Friday’s Endnotes – 05/17/24

Internet Archive Fails to Dismiss Record Labels’ Copyright Lawsuit — “Several major music labels, including Capitol, Sony, and UMG, sued the Internet Archive last year over its ‘Great 78’ phonograph archiving project. With hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages at stake, IA filed a motion to dismiss, hoping to end the matter swiftly. The court, however, was not convinced.”

The Interplay Between Copyright Licensing and Exclusive Rights; AI Edition — “The argument that copyright and licensing somehow stifle innovation is seemingly as old as copyright itself. I tend to find it silly. Copyright predates the measurement of longitude, the horseless carriage, radio, and a few technologies that I currently wear. Collective licensing has advanced technologies including recorded music, broadcast, cable, photocopying, and the Internet. So why are these companies so adamant that, notwithstanding history, licensing will ‘chill’ or ‘impede’ progress? The answer (other than ‘money; they don’t want to share it’) lies in part in how US courts and non-US governments view the interplay between licensing and copyright exceptions.”

Appeals Court Upholds Childish Gambino Victory in ‘This is America’ Copyright Infringement Case — An important reminder that there are two separate and distinct copyrights in a musical composition and sound recording of that composition. The Copyright Office permits a copyright owner to register both in a single application if they are embodied in the same phonorecord and the copyright claimant is the same for both. Filling out the standard application to claim a copyright in both is not intuitive: applicants must select “sound recording” using a dropdown menu under the “type of work” field, then under the “type of authorship” field, they must both check the box for “sound recording” and describe the musical composition authorship in the text field for “other.” The Second Circuit here takes a strict view of those requirements here, notwithstanding the lower court stating that dismissal would also be warranted on the infringement claim itself.

Shopify sues rival for copyright infringement over e-commerce platform — “Canadian e-commerce provider Shopify sued a subsidiary of Chinese technology company JOYY Inc in New York federal court on Tuesday, accusing it of illegally copying Shopify’s software to build its own e-commerce platform. Shopify said in the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, that JOYY’s Shopline created a ‘thinly disguised knockoff’ of its Dawn storefront-template technology to power competing e-commerce services.”