Copyright Office – RightsTech Project

The role of copyright law in the FCC’s set-top box rulemaking

August 16, 2016By rightstech

While there seem to be broader problems with the proposed approach to increasing set-top box “competition,” the Copyright Office focused only on those aspects within the scope of its own unique expertise—the serious conflicts between the Proposed Rule and US copyright laws.

The Copyright Office thus explained how those copyright-related conflicts could affect all parties—content creators, MVPDs, third-party software or device developers, and consumers—implicated by the Proposed Rule.

Source: The role of copyright law in the FCC’s set-top box rulemaking

Wagging Music Publishing’s Long Tail

June 27, 2016By rightstech

Bill Colitre Last week’s announcement that the U.S. Copyright Office had successfully accepted a bulk submission of notices of intent (NOIs) for compulsory mechanical licenses in electronic form marked a major milestone, both for the Office and for Music Reports Inc., which delivered the NOIs on behalf of music streaming service Guvera.

Music Reports has been working with the Copyright Office for more than a decade as part of the Office’s fitful, and at times halfhearted, effort to upgrade the creaky, pre-digital process for submitting and accessing music publishing information to at least 20th century standards if not quite 21st. Last week’s successful test run on the Office’s new, electronic submission system, involving about 100 tracks, is believed to be the first such hand-off.

“We’re now ready to start doing this at scale. It’s a big, big step,” Music Report’s VP and general counsel Bill Colitre told RightsTech.com.

But it was only one step toward solving what Colitre says is a much bigger problem: the vast and fast-growing amount of music being released on digital platforms today for which publishing information is not available, if it was ever collected in the first place.

U.S. Copyright Office Clears Path for Digital Compulsory Licenses

June 24, 2016By rightstech

Until recently, NOIs had to be filed manually, by paper and under a prohibitive pricing structure. So if you started a service and had the publishing data for say 5 million songs, but did not have the information for another 500,000 songs, the service would need to file NOIs, saying it is licensing and using those songs with the Copyright Office. That process would cost $75 to register for the filing of all those songs, and $2 a song, or about $1 million. Also, the NOI for each song would need to be filed individually, although they could all be batch delivered to the Copyright Office.

But about two months ago, the Copyright Office revamped the way it is willing to accept NOIs and changed its pricing structure. Now, NOIs can be filed on excel spreadsheets, with something like 20 columns of relevant data needed to be completed for each song. This electronic filing still requires an upfront fee of $75 but it now only costs 10 cents a track. So now, filing NOIs for 500,00 songs will only cost $50,075, instead of $1.000075 million.

Source: U.S. Copyright Office Clears Path for Digital Compulsory Licenses | Billboard