IP News September 2018
Welcome to IP News This Month. Here’s your 5-minute guide to all things intellectual property, culled from news reports from around the world. Tips or comments? Send them direct to jeffjohnroberts AT gmail.com. Tell your friends to subscribe here! – Jeff
Top 3 Stories
Europe strikes back: EU passes copyright directive to counter North American approach to the Internet. Supporters say it will mean fair payment for artists, but critics warn it will bring censorship and entrench tech monopolies
High noon at NAFTA over pharma IP: US presses Canada to increase data exclusivity for biologics as Professor Gold warns of new costs for Canadians without a benefit
Commonwealth compromise: the mints of Canada and Australia ended a 3 year court fight over the Aussies’ alleged infringement of a patented technique for coloured coins
Canada
In a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court held ISPs may charge copyright owners a reasonable fee when they are obliged by court order to supply the names and addresses of infringers
The founder of Shopify says the country should be cautious of U.S. tech companies coming to Canada, in part because they may acquire Canadian IP but deliver its value to the US
Prof Gervais and rocker Bryan Adams told a Parliamentary committee that reversion rights should be available to artists 25 years after assignment, not 25 years after death
United States
SCOTUS agreed to hear a case over whether costs awarded in copyright decisions can include nontaxable items like witness fees
The “Stairway to Heaven” copyright case will go back before a jury as an appeals court ruled a judge erred by not allowing the plaintiff to play songs in court
Congress passed The Music Modernization Act, which creates new blanket licenses for digital music and takes a more high-tech approach to royalty collection
The law will also create a new federal levy for sound recording made before 1972, and protect them for up to 110 years
A new appeals court ruling means Harvard and MIT have likely won a bitter fight with California universities over key CRISPR patents
The Senate is renewing a push to make the Register of Copyrights a political appointee by the Presidnet; the EFF thinks this is a terrible idea, claiming the position should be non-partisan
Google will soon include copyright metadata for images, including the identity of the photographer and who owns the right to a picture
Dating app Bumble rejected Tinder’s accusations of patent and trade secret theft; the legal fight is bitter as Bumble’s founder was a Tinder co-founder who says she was pushed out by sexism
Europe
Artist and copyright provacateur Jeff Koons is being sued by a French advertising director who claims a Koons sculpture is a “servile copy” of a famous ad
Le Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris gutted Twitter’s terms of service after finding a copyright provision, which grants a near-unlimited future license, to be illegal
International
Banks in Australia are balking over a consumer data rights law, claiming it will strip their IP assets by forcing them to turn over “value-added data” like credit scores
Nintendo invoked its IP rights to shut down a Tokyo attraction that let tourists dress up in Super Mario costumes and drive carts around the city
This content has been updated on January 14, 2019 at 13:51.
Comments