Friday’s Endnotes – 08/12/16

What happens now after the German Federal Constitutional Court’s Metall-auf-Metall Decision? — Last May’s decision in Metall-auf-Metall reversed a lower court decision finding the use of a non-licensed sample was infringing. As Martin Schaefer at Kluwer Copyright Blog explains, “the use of an excerpt of copyright-protected subject matter can be recognised as a means of artistic expression and artistic design.” And “If there is a conflict between artistic freedom on the one hand and an infringement of copyright or neighbouring rights on the other – an infringement which only slightly impairs the exploitation of those rights – the rightholder’s interest in exploiting those rights may have to give way to artistic freedom.”

Judge Upholds $25 Million Judgment Against ISP Over User Piracy — This week, Judge O’Grady denied Cox’s motion for judgment as a matter of law following a jury verdict that held the ISP liable for copyright infringement. Particularly instructive is O’Grady’s discussion of contributory infringement.

No, The FCC Should Not Have the Power to Cancel Contracts — Kristian Stout at Truth on the Market weighs in on the Copyright Office’s letter explaining the copyright implications of the FCC’s set-top box proposal. Says Stout, “The truth is that Section 106 sets out a general set of rights that inhere in rightsholders with respect to their protected works, and that commercial exploitation is merely a subset of this total bundle of rights. The ability to contract with other parties over these rights is also a necessary corollary of the property rights recognized in Section 106. After all, the right to exclude implies by necessity the right to include. Which is exactly what a licensing arrangement is.”

Art of the Title: Stranger Things — Michelle Dougherty, Creative Director at Imaginary Forces, discusses how the title sequence to Stranger Things, Netflix’s hit summer series, was created.

Can Twitter Fit Inside the Library of Congress? — “In 2010, the Library of Congress and Twitter announced a historic and incongruous partnership: Together, they would archive and preserve every tweet ever posted, creating a massive store of short-form thoughts… Six years after the announcement, the Library of Congress still hasn’t launched the heralded tweet archive, and it doesn’t know when it will. No engineers are permanently assigned to the project. So, for now, staff regularly dump unprocessed tweets into a server—the digital equivalent of throwing a bunch of paperclipped manuscripts into a chest and giving it a good shake.”

Veteran Photographers Say Working for Free has Rarely Paid Off — A number of working photographers share their thoughts on that ever-present expectation for creative professionals to provide their services for free. “There are, of course, certain jobs that a visual journalist must look at and see if taking it on for free is worth it. But overall, doing free work is generally a terrible business practice, according to NPPA board member Brad Smith.”