Copyright

Copyright Clearance Center Acquires Ixxus

Copyright-Clearance-CenterCopyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a firm dedicated to creating global licensing and content solutions that make copyright work, has acquired London-based Ixxus, a software professional services firm and leading provider of publishing solutions that reinvent the way organizations work with content. With offices in the UK, US, Spain and Romania, Ixxus is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of CCC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

According to The Radicati Group, the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2014 to more than $9.4 billion in 2018. This is an average annual growth of 15% over that timeframe. The Ixxus proposition goes beyond the traditional ECM offering, combining content modeling, semantic linking and advanced workflow capabilities to support the publishing process from end to end and deliver truly ‘smart content.’

Source: Copyright Clearance Center Acquires Ixxus | Digital Book World

Copyright’s “Double Spend” Problem: Digital First Sales 

Lance_Koonce_DWTJack Browning recently posted a great analysis regarding whether a new technology like the blockchain could revitalize the first sale doctrine under copyright law.  Jack used a terrific analogy to explain the first sale doctrine, from the Hugh Jackman movie The Prestige. In the film, in order to create the illusion of teleportation, Jackman’s character – who had access to a cloning device only (just watch the movie, okay?) — had to murder his own duplicate each time one was created, so that there was only one copy in the world at any given time.

In the digital world, the problem is that it is difficult to kill the original work when you sell the original version to a third party – you are not effecting a physical transfer of your copy.  Instead, what really happens is that you are making a copy of the work on a new computer, and the only way to get rid of the original is to delete it from the original location. To make sure that occurs, some trusted third party would have to ensure that the original copy was truly wiped from existence.

Sound familiar?  It’s precisely the same issue cryptocurrencies face, which as noted was (many believe) solved by the blockchain.

Source: Copyright’s “Double Spend” Problem: Digital First Sales | Davis Wright Tremaine LLP – JDSupra

Welcome to the RightsTech Revolution

Digital-handConcurrent Media Strategies, LLC, publisher of the Concurrent Media blog, and Digital Media Wire, Inc., producers of Digital Entertainment World and the New York Media Festival, among other conferences, today announced the official launch of RightsTech, a new forum — blog, newsletter, conferences — for cross-industry global collaboration focused on furthering technology innovation around rights management and licensing across multiple media verticals.

The inaugural RightsTech Summit will be held July 26 at the the Japan Society in New York City. The newsletter, which you can subscribe to here, will keep you up to date on all the news and conversation around the emerging RightsTech ecosystem. This blog will be an evolving platform for discussion and debate among the various stakeholders.

Will We Ever Hear the Hundreds of Songs Prince Left Behind?

It’s important to understand that even unreleased songs are protected by copyright as soon as an artist writes them down.

“Once [Prince] created it,” says Mike Carrier, a law professor at Rutgers, “it was fixed. It wasn’t just in his head. He didn’t just sing it once; he recorded it.” Still, no one knows who owns those copyrights now. Given his history with, and distrust of, the music industry, Prince’s heir or heirs may well fully own the recordings. Copyright lasts the life of the artist, plus 70 years.

(Mark your calendars for 2086, when Purple Rain enters the public domain.)

But “copyright is so much more about contracts, than it is about federal policy,” Vaidhyanathan says. “A copyright holder has tremendous power over what happens, how it’s released to the world.” We can’t say anything for sure so soon after his death, when so much remains unknown, but we can speculate. So let’s speculate.

Source: WIRED

Copyright Management: What If Instagram Used The Blockchain?

Nowadays the market for art is increasing its power thanks to social networks and platforms that allow anyone to express and publish their artistic creations on the web. Omitting the fact that we cannot always define those creations as ART, the democracy of self expression is growing up.But on the other hand – with this system, on the web – anyone can save or copy content, cheating the real author.

Source: Coin Telegraph

The Future of Protected IP and 3D Printing: Is Source3 and Their Licensed 3D Printed Album Covers a Model for New Media Distribution?

While the internet has changed the world in more ways than one could easily list, that doesn’t mean that all of those changes have been good for everyone.

One of the areas where digital technology and the internet haven’t paired well has been with intellectual property.

There has always been a thriving black market, or secondary market, for products that have been made without the consent of the copyright or trademark holder’s permission. However before the internet they rarely had any significant impact on businesses based simply on reach and scale. But with the relative anonymity and global access of the internet, the unauthorized use, reproduction or distribution of media like music, television, movies and artwork has made it easy to illegally trade and sell.

Source: 3DPrint.com

Could a Blockchain-Based Registry Ever Replace the Copyright Office?

Blockchaicopyrightn technology opens up the possibility for a provider to offer an immutable registry of transactions, held on a decentralized network of computers.

While financial applications continue to dominate the blockchain development landscape, as we’ve detailed in prior posts there are a growing number of companies offering registries for digital content, including Monegraph, ConSensys, Stem, Mediachain, ascribe and others.

A content registry, for the most part, is a registry of the ownership of intellectual property, most prominently copyright. Ideally, such a registry would accurately record original ownership of a work, and then also record all subsequent transactions involving that work. Since copyright interests are divisible, this can become an extremely complicated tree of transactions, very rapidly.

Source: JDSupra

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