Friday’s Endnotes – 12/18/15

TPP, copyright, e-commerce and digital policy: a reply to Michael Geist — Barry Sookman: “Geist likes to use the emotionally super-charged metaphor of content being “locked up” or “locked down” because of copyright to garner maximum visceral reaction for his claim. It sounds from listening to him like all works that were scheduled to fall into the public domain will immediately be made inaccessible by being pulled from stores and libraries and be buried as radioactive waste at the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, or some similar facility.”

Goodbye “Incentive.” We Hardly Knew Ye. — John Degen: “Copyright protected works can be remarkably valuable. That value is a form of property, and we extend copyright terms past the death of the author in order to allow the author to leave said value to her heirs. If incentive comes into play at all in extended copyright terms, the incentive acts upon the living author to create yet more valuable property that can then be protected in her estate.”

Photographer Profile – Yunghi Kim: “I wanted to protect myself. And I wanted to empower other photographers” — “Kim’s holiday gift to photography underscores her commitment to the profession, but, moreover, her belief that there is a place in photography’s future for traditional notions of professionalism — for both intellectual property rights and creative ownership that places inherent value on work. ‘We’re not so helpless when it comes to all this,’ Kim says. ‘That’s the whole message behind the grants.'”

Music Publisher Gets $25 Million Jury Verdict Against Cox in Trailblazing Piracy Case — Following last month’s ruling that the ISP’s failure to reasonably implement a repeat-infringer policy, a jury found Cox liable for contributory infringement, awarding damages for willful infringement of nearly 1400 songs by its users.

Copyright Office Lays Out Technology Upgrade Plan, Pushes for Tech and Data Workers — “Pallante said the office would like to eventually ‘morph’ about a third of its employees (about 150 workers), into tech and data experts. ‘These experts should not merely be assigned or on-call from another part of the agency, but rather be integrated into the copyright office mission where they can work side by side with legal and business experts,’ Pallante said.”