneous with the remaining 6.48%.

Source: NMPA Honors Garth Brooks, Reports Over $3.7 Billion in 2019 Revenue

We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic.  However, this lawsuit is not just about the temporary National Emergency Library. The complaint attacks the concept of any library owning and lending digital books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in the digital world.

Source: Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early, returning to traditional controlled digital lending – Internet Archive Blogs

As people spend more time at home amid coronavirus restrictions, many of them are turning to video-streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and HBO Now more than ever. The problem is, so are their families and friends. Although the services allow people to share accounts, they place limits on how many devices can stream at once, stirring tensions among loved ones.

Source: You’ve Shared Your Netflix Password With Your Entire Family. Now You Can’t Watch Netflix.

Doctorow and the EFF have their critics within the music industry, as this response to his plan from Music Technology Policy blog shows. In the interview, he suggested that there is common ground between the EFF and artist rights groups. “If there’s one thing that EFF and artist groups completely agree on is that artists incomes have not been improved” by many of the developments in online music distribution.

Source: Debating Cory Doctorow’s internet blanket music licensing plan

Deepfakes are often portrayed as a political threat — fake videos of politicians making comments they never made. But in a recent report, the research group Deeptrace found that 96 percent of deepfakes found online are pornographic. Of those videos, virtually all are of women. And virtually all are made without their consent.

Source: The most urgent threat of deepfakes isn’t politics. It’s porn.