Friday’s Endnotes – 02/05/16

Copyright Works: Professional Authors Tell It as It Is — Read the personal experiences of authors from South Africa, Sudan, Panama, Canada, Australia, Malawi, and India in this booklet from the International Authors Forum.

Sorry slacktivists: The Man is shredding your robo responses — Orlowski: “The EU this week binned thousands of responses to a copyright consultation generated by a Canadian lobbying group OpenMedia, a groupuscule funded by Canada’s technology industry. In December, OpenMedia declared that the European Commission was going to “copyright the hyperlink” and urged people to submit a roboform to “Save The Link”. Scared out of their wits, 75,000 people did just that. The problem was that the scare was entirely bogus. Even academics hostile to copyright declared that the EU wasn’t proposing anything of the sort. The protections safeguarding publishers large and small would remain intact.”

FilmOn X Not Entitled To Cable License, Broadcasters Tell Appellate Court — Last week, broadcasters filed a brief in the Ninth Circuit arguing that the Copyright Act’s compulsory cable license does not apply to internet retransmissions. On Wednesday, they were joined in support by a number of amici, including the Copyright Alliance, the International Center for Law & Economics and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the National Association of Broadcasters, and the Washington Legal Foundation.

Bestselling Authors and Rights Organizations Support Authors Guild in Asking Supreme Court to Review Authors Guild v. Google Ruling — Amicus briefs supporting the Authors Guild cert petition also rolled in this week. The Authors Guild collects seven of them from a broad group of individuals and organizations.

Authors Guild v Google: The Fair Use Transformed — Speaking of the Authors Guild petition, be sure to check out my article at the Copyright Alliance site explaining why the Copyright Alliance filed an amicus brief supporting Supreme Court review.

Attacking the Notice-and-Takedown Strawman — Devlin Hartline makes a sharp observation regarding criticisms of certain proposals to improve the DMCA notice and takedown process, “supporters of notice-and-staydown today are actually advocating for what the EFF recognized to be reasonable over eight years ago.”