The Copyright Office's online eCO registration system will be offline for portions of Saturday and Sunday, the Library of Congress said Wednesday. The registration system will be offline 6-8:30 p.m. Saturday and between 10 p.m. Saturday and 6 a.m. Sunday, LOC said.
Securus accused Global Tel*Link (GTL) of making “grossly inaccurate” statements after the Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) granted GTL's requests to invalidate two of Securus' patents. In a Tuesday news release, Securus said GTL issued its own news release (see 1509140069) containing "some clearly misleading and inaccurate statements" about the PTAB decision and the extent to which it affected Securus' patent portfolio. Securus said it plans to appeal the PTAB decisions, and the rulings didn't invalidate all of the company's call processing patents. Securus also denied GTL's claims that it's a patent predator and not an innovator, and had patented material invented by others. "Any suggestion that Securus patented what others were doing is wrong," Securus said. "GTL effectively admitted Securus' patents were new and novel and the PTAB did not undermine this."
The Internet Association invited the House Judiciary Committee to hold a roundtable discussion in the San Francisco Bay area or Silicon Valley as part of the committee's planned Copyright Act review “listening tour.” House Judiciary is set to begin the listening tour Sept. 22 with a session in Nashville targeted at gathering feedback from music industry stakeholders (see 1509100041). San Francisco and Silicon Valley “are just as much the center of copyright as Nashville and Hollywood have been for decades,” IA said in a Tuesday letter to House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich. “This is home to the leading Internet companies -- the global leaders of legal content distribution and content creation.” IA said its members include Amazon, Google and Netflix. An industry lobbyist told us few additional details on House Judiciary's plans for the listening tour are available, but it's likely that the committee will also hold roundtables in Los Angeles and New York to accommodate large groups of stakeholders in those areas. House Judiciary said it will announce further sessions later.
Any excitement over Apple’s recent patent application filing (2015/0249280) on using fuel cells to power mobile devices “for days or even weeks” is tempered by patent searches in which we found that the same inventors have been filing similar, but increasingly complex, patents on Apple’s behalf for five years, with no sign of any commercial product. In June 2010, inventors Bradley Spare, Vijay Iyer, Jean Lee, Gregory Tice, Michael Hillman and David Simon filed for a “Fuel Cell System to Power a Portable Computing Device.” The patent document (2011/0311895) describes a stack of individual fuel cells, ganged together to increase the voltage, with bidirectional control communication between the stack and computer. As a “consequence” of the increased consumer awareness “to promote and use renewable energy sources” in portable devices, CE manufacturers “have become very interested in developing renewable energy sources for their products, and they have been exploring a number of promising renewable energy sources such as hydrogen fuel cells,” the patent document says. Hydrogen “can potentially achieve high volumetric and gravimetric energy densities, which can potentially enable continued operation of portable electronic devices for days or even weeks without refueling,” it says. “However, it is extremely challenging to design hydrogen fuel cell systems which are sufficiently portable and cost-effective to be used with portable electronic devices.” Since individual “proton exchange membrane” (PEM) fuel cells, using hydrogen as a fuel, generate voltages that are too low to run a mobile device, Apple has proposed electrically daisy-chaining many PEM cells together in a series, the filing says. A set of 25 PEM fuel cells is needed to deliver the 12.5-17.5 volts required to drive a laptop, mobile phone or “other type of compact electronic device,” it says. US 2011/0256463 from April 2010 acknowledged that connecting fuel cells in series to increase the voltage can be problematic. For example, if one cell fails, the whole stack may shut down, it says. So Apple has also been looking at cell connections in parallel, to give low voltage at high current, which is then up-converted to the working voltage needed to drive a mobile device. “The parallel configuration of fuel cells may represent a significant improvement in reliability over a series configuration,” Apple says. The patents leave no doubt that using fuel cells to power mobile devices isn't a trivial challenge.
The Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued written decisions granting Global Tel*Link's requests to invalidate two patents held by Securus Technologies, GTL said in a news release Monday. The rulings end existing patent infringement claims against GTL made by Securus and prevent any new suits related to the patents, GTL said. In one ruling, PTAB said Securus made incorrect statements to patent officials while seeking approval for one of the invalidated patents, the news release said. Securus didn't comment.
Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) generated more than $1 billion revenue during FY 2015, which ended June 30, the music rights management company said Thursday. BMI said its FY 2015 revenue total is the highest in the company's history and the “most public performance revenue generated for songwriters, composers and publishers by any music rights organization in the world.” BMI's revenue from digital performances rose 65 percent from FY 2014 to more than $100 million. U.S. media licensing generated $484 million revenue, while licensing to U.S. bars, hotels and other facilities totaled $137 million, BMI said. An additional $292 million revenue came from international licenses, the company said. BMI distributed $877 million to its affiliated songwriters, composers and music publishers -- up almost 4.5 percent from FY 2014. BMI CEO Mike O’Neill in a news release said the results are "even more impressive when you consider the negative impact to our international revenues brought on by the strengthening dollar.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation “continues to call” on officials in nations considering the Trans-Pacific Partnership “to renounce misguided plans to extend the length of copyright by 20 years in half of the 12 TPP-negotiating countries,” EFF Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm said Tuesday in a blog post. The extension appears inevitable because it has been included in all U.S. free trade agreements since the North American Free Trade Agreement and is facing “little to no opposition” among negotiating countries, Malcolm said. “Even so, we can't simply sit back and accept this, because what's wrong is wrong. … Copyright term extension has never been about economics, it has been about placating a big content sector that takes pride in its ability to demand, and to receive, copyright laws that benefit nobody but themselves.” EFF “won't be giving up this fight and neither should those countries. Either we'll convince them to reject the unwarranted extension of the copyright term by 20 years, or we'll have given them fair warning: if they press ahead and include this term in the agreement regardless of the public's wishes, we will together rise up and defeat the TPP as a whole, just as we defeated ACTA [Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement] and SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] before it,” Malcolm said.
“The Copyright Office’s online copyright registration system, eCO, remains offline until further notice,” the Library of Congress said Thursday. The data center was shut down Aug. 28 for a scheduled annual power outage to allow routine maintenance, but the library hasn't been able to restore access to eCO and other CO systems since it attempted to reopen the data center Aug. 30 (see 1509010062), it said. “Until service is restored, you will be unable to use the eCO system to file a copyright registration, and Office staff may be unable to access Office records.”
Rightscorp, a data and analytic services provider for artists and owners of copyrighted property, said it launched a Popcorn Time Protection (PTP) service for content owners who want to prevent unauthorized streaming of their content via Popcorn Time. “Popcorn Time aka ‘Netflix for pirates’ is an illegal BitTorent-based software application that has become one of the most popular ways to illegally stream movies and TV shows,” said the company in a news release Thursday. “Our new Popcorn Time Protection service is the only scalable solution for this major threat to Hollywood,” said Rightscorp CEO Christopher Sabec. “Popcorn Time is unaffected by domain blocking and by [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] takedown notices.”
The Library of Congress data center that hosts some Copyright Office systems, including the online copyright registration system, remains offline after scheduled routine maintenance (see 1508270016) over the weekend, a CO news release said Tuesday. The Library of Congress attempted to reopen the data center Sunday, “but has been unable to restore access to Copyright Office systems,” the release said. CO staff is unable to access internal shared network resources, it said. “Until service is restored, you will be unable to use the eCO system to file a copyright registration, and Office staff may be unable to access Office records.” Copyright registration can still be filed using a paper registration form during the outage, the office said. “The Library of Congress informs us that it is working to resolve the problems as expeditiously as possible, but we do not have an estimated time for service resumption.”