American photographer Carol M. Highsmith has brought a copyright lawsuit under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) based upon the Defendants’ gross misuse of Ms. Highsmith’s photographs – more than 18,000 of them.
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Category: Copyright
A comparison between the licensing of public performance rights and the licensing of synchronization rights further illustrates the problem faced by music users who rely on PRO licenses. Producers of movies or television programming have traditionally entered separate synchronization licenses with each owner of a fractional interest in a song the producer seeks to include in his or her television show or movie, generally on a song-by-song basis.
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If PROs offer fractional licenses, a music user, before performing any multi-owner work in a PRO’s repertory, would need a license to the fractional interests held by each of the work’s co-owners. A full-work license from a PRO, on the other hand, would provide infringement protection to a music user seeking to perform any work in the repertory of the PRO.
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The European Union Intellectual property office has published report (de) presenting the results of the eighth sectorial study, covering the production of two products: spirits and wine. It is estimated that the legitimate industries loses approximately €1.3 billion of revenue annually due to the presence of counterfeit spirits and wine in the EU marketplace, corresponding to 3.3% of the sectors’ sales.
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Right holders, who are not happy with RAO have decided and created their own collecting society. As the basis for new collecting society has been taken already incorporated legal entity in a form of non-profit partnership “Russian society of authors and other right holders on collective management of their rights ROAP”. New legal entity is called Russian Authors Union (ROAS).
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1st of August, 2016 in Russian Gazette under advertisement rules has been published a call to RAO’s members to organise extraordinary conference, i.e. meeting. For these purposes RAO members were proposed to complete and file some “anonymous ballot paper”. Agenda was simple: to fire Sergey Fedotov, CEO of RAO, his first deputy Vera Fedotova, his mother, dissolution of authors council and dissolution of audit commission.
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Many musical works have multiple authors. Under the copyright law, joint authors of a single work are treated as tenants-in-common, so “[e]ach co-owner may thus grant a nonexclusive license to use the entire work without the consent of other co-owners, provided that the licensor accounts for and pays over to his or her co-owners their pro-rata shares of the proceeds.” Copyright holders may, however, depart from the default rules under the Copyright Act.
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The group of right holders has written a petition to stop anarchy in Russian Authors Society (RAO). This petition is to be signed electronically by 50000 persons; almost 47 thousands already did it. This petition will be delivered to Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, to his first deputy Igor Shuvalov, to director of Federal Security Service (FSB), to minister of internal affairs, to chairman of investigation committee, to attorney general, to minister of culture, and to members of RAO.
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The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) are “performing rights organizations” (PROs). PROs provide licenses to users such as bar owners, television and radio stations, and internet music distributors that allow them to publicly perform the musical works of the PROs’ thousands of songwriter and music publisher members.
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RAO is ready to create special technical platform in order to automatically track using of musical works in public places (restaurants, outlets and other different venues) and on television channels and radio stations. The purpose is to allow authors and right holder to be able to check how often their music is performed and how much they should receive.
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