The Patent and Trademark Office's new San Jose office will host a program on efficient patent prosecution Nov. 17, it said in a news release Monday. The program's three sessions will be on topics including virtual interviewing capabilities, utilizing prior art search tools and using the patent ombudsman to resolve procedural prosecution issues, said the PTO.
Kudelski Group subsidiaries Nagra France and OpenTV filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Verizon and its subsidiary AOL in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Nagra said in a news release Monday. The suit alleges Verizon and AOL products and services -- including FiOS TV, FiOS TV Everywhere, Go90 video services, Redbox Instant and AOL's Spot On advertising and streaming video services -- infringe on at least one of seven U.S. patents held by OpenTV and Nagra France. Verizon didn't comment.
The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) sought comment on a motion for partial distribution of digital audio recording technology (DART) fees included in the 2014 Sound Recordings Fund, in Monday’s Federal Register. An Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies (AARC) settlement agreement filed in late July said it and parties it has reached settlements with agreed to distribute 98 percent of DART fees from the Sound Recordings Fund’s subfunds for copyright owners and featured recording artists. All but one claimant to the Featured Recording Artists Subfund reached a settlement, as have all but four claimants to the Copyright Owners Subfund, AARC said. CRB said it’s seeking comment from parties on whether any “reasonable objection exists” that would preclude the distribution of the DART fees. Comments on the partial distribution motion are due Dec. 2.
SESAC is trying to get radio stations to sign an alternative to the settlement it reached with the Radio Music License Committee (RMLC), said Fletcher Heald attorneys Kevin Goldberg and Harry Cole on the firm’s blog Thursday. The letters offering stations the alternative agreement offer a “reduced fee schedule” for 2016-18 if the stations sign by Nov. 15, the lawyers said. “We’re hearing a lot of chatter from radio stations on the heels of this letter, with stations confused as to (1) whether signing on directly with SESAC binds them to the settlement agreement or not and, (2) what to do.” RMLC “seems confident” that the actual settlement agreement “will result in license fees considerably below those now being offered by SESAC for 2016-2018,” the blog said. The SESAC offer also only goes to 2018, while the actual settlement agreement is for the next 20 years, the blog said. The deals are mutually exclusive, the blog said. Stations “can sign up individually for SESAC licenses, in which case they will be on their own to negotiate future fees on a one-on-one basis. Or they can sign up with RMLC, thereby aligning themselves with a broad cross-section of the radio industry on one side of the negotiating table -- with the added assurance of an arbitration process as a safety net if the negotiation fails,” said the blog post from the firm with broadcast clients. SESAC didn't comment.
The Patent and Trademark Office will perform maintenance on certain systems next week, which will make access unavailable to its online patent application filing systems, it said in a news release Thursday. The maintenance will be from 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. Nov. 7, and will affect online accessibility to its public and private Patent Application Information Retrieval systems, plus EFS-Web and EFS-Web Contingency electronic filing systems, said the PTO. During the outage, patent applicants can submit new documents, applications and fee payments by mail using procedures here, but are encouraged to transmit electronic filings before the outage period, the release said.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) will host a webinar concerning comments received on its Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative (EPQI) and the next steps it's considering, the PTO said in a news release Wednesday. The online chat will take place Nov. 10 and be hosted by Valencia Martin Wallace, PTO deputy commissioner for patent quality, and Senior Adviser Sandie Spyrou. The speakers will present a summary of comments received on EPQI, discuss how PTO plans to be responsive to the comments and provide more comprehensive details about the initiative, the release said.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation praised Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Friday for requesting a Copyright Office study of the role of copyright law on the use of “software-enabled devices.” EFF said that issue is “crucial because technology and the law have evolved in a way that no one could have intended when Congress wrote the present copyright laws.” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante in a letter Thursday that “this is a complex field, and how we interact with software in our products touches on numerous important policy arenas, including intellectual property, privacy, consumer protection, public safety, cybersecurity, competition, and the evolution of the digital marketplace.” The CO should “undertake a comprehensive review of the role of copyright in the complex set of relationships at the heart of these issues,” Grassley and Leahy wrote. That review should examine how legitimate usage of software-enabled products is affected by existing copyright law, how innovation is affected by those provisions and what changes to copyright law would affect the creation and use of software-enabled products, Grassley and Leahy said. The CO said Friday it’s “pleased” to have received Senate Judiciary’s study request and “will ask for public input to ensure that the Office’s report considers the views of all in the copyright community, including copyright owners and public interest groups.” The CO is expected Wednesday to release its ruling on proposed exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 1201’s ban on the circumvention of technological protection measures. EFF, which has advocated for several of the 27 proposed exemptions under review as part of CO’s triennial Section 1201 exemptions rulemaking process, said it believes Section 1201 “has restricted customers’ freedoms to repair, understand, and improve on the devices they buy.” EFF said it believes “there is already an extensive record establishing the need to rein in Section 1201, to protect device owners from copyright abuse enabled by end-user license ‘agreements,’ and to pass other reforms that would generally improve copyright law such as reducing statutory damages and the length of time that copyrights remain in force.”
The Copyright Office’s top strategic goals for 2016-2020 include building a “robust and flexible technology enterprise that is dedicated to the current and future needs of a modern copyright agency,” the CO said Friday in a draft of its five-year strategic plan. The strategic plan is to take effect Dec. 1. The CO said it “must be a model for twenty-first century government” that's “future-focused.” The CO and the Library of Congress have faced significant criticism this year on technology issues, including a GAO report that criticized LOC for not modernizing critical systems (see 1503310046) and for a lengthy late summer outage of critical CO systems (see 1509080058). "Broad-ranging modernization efforts are needed to meet the changing needs of individual authors, entrepreneurs, the user community, and the general public," said Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante in a statement. CO systems “should inspire confidence and encourage participation in day-to-day services and transactions,” the office said in its draft strategic plan. “Custom search tools should yield quick, authoritative results. In short, technology should support all aspects of the Copyright Office’s mission and adapt to evolving needs.” The CO said it’s developing a “detailed IT plan” and will seek public comment on “specific strategies, costs, and timelines for technology objectives.” The CO is planning to expand engagement with a range of copyright stakeholders on technology issues and will “adopt industry technology standards, architectures, and cloud services” that will be compatible with current and future tech. The CO said it’s analyzing requirements for “premium on-premises and off-premises hosting solutions” for copyright systems. The CO will also strengthen its procedures for making technology investments to ensure there’s a comprehensive review of all proposed investments. The CO said it also set a strategic goal to make copyright records “easily searchable and widely available” to stakeholders. Copyright records “can fuel any number of innovative business models if captured and organized properly and provided in a timely manner,” CO said. The office plans to use business strategies to integrate its “registration and recordation systems” and will use a “robust” public records search engine that will allow for faceted searching and unlimited results. CO said it plans to work with private sector stakeholders to “formalize accepted metadata standards and increase use of unique identifiers” in copyright records. The CO also plans to advance its use of third-party programs and other technologies and ensure they’re interoperable with CO data and records. The CO said it plans to expand the number of records integrated into its online contemporary records database. Other CO strategic goals include effective administration of U.S. copyright laws, providing impartial assistance to all branches of the federal government on copyright law, recruiting a diverse expert pool and delivering “outstanding” resources to stakeholders.
MPAA wants the joint strategic plan of the Office of the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator to ensure the "highly significant resources and expertise of the federal government are deployed efficiently" against those stealing intellectual property, the association said in comments to IPEC. The comment period for the three-year joint strategic plan, which will become effective in 2016, ended last week, with conflicting suggestions (see 1510190052). MPAA said that since the implementation of the last joint strategic plan, the use of domain names for unlawful conduct, the prevalence of piracy websites prominently appearing on search engines and the use of data storage services to host websites trafficking stolen content have been key areas in which progress has been lagging. MPAA asked IPEC to address those issues in the plan being developed and to continue coordinating enforcement actions against those who steal copyrighted material. The group suggested IPEC continue to facilitate and encourage industry collaboration on initiatives to address IP theft.
Public interest groups praised the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling Friday affirming that the Google Books project to digitize portions of the world’s books is an acceptable example of fair use. A three-judge 2nd Circuit panel said Google Books’ “snippet view” is likely to cause some book sales losses, but that “does not suffice to make the copy an effectively competing substitute” (see 1510160063). The decision “is a victory for the public,” Public Knowledge Policy Counsel Raza Panjwani said in a statement: “Researchers can now spend seconds, not lifetimes, searching through libraries across the world to identify relevant books. If copyright law is truly intended ‘to promote the progress of science and the useful arts,’ then this is precisely the kind of access-enhancing use it should permit.” The 2nd Circuit ruling “stresses that the reason ‘transformativeness’ matters is that it helps justify the copying,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post. “Google’s justification is plain: to provide otherwise unavailable information to the public. Relying on the court’s earlier ruling in the [HathiTrust] case, the opinion finds that Google’s use is highly transformative. The court also firmly rejects the claim that Google’s commercial nature undermined any claim of fair use.”