Website blocking has been shown around the world to be "a fair, effective, and proportionate tool" for tackling pirate sites, and the U.S. needs to follow suit with a legal route for rightsholders to get ISPs to block websites involved in mass dissemination of copyright-infringing content, said the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Wednesday. Since Congress failed in 2012 to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, 33 nations have adopted laws letting rightsholders obtain injunctions requiring ISPs to block access to pirate sites "and the Internet continues to flourish," ITIF said. It said those nations have shown that SOPA/PIPA-era criticisms "simply do not hold up to scrutiny" and that website blocking "is a fair, effective, and proportionate tool to target sites involved in the mass, illegal dissemination of copyrighted content and that it does not undermine human rights, free speech, or net neutrality."

Samsung applied Jan. 14 to trademark “SmartThings Home Tablet” for commercializing “smart home hubs” in a tablet form factor to connect robotic vacuum cleaners and other home appliances to a wireless network, Patent and Trademark Office records show. The company announced the launch of Samsung Home Hub earlier this month, billing it as a “new way to manage home appliances” via a “tablet-style touchscreen device” that uses AI and SmartThings technology “to understand users’ needs and automatically provide the right solutions” to household tasks. Samsung didn’t comment about its commercial deployment plans for the SmartThings Home Tablet trademark. Samsung bought the SmartThings IoT platform in August 2014, making it part of the Samsung Open Innovation Center (see 1408180053).

U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Hegarty of Denver granted a motion by movie production companies compelling WideOpenWest to disclose the identities of 375 IP addresses of WOW subscribers and begin notifying them of the impending disclosures. In the docket 21-cv-01901 order Wednesday, Hegarty said the plaintiffs estimate their statutory damages from alleged movie piracy by WOW subscribers at $14 million.

The International Trade Commission wants Sonos’ participation in a survey it plans to help “assess the effectiveness” of limited exclusion orders issued for Tariff Act Section 337 violations, the commission wrote a Sonos lawyer Thursday. The ITC awarded Sonos an exclusion order Jan. 6 when it found in its final determination that Google smart speakers, Pixel smartphones and Chromebook laptops infringe at least 17 claims in five Sonos multiroom audio patents (see 2201060065). The ITC has canvassed “exclusion order holders” four times since fiscal 2000, and “anticipates conducting another such survey in the future,” it told Sonos attorney Bas de Blank with Orrick Herrington, seeking a Sonos point person to canvass with familiarity of the exclusion order against Google.

CTA filed four nearly identical applications Friday to trademark a logo for promoting awareness of consumer radar products and "the importance of such products meeting certain performance standards,” Patent and Trademark Office records show. The proposed trademark consists of the word Ripple, alongside what the applications call a “stylized fish design.” CTA announced Ripple on the opening day of CES 2022 with little fanfare as a new industry standard for radar system development "that will enable hardware and software interoperability for general purpose consumer radar across industrial, automotive and medical applications." A working group formed in 2021 with the participation of Aptiv, Blumio, Ford, Google, Infineon, NXP and Texas Instruments devised the standard to "accelerate the growth of low-power, general purpose radar," said CTA. Ripple's framers envision "a number of possible use cases including non-invasive wellness monitoring, occupancy detection, human activity, and touchless gesture controls," emailed a CTA spokesperson Tuesday. "At this point, we are not planning on having a certification logo for product compliance," he said. The goal of the first release of Ripple's open application programming interface "is to accelerate the growth of applications" by enabling interoperability across various types of radar hardware implementations, he said.

U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi in Los Angeles granted Netflix and various studios a preliminary injunction Friday against the anonymous defendant operators of the streaming video website Primewire. In the docket 21-cv-09317 order, Scarsi said the plaintiffs adequately showed a significant likelihood they will succeed on the merits in their video piracy claim. He said defendants hadn't responded.

Thursday’s International Trade Commission vote was 4-0 to approve the final determination that Google devices infringe at least 17 claims in five Sonos multiroom audio patents (see 2201070022), said a voting sheet posted Monday in docket 337-TA-1191. Commissioner Rhonda Schmidtlein recused herself, as she did throughout the now-terminated Section 337 investigation into Sonos’ January 2020 complaint (see 2003050020). The ITC approved limited-exclusion and cease-and-desist orders on the infringing Google goods and ordered Google to pay 100% bond on imports of those goods during the 60-day review of the decision by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative that runs through March 7.

With so many redactions in LG’s memorandum of law in support of a preliminary injunction and a 14-day temporary restraining order against Dolby Labs (see 2201060058), it’s virtually impossible for the public to identify the allegedly harmful Dolby conduct that LG is asking the court to enjoin. Dolby violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and California unfair-competition laws when it reneged on its ATSC commitments to license its Dolby AC-4 audio codec patents for NextGenTV on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms, alleges LG in the memorandum. A sealed complaint, unavailable for public view even in redacted form, was locked in a vault Jan. 4 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, according to the case's 1:22-cv-42 docket report. Once a standards-setting organization (SSO) selects a technology “to perform a function,” as ATSC did when it picked AC-4 as NextGenTV’s codec for North America, “it eliminates the competing technologies in the relevant market,” says LG’s 34-page memorandum. “Equipped with SSO-derived monopoly power,” it says, “Dolby has acted anticompetitively to exploit that power by demanding” actions from LG that are blacked out in the document. When LG “refused to give in to its demands, Dolby exerted maximum pressure,” it says, but the nature and specifics of Dolby’s allegedly bad behavior also are hidden from public view. “That violated Dolby’s FRAND commitment” to ATSC, “which was the only thing protecting competition from Dolby’s monopoly power,” it says. The supply chain crisis adds further urgency to LG’s preliminary injunction and TRO motion, according to the few snippets of readable text in the memorandum. LG “has suffered and will suffer irreparable harm” from Dolby’s actions, it says. “Ensuring consistent, timely, and complete delivery requires an exceptionally delicate balancing act in any situation, but even more so now when the economy is in the throes of historic disruptions,” it says. The “risks” to LG from Dolby’s actions, including the loss of market share and the threat of lost customers, “are exacerbated because of how tight the global supply chain is,” it says. Dolby and LG haven't responded to multiple requests for comment since LG applied to the court Dec. 23 to file its complaint under seal. Dolby filed a declaration statement with ATSC in June 2016 agreeing to license its AC-4 patents on FRAND terms, as ATSC's patent policy requires.

Media and tech groups offered competing comments last week on the Copyright Office’s study on potential copyright and competition protection for the news industry. Comments were due Wednesday on a study about “effectiveness of copyright protections for publishers, with a focus on press publishers.” The CO should recognize that Big Tech’s aggregation of “valuable news content” is a “major contributor” to the struggle of news publishers, the Copyright Alliance commented. The organization suggested the office offer guidance on copyright principles for news aggregation and recommend further study on competition and antitrust issues. News publishers and creators are relying on the agency to “diagnose the problem and to clarify how copyright laws actually operate in the context of news aggregation,” the organization said. Clarify the law and policies to strengthen news publishers’ rights, the News Media Alliance asked. It recommended the CO amend its policies on copyrightability of “words and short phrases,” clarify the law on “substantial takings and systematic use of news content,” study the need for “sui generis protections for news publishers” and study further guidance or congressional action on "the use of news content for artificial intelligence applications.” The Computer and Communications Industry Association opposed the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (see 2103120066). JCPA is bipartisan legislation to give news outlets power to negotiate with Big Tech over compensation for content. A few commenters asked the CO to weigh in on the legislation. CCIA said the proposal is outside the scope of the CO’s inquiry and expertise. CCIA argued the legislation would allow larger news publishers to dominate negotiations, leading to further consolidation of the news industry. The JCPA would likely “benefit large actors, continuing the power imbalance and leaving smaller outlets and tech-enabled media startups behind,” commented Engine. Defining what is and isn’t subject to “enhanced copyright or competition protection” would put the federal government in the problematic position of “picking winners and losers when it comes to speech,” Engine said.

There's “no compelling or well-founded argument for adoption” of additional copyright protections for online news stories and headlines that would affect news aggregators such as Google and Facebook, said Computer & Communications Industry Association in second round comments that were due Wednesday in a Copyright Office proceeding (see 2112090069) on publisher protections (docket ID COLC-2021-0006). The proceeding stems from a May request by Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C, that the CO investigate additional publisher protections. News aggregation “is an existential problem for the news industry,” said the Copyright Alliance in its own comments. Congress and the CO should look into policies in Europe and Australia that give publishers additional protections and allow publishers to collectively bargain with aggregators for rights, said the Association of Magazine Media. Such rules would be “not only undesirable but also impossible within the U.S. legal framework,” CCIA said. The CO should make it easier for online publishers to register works, the News Media Alliance said. The “current market crisis” for news publishers will persist until their copyrights are properly enforced and Congress “steps in to recalibrate” the current “market dominance problems,” said NMA. Extending copyright protections or adjusting competition law to restrict sharing hyperlinks and quoting headlines or article snippets “would fundamentally alter the way we create, share, engage with, and learn from news and information online,” said startup-policy group Engine. “Platforms and online communities do not ‘free ride’ off of the content created by publishers,” said Reddit. “They share it, build off of it, and help others discover it.”