Copyright/Intellectual Property

From Eater London:

The worlds of London food and international cookbooks are rocking after far-reaching allegations of plagiarism by a highly regarded chef. Cookbook publisher Bloomsbury Absolute has withdrawn Makan, the debut cookbook by Mei Mei owner Elizabeth Haigh, after allegations of plagiarism from Sharon Wee, the author of Growing Up in a Nonya Kitchen, a cookbook memoir published by Marshall Cavendish in 2012.

Wee issued a statement on her Instagram on Thursday 7 October, saying that she had been “distressed to discover that certain recipes and other content from my book had been copied or paraphrased without my consent in Makan by Elizabeth Haigh, and I immediately brought this matter to the attention of the book’s publisher, Bloomsbury Absolute.” Wee’s book is set to be republished in November 2021.

Eater contacted Wee, Haigh, and Bloomsbury for comment. Wee told Eater that she cannot elaborate on her statement for legal reasons; a spokesperson for Haigh said, “Elizabeth Haigh is not able to answer your questions, for legal reasons.” Bloomsbury Absolute initially returned an out-of-office auto-reply, before pointing to a statement given to industry publication The Bookseller, which followed a report in the Daily Mail: “This title has been withdrawn due to rights issues.”

. . . .

The email then presented examples from both books side-by-side:

Wee:

“My mother, like many of her friends, placed their most frequently used condiments and ingredients within easy access while they cooked. That often meant a plastic tray . . . where there were small bottles of soy sauces, sesame oil, and jars of minced garlic, salt and sugar. In the past there would also have been a metal container to hold recycled cooking oil.”

Haigh:

“My mother . . . kept her most frequently used condiments and ingredients within easy reach of where she cooked. That often meant a plastic tray full of little jars of oils, crispy-fried shallots or garlic, crushed garlic, salt and sugar. There was also usually an old metal pot for recycled or discarded frying oil.”

Wee (on transcribing her mother’s recipes):

“It faced many challenges along the way. It first started with converting her handwritten recipe measurements from katis and tahils (old Chinese measurements) and learning the different daum (or herbs) and rempah (spice pastes).”

Haigh:

“It faced many challenges along the way. It first started with converting her handwritten recipe measurements . . . and learning the different daun (or herbs) and rempah (spice pastes).”

Wee:

“Ginger is thought to ‘pukol angin’ (beat the toxic gases and dampness out of you to relieve aches and pains). Hence, post-natal mothers were given lots of ginger to ‘beat the wind.’ In my case, a backache, especially in the winter, was often remedied with a knob of ginger, with the sliced surface dipped in brandy. The brandied ginger was used to rub my back and it left red streak marks, indicating the wind in my flesh and bones. It always worked.

The ginger flavour is strongest just beneath its skin. Therefore, leave the skin on to get the most of the flavour.”

Haigh:

“Ginger is thought to have healing properties – pukol angin (to beat the toxic gases and dampness out of you to relieve aches and pains). This is why postnatal mothers were given lots of ginger to ‘beat the wind’ . . . The strongest ginger is just beneath the skin, so to get the most flavour out of it don’t peel it.”

Further allegations followed, suggesting that recipes had been lifted from more than one source. Singaporean poet and critic Daryl Lim shared two Instagram posts detailing similarities between Makan and other recipes, from blogs and other cookbooks, as well as between Haigh’s book and Sharon Wee’s.

Link to the rest at Eater London

Are Recipes and Cookbooks Protected by Copyright?

From The Copyright Alliance:

Recently, the owner of a website that aimed to “fix online recipes” by removing ads and stories apologized and removed the website after receiving complaints via social media. While the website hoped to create an easier reading experience for visitors, the owner acknowledged that a great deal of time, money, and effort go into creating these recipes and the content that accompanies them.

Given the recent controversy, we thought this would be a good time to discuss the copyrightability of recipes. Can you copyright a recipe and, if so, which elements? What about copyright protection for cookbooks?

What Copyright Law Protects

Copyright law protects original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible medium of expression. So, a work needs to be original, independently created by a human author, and possess at least some minimal degree of creativity while also being set in a sufficiently permanent form.

Recipes easily meet most of these requirements. For instance, they usually satisfy the “fixed in a tangible medium of expression” factor by being recorded in a cookbook or website or even on a piece of paper. They are also independently created by a human author — usually someone’s grandma, it would seem. However, despite meeting most of the requirements, standing alone, recipes are usually not protected by copyright.

Can You Copyright a Recipe?

Recipes are usually not protected by copyright due to the idea-expression dichotomy. The idea-expression dichotomy creates a dividing line between ideas, which are not protected by copyright law, and the expression of those ideas, which can be protected by copyright law.

There are rare times where the idea and the expression of the idea are so intertwined that there is only one way, or very few ways, to express the idea. When this is the case, that expression of the idea is not protected by copyright law. A recipe’s list of ingredients, or simple directions, is so intertwined with the idea of that recipe that there are very few ways to express this idea; so, a simple list of ingredients or simple directions will not usually be protected by copyright.

Based on this reasoning, the United States Copyright Office Compendium, the Office’s manual for examiners, states that a mere listing of ingredients or contents is not copyrightable, as lists are not protected by copyright law (chapter 314.4(F)). The Office has also stated that a “simple set of directions” is uncopyrightable.

In addition, courts have found that recipes are wholly factual and functional, and therefore uncopyrightable. As the Sixth Circuit described in Tomaydo-Tomahdo, LLC v. Vozary, “the list of ingredients is merely a factual statement, and as previously discussed, facts are not copyrightable. Furthermore, a recipe’s instructions, as functional directions, are statutorily excluded from copyright protection.”

Further, in Publications Int’l., Ltd. v. Meredith Corp., the Seventh Circuit explained that certain recipes may be copyrightable, as there is a difference between barebones recipes and those that “convey more than simply the directions for producing a certain dish.”

Elements of a Recipe That Can Be Protected By Copyright

Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression.” This expression can be an explanation or detailed directions, which is likely why food and recipe bloggers often share stories and personal anecdotes alongside a recipe’s ingredients.

A recipe can also be protected by copyright law if it creatively describes or explains the cooking or baking process connected to the list of ingredients. Even if the description of the recipe is sufficiently creative and copyrightable, the copyright will not cover the recipe’s ingredient list, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself, which are all facts. It will only protect the expression of those facts. That means that someone can express the recipe in a different way — with different expression — and not infringe the recipe creator’s copyright.

Cookbooks Can Be Protected as Copyrightable Compilations

What about a compilation of recipes, like those found in a cookbook? A cookbook can be protected under copyright law as a compilation if the selection, arrangement, and coordination of the included recipes is creative.

The copyright for a compilation does not cover the individual works included in the compilation, such as the individual recipes within the cookbook.

Link to the rest at The Copyright Alliance

Even if it were possible to copyright recipes, the Guardian’s account indicates that the offended chef was not the creator of the recipes and that the chef transcribed her mother’s recipes:

It first started with converting her handwritten recipe measurements from katis and tahils (old Chinese measurements) and learning the different daum (or herbs) and rempah (spice pastes).”

PG claims no special expertise about UK copyright law, but some quick research on the UK Copyright Licensing Agency website indicates that recipes may not be copyrightable under UK law for the same rationale as applies to recipes under US law.

From The Guardian in 2006:

Can a recipe – as some of the world’s top restaurateurs and food experts are now asking – ever be considered intellectual property?

An altogether more complex dish has prompted this debate on the online food forum, eGullet, this week. The recipe, in brief: prawns are pureed using an enzyme called transglutiminase, extruded into a noodle, cooked, and served with smoked yoghurt, paprika and nori. Not the sort of meal that two chefs separated by 10,355 miles are likely to invent at the same time.

Still, identical versions of this dish did appear simultaneously on the websites of two cutting-edge restaurants – Melbourne’s Interlude, run by a 31-year-old British chef, Robin Wickens, a former student of Raymond Blanc; and Wylie Dufresne, head chef/owner of WD-50, a restaurant in New York’s trendy Lower East Side. The former, it quickly transpired, had copied the latter, without crediting the innovator. Interlude also appeared to have produced direct replicas of recipes from several other restaurants, leading to one eGullet poster to warn Wickens to prepare to be labelled a “fraud”.

Wickens told the Guardian that the near-identical dishes were a result of a research trip to WD-50 and said that, “At no time did I try and claim that I invented any of the dishes that I had experienced in the US and recreated at Interlude.”

“It might be a bloody cheek. But so what?” says restaurant reviewer Egon Ronay. “It goes on all the time. Chefs travel the world looking for dishes and try to imitate them in their own menus. That’s how good cooking spreads – it’s what food is all about. Frankly, in my view, it doesn’t matter a damn.”

Dufresne is reluctant to criticise Wickens, who recently sent him a letter of apology. Whatever his justification, Wickens has opened a pandora’s box. As an eGullet editorial put it: “We believe the Interlude controversy is not a simple matter of a lone Australian restaurant copying a few dishes from halfway around the world. Rather, it’s one of the most significant issues facing the global culinary community today.”

But can you copyright a recipe? Could Heston Blumenthal register his roast spiced cod with castelluccio lentils? Or St John’s Fergus Henderson his roast bone marrow with parsley salad? No, says Alex Papakyriacou, of intellectual property law firm Briffa. “Case law suggests that reproducing a written recipe in the preparation of a dish is not copyright infringement. The same goes for recipes that have been communicated aurally or by a chef deciphering the ingredients and method involved in the preparation of a recipe by sampling a dish prepared to it.”

Nor is it possible to patent a recipe, either in the UK or US, because the organic development of food will never constitute an “inventive step”. In short: you will never know definitively where your pizza or prawn noodle originated.

But if there is no legal basis crediting a dish, is there a moral incentive? “Only if it’s a signature dish by one of the very few truly original chefs in the world,” says Richard Corrigan, the chef owner of two of London’s top restaurants, Lindsay House and Bentley’s Oyster Bar and Grill. “Everyone has been robbed in the middle of London, it’s normal. But it doesn’t bother me; I’m sometimes tickled. Every restaurant in London is after my bread recipe, for example, and it’s not easy to keep it a secret.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

Even if it were possible to copyright recipes, the Guardian’s account indicates that the offended chef was not the creator of the recipes and that the chef transcribed her mother’s recipes:

It first started with converting her handwritten recipe measurements from katis and tahils (old Chinese measurements) and learning the different daum (or herbs) and rempah (spice pastes).”

In her Instagram post decrying the use of these recipes, Ms. Wee wrote, “I wrote my book in loving memory of my mother. I credit her and her peers for their anecdotes, recipes and cooking tips. This was their story.”

PG suggests that this statement, if true, could be interpreted to mean that all sorts of people besides Ms. Wee’s mother used the recipes in her cookbook and even Ms. Wee’s mother was not the creator of the recipes which Ms. Wee wishes to take credit and prevent others from copying.

The fact that Ms. Wee was the first person to write down these recipes in English and publish them doesn’t make her any sort of a creator of the type that copyright laws are designed to protect.

To be clear, plagiarism may rightly be regarded as bad behavior, but unless the plagiarist violates copyright law, there’s no foul under US law.

From The New York Times:

There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

. . . .

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

. . . .

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Editors’ Picks

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

. . . .

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

. . . .

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”

. . . .

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

. . . .

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Link to the rest at The New York Times (unfortunately, there is a paywall) and thanks to D for the tip.

Perhaps PG is feeling a little unfeeling today. He blames an approaching winter storm.

From a strictly legal standpoint, nobody owns a story. The first person who created a story that follows the boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl (and all the various gender variations to the basic structure) doesn’t own the story structure.

Copyright only protects a particular expression of a story, not the ideas behind the story. For example, PG can easily recall multiple instantiations of the following structure:

1. Heroine sets out on a quest to accomplish something important. The quest involves a journey.
2. Heroine encounters multiple obstacles and setbacks during the journey, some of which seem almost impossible to overcome.
3. Using strength, skill, brains, and perhaps, luck or divine assistance, heroine overcomes each obstacle and ends up triumphant in the end.

The Odyssey follows this pattern. So does the story of King Arthur’s quest for the Holy Grail, along with Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

In the OP, Ms. Dorland was not the first person to face the emotional stress of donating a kidney, making a great sacrifice, or risking her life to help someone else, known or unknown.

For PG, Ms. Larson’s explanation, that she wrote a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation” rings true and does not violate any exclusive right of Ms. Dorland to tell such a story. Whether Ms. Larson heard about Ms. Dorland’s experience directly from Ms. Dorland or from someone else is, for PG, immaterial.

To get a bit legalistic about the matter, if Ms. Dorland wished to make certain Ms. Larson didn’t use her experience to write a story, Ms. Dorland should have asked for Ms. Larson to keep the matter confidential at a minimum. Absent Ms. Larson’s agreement to keep the matter secret, for PG, even a request would not grant Ms. Dorland any sort of exclusive right to the story.

Perhaps if the two women had engaged in a lengthy series of exchanges that were clearly intended and understood to remain confidential and the kidney transplant story was part of this series of conversations, Ms. Dorland might have had some legitimate expectation concerning Ms. Larson’s keeping the matter confidential.

But perhaps PG has missed something in the OP that makes his opinions questionable. He’s happy to hear contrary views in the comments. If this is something only two women would understand (but a lot of pairs of women would understand the same way), PG is happy to be told of his male blindness as well.

PG note: IRL = In Real Life

From Vulture:

Contemporary entertainment is a hall of mirrors, an endless flow of simulacra: reality shows, biopics, documentaries, Instagram posts, Youtube vlogs. Podcasts and docuseries and movies process the same real-life events (Tonya Harding, the O.J. trial, Theranos), responding to one another, building on one another, until the metanarrative is part of the entertainment. I guess it is no surprise, then, that our fictionalized characters have starting launching protests about how we’ve used them. A woman named Alexis Nowicki recently wrote a Slate essay outing herself as the inspiration for the viral short story “Cat Person,” and Amanda Knox, who was falsely accused of murder by Italian authorities, wrote an Atlantic article about a movie that (very) loosely transposes her story. Tom McCarthy, the director of Stillwater, did acknowledge in a Vanity Fair interview that his movie was “directly inspired” by Knox’s case. I still can’t decide if this was all marketing — McCarthy trying to stir up the true-crime audience and situate his film amid the flow of Amanda Knox content — or naiveté, an artist assuming that people will understand that inspiration is about the spark of an idea, not the act of appropriation.

It must first be noted that Stillwater bears little resemblance to Knox’s nightmarish story. She was a 20-year-old American exchange student in Italy when her roommate, a British student named Meredith Kercher, was gruesomely murdered. The police immediately focused on Amanda and her Italian boyfriend, despite virtually no evidence pointing to them. Another man was eventually arrested and convicted of the crime, but Knox was still churned through the Italian legal system for eight years. She was definitively cleared of murder charges in 2015, but not before she spent four years in an Italian prison, where she was sexually harassed and subject to psychological abuse. Her diary was stolen and pored over by the rabid press, which portrayed her as a nymphomaniac femme fatale who had convinced two men to murder Kercher as part of a demented sex game.

Stillwater takes place not in Italy but in France, and the American exchange student, Allison Baker (played by Abigail Breslin), is not from a nice, working-class family in Seattle, like Knox, but a poor and chaotic home in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where she was raised by her grandmother because her father was a drug addict and her mother died by suicide. Allison is convicted of murdering her ex-girlfriend, a French Muslim girl, but insists that a mysterious man named Hakim committed the crime. The film takes place five years after her conviction, as her father, Bill (played by Matt Damon), who has cleaned up and is trying, belatedly and disastrously, to be in his daughter’s life, takes on the task of tracking down Hakim.

Knox was understandably angry that McCarthy used her case as shorthand to sell a movie that has little to do with her. She wrote a series of tweets that she spun into an essay for The Atlantic, venting her frustration at the way her name is used without her consent: the “Amanda Knox saga” or, worse, “the sordid Amanda Knox saga.” “I never asked to become a public person,” Knox writes, but she acknowledges, “My name, my face, my story have effectively entered the public imagination. I am legally considered a public figure, and that leaves me little recourse to combat depictions of me that are harmful and untrue.” After years of Italian authorities and the tabloid media creating fanciful and grotesque stories about her, Knox is weary of being made a subject of fiction.

Knox’s public vendetta against Stillwater may also be a matter of practical survival. As a best-selling author and true-crime podcaster, she is eager to maintain her hold on her story for both her dignity and her brand, which is her only source of income. The Vanity Fair article in which McCarthy discusses Stillwater ends, for some reason, with a rundown of the personal and legal debts that Knox and her family incurred during her trials, which reportedly ate up all of her nearly $4 million book deal. In a vast and lucrative true-crime media landscape on podcasts and streaming TV, big cases may appear like proprietary brands, but they are in fact public property. The “Amanda Knox case” does not belong to Amanda Knox, which seems to be the major source of her frustration: that she has neither the sole right to tell her story nor the exclusive right to profit off of it.

Link to the rest at Vulture

PG will spare long-suffering visitors to TPV yet another rant, but he doesn’t agree with the whole “appropriation” argument as it is used in a variety of settings.

He takes a very legal approach to his thinking. If something newsworthy happens that the newspapers and other news outlets can write and feature, its in the public sphere. At that point, anybody can pretty much do whatever they want with the story, particularly if they create a work of fiction that doesn’ t use a victim’s or key participant’s real name.

For PG, the key sentence in the OP (if it is correct), encapsulates the legal justification, “It must first be noted that Stillwater bears little resemblance to Knox’s nightmarish story.”

UK authors, illustrators protest mooted copyright changes

From Books+Publishing:

In the UK, over 2600 authors and illustrators have signed an open letter to protest the government’s reconsideration of copyright and trade laws, reports Publishing Perspectives.

The letter comes after publishing industry organisations launched the Save our Books campaign in June, protesting the mooted changes to copyright laws which they claim would lead to a flood of cheap copies of UK books coming back into the home market.

Signatories to the letter, which was published as an open letter to the editor in the Sunday Times, include Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Pullman, Maggie O’Farrell and Bernardine Evaristo.

‘The Intellectual Property Office is currently consulting on the UK’s future exhaustion regime,’ the letter reads. ‘If they decide to introduce an international exhaustion framework, authors will be unable to limit foreign editions of their books being sold into the UK—undercutting their domestic sales.’

In a statement, Publishers Association CEO Stephen Lotinga said the letter ‘is a clear and urgent call from authors to avoid an outcome that weakens our copyright laws’.

‘Britain is a world leader in publishing and currently exports more books than any other country in the world,’ said Lotinga. ‘The wrong outcome would jeopardize the whole books industry and vandalize the UK’s cultural landscape. It would mean fewer books, by fewer authors, for fewer readers.’

Prior to Brexit, the UK fell under the EU’s copyright agreement, meaning books could be sold freely in Europe but not reimported to the domestic market. The Intellectual Property Office has since launched a consultation ‘which considers a weakening of copyright rules crucial for exporting books around the world and ensuring that UK authors benefit financially from the sales’. Author royalties on export sales are much lower than in the UK market, so if authors can’t prevent their copies from around the world being sold back into the UK, export sales risk eroding domestic sales.

Link to the rest at Books+Publishing

Save Our Books campaign launches – June 2021

From the Publishers Association:

An alliance of organisations has launched the Save Our Books campaign in the face of a potentially devastating change to the UK’s copyright laws which could result in fewer books, by fewer authors, for fewer readers.

Save Our Books is a joint campaign from the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors, the Association of Authors’ Agents and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society.

The government is reconsidering the UK’s approach to copyright and trade following Brexit. The Intellectual Property Office launched a consultation today (Monday 7^th June 2021) which considers a weakening of copyright rules crucial for exporting books around the world and ensuring UK authors benefit financially from those sales.

Changing the way these rules, known as ‘copyright exhaustion’, work would present serious dangers for the health of the books industry, including: 

• Significantly impacting authors’ livelihoods. Author royalties on export sales are much lower than what authors can earn from UK sales of books published for the UK market. If authors cannot prevent their copies from around the world being sold back into the UK, then an export sale risks eroding the corresponding domestic sale. Approximately two-thirds of authors’ incomes could be at risk on the sale of a book in this scenario. This would threaten the sustainability and diversity of UK authorship.
• Destroying creative export markets. The potential loss of up to 25% of the UK publishing industry’s revenue – almost £1bn – which would harm investment and could lead to publishing job losses.
• Damaging the already suffering British high street and further supporting online retail giants.

For the continued success of the publishing industry, the UK must ensure authors and publishers have control over the resale of their global products. The government must avoid an ‘international exhaustion framework’ and find a solution that allows UK authors and publishers to ensure different markets can access versions of a book best suited to their needs.

Link to the rest at Publishers Association

A bit more explanation in the event some visitors to TPV aren’t certain what this is all about.

1. In the US (and many other countries), the author of a book (or creator of a painting, etc.) may, under copyright law, prevent anyone from making, printing, selling, etc., the book without the author’s permission.
2. If the author publishes a printed book, either directly or through a publisher, and offers it for sale, the author receives some or all of the price a reader pays to purchase the book. This is the “First Sale” of the book.
3. Under US law, after the First Sale of the physical book, the purchaser can do whatever he/she wants with that physical copy, including reselling it as a used book, to anyone else without any obligation to make any further royalty payment to the author.
4. The term, “copyright exhaustion” is used to describe this limited right to control/be compensated for the first sale of the book. Under copyright law author has no further control over or right to receive payment from future sales of that copy of the book. This doesn’t mean that someone who purchases a physical book can make copies of the book to resell or anything like that. The author’s copyright is “exhausted” only for that particular copy of the book.
5. Thus, when a used bookstore resells a physical book that has been sold or given to the store, neither the author or the publisher receives any additional payment for this “second sale”.

(Note: Ebooks are licensed, not sold. The license agreement could effectively control this sort of problem for ebooks without all the issues involved with printed books. Most ebook, software, etc., licenses prohibit transfer, resale, etc.)

Based upon the two articles PG has read concerning the problem described in the OP, the problem seems to be that, if proposed changes are made in British copyright law, new physical British books sold to buyers other countries (European) could then be sent back to Britain as new books and sold without the author receiving the much higher royalties he/she would normally receive from the sale of a new physical book in Britain.

As a hypothetical example, a shipload of new books could be sent across the English Channel to France to a French buyer (generating a much smaller export royalty for the author), then sent right back to Britain and sold as new books (boxes never opened, in exactly the same condition they were when they left the printer) without the author receiving the much higher royalties that would have resulted if the publisher had sold the books to British book distributors and British bookstores before the round-trip to France and back.

(PG notes that the previous paragraph definitely qualifies as a run-on sentence for which one of PG’s beloved elementary school teachers, Mrs. Lascelles, would have lowered PG’s grade.)

From Jane Friedman:

We have an original oil painting hanging over our fireplace in the basement. We commissioned it many years ago from a young local artist whose work we enjoyed. The painting is probably worth less today than when we bought it in the late 90s.

On the back of the painting is an envelope, taped there by the artist. Inside is a handwritten “certificate of authenticity” signed by the artist indicating that he in fact did paint the picture, a whimsical scene of a stylized living room that was meant to be hung, well, in a living room. That certificate is the only proof of provenance we have should that artist suddenly become famous.

If instead of actually committing oil to canvas, however, the artist had created the work purely and only in a digital form, he could not have attached his physical certificate of authenticity to the work. Thus, when he emailed me the JPEG or PNG of the image for me to presumably print, frame, and hang over my fireplace, all I would have to prove provenance is his email indicating that the attached was his original work of authorship. And I might not even have such an email!

So, what to do to establish provenance of wholly digital works of art? NFTs! These digital certificates of authenticity, minted and recorded in the blockchain, certainly have their utility in terms of establishing provenance, but as a copyright lawyer, I frankly stand all amazed at the hoopla surrounding non-fungible tokens.

Why? Well, whence does a work of art derive value? Provenance, yes, but more accurately, scarcity. It’s Econ 101 all over again. If there’s only one The Starry Night, never to be re-created again by Van Gogh, and the provenance is not in question, that work of art is worth tens of millions of dollars. If there were fifty or a hundred The Starry Nights, however, all identical to the original and all painted by Van Gogh, the value of that masterpiece would certainly decrease.

So now consider a wholly digital work of art, a work that may be infinitely and easily copied and re-created by everyone who sees it on the internet simply by right-clicking on the image and selecting “Save As.” Or “Print.” Or “Email.” Or “Publish to Facebook.” Again, and again and again. There is thus no inherent scarcity to wholly digital works of art.

And this is true even if the artist has minted an NFT to go along with it because all an NFT is is a digital form of provenance. Admittedly the unique, immutable non-fungible token itself may have value as a novelty and because there is only one, but I worry about the general public’s perception that the NFT somehow establishes the value and creates scarcity of the underlying work of art.

And so now enters our old friend copyright law. With or without an NFT, the only way an artist can stop the unlawful reproduction of a digital work of art is by using copyright law, as is true for any work authored in, say, the last 100 years. For today, U.S. copyright law does not recognize an NFT as that “thing” that will get you admission to federal court to sue for copyright infringement. Unless a digital artist has registered her copyrights in her portfolio with the United States Copyright Office, she has no legal remedies against illegal copying of her digital works, NFTs notwithstanding, and this means she has no real effective mechanism to create scarcity of her work by controlling the supply.

So until Congress rewrites 17 USC Section 411(a) or the U.S. Supreme Court revisits its recent Fourth Estate decision (holding that the plaintiff must have a copyright registration certificate in hand to maintain an infringement action in federal court), an NFT is not equivalent to a copyright registration certificate issued by the Copyright Office. Thus, cutting-edge digital artists are left with a legal remedy hundreds of years old to create the requisite scarcity to drive value in their digital works, even if the artist has minted an NFT for the work.

. . . .

Think of it this way: an investor paid $69 million for the NFT minted in connection with Beeple’s digital work of art Everyday: The First 5,000 Days, but unless and until Beeple obtains a copyright registration certificate on that work, someone could, for example, print 1,000 T-shirts with exact copies of 5,000 Days on them and sell them on Etsy with relative impunity. 

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

From The Verge:

There’s nothing like an explosion of blockchain news to leave you thinking, “Um… what’s going on here?” That’s the feeling I’ve experienced while reading about Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or about Nyan Cat being sold as one. And by the time we all thought we sort of knew what the deal was, the founder of Twitter put an autographed tweet up for sale as an NFT.

You might be wondering: what is an NFT, anyhow?

After literal hours of reading, I think I know. I also think I’m going to cry.

Okay, let’s start with the basics:

What Is an NFT? What Does NFT Stand For?

Non-fungible token.

That doesn’t make it any clearer.

Right, sorry. “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different. You gave up a Squirtle, and got a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, which StadiumTalk calls “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards.” (I’ll take their word for it.)

How do NFTs work?

At a very high level, most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, like bitcoin or dogecoin, but its blockchain also supports these NFTs, which store extra information that makes them work differently from, say, an ETH coin. It is worth noting that other blockchains can implement their own versions of NFTs. (Some already have.)

What’s worth picking up at the NFT supermarket?

NFTs can really be anything digital (such as drawings, music, your brain downloaded and turned into an AI), but a lot of the current excitement is around using the tech to sell digital art.

. . . .

A lot of the conversation is about NFTs as an evolution of fine art collecting, only with digital art.

Do people really think this will become like art collecting?

I’m sure some people really hope so — like whoever paid almost $390,000 for a 50-second video by Grimes or the person who paid $6.6 million for a video by Beeple. Actually, one of Beeple’s pieces was auctioned at Christie’s, the famou—

Sorry, I was busy right-clicking on that Beeple video and downloading the same file the person paid millions of dollars for.

Wow, rude. But yeah, that’s where it gets a bit awkward. You can copy a digital file as many times as you want, including the art that’s included with an NFT.

But NFTs are designed to give you something that can’t be copied: ownership of the work (though the artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork). To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.

No shade to Beeple, but the video isn’t really a Monet.

What do you think of the $3,600 Gucci Ghost? Also, you didn’t let me finish earlier. That image that Beeple was auctioning off at Christie’s ended up selling for $69 million, which, by the way, is $15 million more than Monet’s painting Nymphéas sold for in 2014.

Link to the rest at The Verge

From Investopedia:

Greater Fool Theory

The greater fool theory argues that prices go up because people are able to sell overpriced securities to a “greater fool,” whether or not they are overvalued. That is, of course, until there are no greater fools left.

Investing, according to the greater fool theory, means ignoring valuations, earnings reports, and all the other data. Ignoring the fundamentals is, of course, risky; and so people subscribing to the greater fool theory could be left holding the bag after a correction.

. . . .

Understanding the Greater Fool Theory

If acting in accordance with the greater fool theory, an investor will purchase questionably priced securities without any regard to their quality. If the theory holds, the investor will still be able to quickly sell them off to another “greater fool,” who could also be hoping to flip them quickly.

Unfortunately, speculative bubbles burst eventually, leading to a rapid depreciation in share prices. The greater fool theory breaks down in other circumstances, as well, including during economic recessions and depressions. In 2008, when investors purchased faulty mortgage-backed securities (MBS), it was difficult to find buyers when the market collapsed.

By 2004, U.S. homeownership had peaked at just under 70%. Then, in late 2005, home prices started to fall, leading to a 40% decline in the U.S. Home Construction Index in 2006. Many subprime borrowers were no longer able to withstand high interest rates and began to default on their loans. Financial firms and hedge funds that owned in excess of $1 trillion in securities backed by these failing subprime mortgages also began to move into distress.

Example of the Greater Fool Theory

Bitcoin’s price is often cited as an example of the greater fool theory. The cryptocurrency doesn’t appear to have intrinsic value (although this is an area of debate), consumes massive amounts of energy, and consists simply of lines of code stored in a computer network. Despite these concerns, the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed over the years.

At the end of 2017, it touched a peak of $20,000 before retreating. Attracted to the lure of profiting from its price appreciation, traders and investors rapidly bought and sold the cryptocurrency, with many market observers positing that they were buying simply because they hoped to resell at a higher price to someone else later. The greater fool theory helped the price of bitcoin zoom upwards in a short period of time as demand outstripped supply of the cryptocurrency.³

The years 2020-21 saw Bitcoin rise to new highs, topping $60,000 and hovering above $50,000 for weeks. This time, however, large institutional investors and corporations such as Tesla and PayPal have been involved in the buying—and it is debatable whether or not they can be considered fools. So, perhaps Bitcoin is not an example of the greater fool theory, after all.

Link to the rest at Investopedia

From Wikiquote:

Unattributed Variants to Murphy’s Law

• It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
• Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently capable fool.
• Make something idiot-proof, and they will build a better idiot.

Link to the rest at Wikiquote

PG suggests that copyright is only one of a great many problems with a collector’s market for Non-fungible tokens.

A great many things that are rare are not valuable. PG cites originals of his third-grade homework as examples.

From Above the Law:

Back in 2019, Techdirt wrote about a fascinating case involving a bogus CC license on a 3D scan of a 3000-year-old bust of Nefertiti. The person at the heart of the saga was the artist and open access activist Cosmo Wenman. His web site has some background on what he calls his “freedom of information projects“:

For more than a decade, museums around the world have been making high-quality 3D scans of important sculptures and ancient artifacts. Many institutions freely share those 3D scans with the public, allowing us to view, copy, adapt, and experiment with the underlying works in ways that have never before been possible. But some keep their scans out of public view, and I’ve been trying to help them see the light.

Following his success in liberating the 3D scan of Nefertiti, Wenman is now trying to do the same with 3D scans of the works of the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Many of these scans have been created by the Musée Rodin in Paris. There is a long and entertaining article (in the original French and an English translation – pdf) about Wenman’s pursuit of the 3D scans, and of the Musée Rodin’s refusal to share them. Wenman took an interesting tack, claiming that the museum’s 3D scans were documents subject to France’s freedom of information (FOIA) laws. It worked:

In late 2018 I sent a formal demand to Musée Rodin for access to all its 3D scans, citing French freedom of information laws. When the museum refused to comply, I brought the matter before the French government.

In June of 2019 the French government agency that oversees FOIA matters announced its first-of-its-kind opinion, in my favor; 3D scans produced by French national museums are in fact administrative documents and are subject to public disclosure. Musée Rodin is required by law to give the public access to its 3D scans of Rodin’s works.

Another victory for Wenman, then, but rather a hollow one. Despite the French government agency’s ruling, Musée Rodin continues to withhold the 3D scans. Wenman went on to file a suit against the museum in the Administrative Tribunal of Paris. Wenman wants the court to compel the museum to comply with the law, and to impose “significant” financial penalties for any delay. After more than a year with no response, the court directed the museum to present a defense. At the time of writing, Wenman is still waiting. However, given the unequivocal nature of the rulings against the Musée Rodin, he is confident:

Musée Rodin is going to fight, but I expect to win. The outcome will affect every national museum in France, inform policies at institutions around the world, and have interesting effects on the art market.

I’m shooting for a victory for open access, and freedom and innovation in the arts.

The knock-on effects of one person’s dogged pursuit of a few computer files could have a major impact on the wider availability of 3D scans of sculptures and ancient artifacts — a real win for the public domain.

Link to the rest at Above the Law

First, the application to authors – the 3D scans are a species of intellectual property, just like an author’s intellectual property interest in a story he/she creates.

The major difference is that, if the 3D model had been created from a scan of an original physical work made by or licensed from the creator of that work or as an original digitally-created work rather than one derived from a pre-existing physical object, the creator would have a protectable intellectual property interest in resulting model, the file created and, likely physical instantiations of that creation.

In this case, the scan was made from an original work created by Rodin, not by The Musée Rodin. Since Rodin’s original copyright interest in the original work expired a long time ago, absent some meaningful additional artistic contribution by someone during the 3D scan or with the resulting file, the scan is not a new protectible creation.

If PG goes to a museum and takes an iPhone photo of a 200-year-old painting, he hasn’t created anything new. (Whether he could post-process the photo into something creatively different from the original is a matter of degree. Enough post-processing and it might be a new creation. If PG just tweaked it so it looked a bit better than what the iPhone had produced on its own, probably not.)

Intellectual property experts are free, as usual, to criticize, supplement, etc., PG’s simplified description of the IP interests and their protectability under IP law in the comments below.

It may be obvious to many from the OP, but allow PG to summarize:

• The Musée Rodin houses a large collection of artworks created by by famous French sculptor August Rodin (1840-1917) at locations in Paris and Meudon, where Rodin lived and worked during the last twenty years of his life.
• Rodin’s best-known sculpture is The Thinker.

Under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Musée Rodin is a non-subsidized national museum, a status that is quite unique on the French museum scene. The collections and works of art originating from the Auguste Rodin Donation, as well the acquisitions made by the museum, are the French State’s inalienable property. The Musée Rodin is administered by a board of trustees. The museum’s task is to make Rodin’s work known worldwide and to ensure that the moral right attached to it is respected.

Musée Rodin Public Establishment

It has become common for museums to perform in situ high-resolution 3-D computer scans of, at least, some of their most well-known sculptures. The result of the scan is a digital file that depicts every portion of the sculpture in great detail.

These scans can be easily shared throughout the world for, among other things, detailed examinations and analyses of the sculpture by experts everywhere without the necessity of interfering with the opportunity for the general public to view the original sculpture or risking any sort of damage to or loss of the sculpture by removing it from its current location for such examination. Like any other digital file, exact duplicates can be created at very little cost.

For purposes of a freedom of information request (which is governed by the laws of the country in question), a digital file is, absent special treatment under the law, a document like any other that a government (including government agencies) is required to produce if a FOIA request if filed in proper form.

In the US, per the US Health and Human Services you can file a FOIA request as follows:

Cosmo Wenman filed a freedom of information suit in France against the Musée Rodin when the museum apparently objected to his request for a copy of the 3D file of the Rodin statue.

Ultimately, the CADA AKA Commission D’Accès Aux Documents Administratifs (Commission for Access to Administrative Documents) ruled, in part:

the scans of works for which the Rodin Museum ensures the conservation, for purposes of both study and commercial exploitation, constitute administrative documents within the meaning of the aforementioned provisions, as soon as they have been elaborated and are held in the framework of the public service mission entrusted to this establishment. They are therefore, in principle, communicable to anyone who requests it.

The scans are administrative documents and Wenman was entitled to them.

One fact noted in a commentary PG read – The Musée Rodin receives over half of its annual revenue from its commercial activities, selling large and small reproductions of Rodin’s sculptures, printed copies of artworks, mugs, stationery, jewelry, t-shirts, lapel pins, tote bags, etc., with images derived from Rodin’s artworks, etc., as opposed to entrance fees paid by patrons.

So much for the museum’s laser focus on steadfastly protecting the artistic heritage of Rodin.

Once Mr. Wenman has a copies of the digital scans of the artworks in The Musée Rodin, you can expect him to make them widely available for anyone to download at no charge.

Mr. Wenman has been down this road before with the three-thousand-year-old Bust of Nefertiti, held by the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin.

You can download the 3-D digital file of the scan at the MakerBot Thingiverse.

Following are two videos that show/explain the 3-D printing process.

The first video is short, depicting the printing process for a smaller-than-life-size copy of the original.

The second video is longer, but more detailed, because the artist/mechanic used a home-sized printer to create a full-sized copy of the original.

From Hyperallergic:

Cerulean, azure, navy, royal … Much has been written about the color blue, the first human-made pigment. “Because blue contracts, retreats, it is the color of transcendence, leading us away in pursuit of the infinite,” wrote William Gass in his book On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Wassily Kandinsky once mused: “The power of profound meaning is found in blue, and first in its physical movements of retreat from the spectator, of turning in upon its own center […] Blue is the typical heavenly color.”

And now, for the first time in two centuries, a new chemically-made pigment of the celebrated color is available for artists — YInMn Blue. It’s named after its components — Yttrium, Indium, and Manganese — and its luminous, vivid pigment never fades, even if mixed with oil and water.

Like all good discoveries, the new inorganic pigment was identified by coincidence. A team of chemists at Oregon State University (OSU), led by Mas Subramanian, was experimenting with rare earth elements while developing materials for use in electronics in 2009 when the pigment was accidentally created.

Andrew Smith, a graduate student at the time, mixed Yttrium, Indium, Manganese, and Oxygen at about 2000 °F. What emerged from the furnace was a never-before-seen brilliant blue compound. Subramanian understood immediately that his team stumbled on a major discovery.

“People have been looking for a good, durable blue color for a couple of centuries,” the researcher told NPR in 2016.

. . . .

OSU patented the color in 2012, but it took five more years until the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved YInMn, at first only for use in industrial coatings and plastics. Last May, the government agency officially approved the new pigment for commercial use, making it available to all.

The vibrant pigment caught attention long before the EPA’s official approval last year. In 2016, Shepherd Color Company acquired the license to sell the pigment commercially for exterior applications. A year later, YInMn Blue inspired a new shade of Crayola crayon called Bluetiful. The pigment has also been popular on Etsy, although the quality and authenticity of these offerings are not guaranteed.

Link to the rest at Hyperallergic

A couple of clarifications concerning the OP:

1. As a general proposition, you can’t “patent” a color.
2. The YInMn Blue patent as described in the OP is what is generically called a “Chemical Patent.”
3. A Chemical Patent protects the use of specific chemicals, molecules, compounds, etc., in experimentation and product development.
4. The YInMn Blue patent, as issued, protects a complex chemical formula, with variations.
5. The patent also protects any paint, ink, glass, plastic, or decorative cosmetic preparation composed with the a material created with that chemical formula.

PG will happily accept clarifications by visitors more knowledgeable than he concerning patent law, chemistry or a great many other topics (a low hurdle), but it seems to him that, when it comes to protecting a color during a digital age, chemistry may not provide a comprehensive solution.

What humans perceive as color in the physical world is light that is reflected off of a colored object. One can affect the color perceived by humans by changing the color temperature of the light being directed to the object.

Sunlight has a different color temperature than moon light which has a different color temperature than fluorescent light, for example. While the human brain can make adjustments to modify perceptions to make them seem different than the eye can see, an object will be a measurably different color when observed under direct sunlight at noon than it will under the light of a full moon at midnight. Similarly an object will reflect a different color when observed under sunlight near sunset than under sunlight at noon.

Since we look at screens quite a lot these days, a computer screen is capable of producing the appearance of YInMn Blue without the use of the chemical formula which is protected by the OSU patent.

In fact, the following image of YInMn Blue was presented to PG’s eyes on his computer screen via the OP and is delivered to those who see this post without PG (or PG’s computer) using the protected chemical formula.

{In case you were wondering, Mrs. PG has observed manifestations of OCD (which PG attributes to a lengthy Covid lockdown) in recent weeks. Perhaps visitors to TPV have just observed a similar manifestation themselves.}

And here’s Bluetiful!, a new YInMn-ish Crayola color. Although you might not have thought so, colors can have genders. Bluetiful! is female. She is interested in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) education.

From The New York Times:

For months, the entertainment industry’s legal calendar had an intriguing item on the horizon: a copyright trial pitting Tracy Chapman, the revered and reclusive singer-songwriter, against the firebrand rapper Nicki Minaj.

But that trial is not to be. Late last month, the parties agreed to a judgment of copyright infringement against Minaj, and a payment of $450,000 to Chapman, according to documents made public on Thursday in federal court in California, where the case was being adjudicated.

Chapman sued Minaj for copyright infringement in late 2018 over a song called “Sorry,” which borrowed heavily from Chapman’s “Baby Can I Hold You,” released in 1988. The aspect of the case that drew the attention of legal scholars and entertainment litigators was that Minaj’s song, which she recorded with the rapper Nas, was never officially released, although it had been played on the radio by Funkmaster Flex, a celebrity D.J. on the New York radio station Hot 97.

Chapman accused Minaj of using “Baby Can I Hold You” without permission, which she said Minaj had asked for but was denied. Yet Minaj argued that her creation of “Sorry,” even without a license from Chapman, was protected by the doctrine of “fair use” — an exception to copyright law that lets creators borrow copyrighted material under certain conditions.

Their dispute raised thorny questions for musicians and the companies behind them: Can artists be held liable for copyright infringement for works in progress? Do artists need permission even to experiment in the studio?

. . . .

In September, Judge Virginia A. Phillips, of United States District Court in Los Angeles, sided with Minaj on the question of fair use. In a summary judgment decision, Judge Phillips wrote that “uprooting” the common practice of letting artists experiment privately “would limit creativity and stifle innovation within the music industry.”

But the judge allowed the case to go to trial over the question of how the song made its way to Funkmaster Flex. Chapman’s side alleged that Minaj had leaked it, and pointed to substantial correspondence between the two. Minaj said she did not send the track, and Funkmaster Flex said that he had gotten it “from one of his bloggers,” according to the judge’s ruling.

If Minaj had leaked the song herself, or authorized its release through intermediaries, she may have been liable for significant penalties. Court papers show that Minaj’s lawyers made their offer of $450,000, “inclusive of all costs and attorney fees incurred to date,” on Dec. 17, and that Chapman’s team accepted it on Dec. 30.

Link to the rest at The New York Times thanks to B. for the tip.

PG hasn’t been following the case except at a distance, but suspects that a lot of the $450K will go to Chapman’s attorneys.

PG hasn’t seen anything about whether Chapman is going after or plans to go after Funkmaster Flex or Hot 97.

From The United States Copyright Office:

Section 407 of the Copyright Act generally requires the owner of the copyright in a work published in the United States to deposit two copies with the Copyright Office for use by the Library of Congress. The Register of Copyrights is authorized to exempt certain classes of works from this mandatory deposit requirement. In a 2010 interim rule, the Office codified its longstanding practice of exempting all electronic works that are not available in a physical format. The 2010 interim rule created one exception to this general rule, providing that electronic-only serials published in the United States are subject to mandatory deposit if they are affirmatively demanded by the Office.

In 2018, the Office issued a proposed rule that would make the interim rule final and would make electronic-only books subject to mandatory deposit by way of the same demand process. An “electronic-only book” was defined as electronic literary work published in one volume or a finite number of volumes published in the United States and available only online, with some exclusions for specific types of works such as serials, audiobooks, websites, blogs, and emails.

In June 2020, the Office updated the 2018 proposed rule in response to public comments. The update clarified the scope of material subject to demand and adjusted the provisions governing the use of technological protection measures on deposited material. The Office also provided additional information on the Library’s digital collection strategy and information technology practices.

In November 2020, the Office issued a final rule, to take effect on December 14, 2020. The final rule largely adopts the language set forth in the June 2020 proposed rule, with one additional clarification regarding the rule’s applicability to print-on-demand books.

Link to the rest at The United States Copyright Office

PG notes that the statement above is included in a press release (in typical government-style prose) describing the new rule for copyright registration of digital and print-on-demand books. The complete rule, including more commentary and additional background and explanation of the purpose of the rule is set forth in the embedded PDF below.

[Thanks to Ryan for pointing out some typos in the above paragraph so PG could fix them.]

For eons (in internet time), the US Copyright Office has required that a copyright registrant send two physical copies of printed books to the Copyright office to be transmitted to the Library of Congress.

OTOH, more recently, the Copyright Office has also permitted the registering of a claim of copyright electronically. Such an electronic registration can also include submission of an electronic copy of the work/book for registration purposes in lieu of depositing two physical copies of the “best edition” of the work to be registered with some limitations. (see https://www.copyright.gov/eco/faq.html for more information).

This more recent (in relative terms) rule clarified the right of Microsoft, for an example, to submit an electronic copy of the computer code for Microsoft Office without also sending two copies of a zillion-page printout of that code, likely the only two printed copies in existence, to the Copyright Office with its copyright registration application. (Computer programs have been exempt from physical deposits for some time, but this illustrates PG’s overall point.)

This latest rule change recognizes that, if a registrant is registering a copyright for a book that will exist only in ebook or print-on-demand format, the registrant doesn’t have to send two copies of the printed version of the book to the Copyright Office.

It appears to PG that the Copyright Office has finally come to the conclusion that maintaining electronic records of books to be copyrighted may be just a touch easier and more convenient than sending more and more dead trees to fill up space in Washington.

Of course, as the discussion of the rule indicates, US government computing and electronic data storage systems are way behind the times and have required changes in order to store copies of ebooks in a manner that will allow access to such stored copies for those required to have access or who are entitled to such access under various laws and regulations.

Please note that this is PG’s sarcastic summary of legal stuff to help make it understandable by mere non-lawyers. If PG were writing about this topic for lawyers, it would take a lot more time for him to do so and 99% of the visitors to TPV (including more than a few lawyers) would not get to the end of PG’s bloviations.

From The Verge:

The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has sued Netflix over its upcoming film Enola Holmes, arguing that the movie’s depiction of public domain character Sherlock Holmes having emotions and respecting women violates Doyle’s copyright.

Enola Holmes is based on a series of novels by Nancy Springer starring a newly created teenage sister of the famous detective. They feature many elements from Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and most of these elements aren’t covered by copyright, thanks to a series of court rulings in the early 2010s. Details from 10 stories, however, are still owned by Doyle’s estate. The estate argues that Springer’s books — and by extension Netflix’s adaptation — draw key elements from those stories. It’s suing not only Netflix, but Springer, her publisher Penguin Random House, and the film’s production company for unspecified financial damages.

. . . .

The Doyle estate made a similar argument five years ago in a lawsuit against Miramax for its film Mr. Holmes — among other things, it claimed Mr. Holmes included plot details about Holmes’ retirement, which only happens in the final stories. But its new argument is a lot more abstract: basically, if this movie wants Sherlock Holmes to express emotions, its creators need to pay up.

The complaint alleges that in the public domain stories, Holmes is famously “aloof and unemotional.” Then, that changed because of his creator’s life experiences:

After the stories that are now in the public domain, and before the Copyrighted Stories, the Great War happened. In World War I Conan Doyle lost his eldest son, Arthur Alleyne Kingsley. Four months later he lost his brother, Brigadier-general Innes Doyle. When Conan Doyle came back to Holmes in the Copyrighted Stories between 1923 and 1927, it was no longer enough that the Holmes character was the most brilliant rational and analytical mind. Holmes needed to be human. The character needed to develop human connection and empathy.

Conan Doyle made the surprising artistic decision to have his most famous character—known around the world as a brain without a heart—develop into a character with a heart. Holmes became warmer. He became capable of friendship. He could express emotion. He began to respect women.

He also starts liking dogs, which a judge actually has described as a potentially protected trait.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that Doyle’s estate fought the partial public domain ruling by unsuccessfully arguing that Sherlock Holmes slowly became a complex figure who needed full copyright protection to remain coherent. The estate claimed that losing copyright to some of the stories gave Holmes “multiple personalities.”

So the estate now says Springer and Netflix are basing Enola Holmes on the personality that’s still protected. And the new personality’s key traits include relating to other people and reacting with “warmth and emotion” to a female character who happens to be his immediate family — in other words, some of the most basic updates any author might make to a century-old character.

Link to the rest at The Verge

PG was about to write some comments about showbiz lawsuits and California courts and lawyers.

(PG is a long-time member of The State Bar of California and one of more than 266,000 attorneys licensed to practice law in California, although PG no longer lives in that state. He will attest that there are some very good lawyers in California, there are some very inept lawyers in California and there are some very crazy lawyers in California.)

However, when PG examined the complaint in the Conan Doyle lawsuit, he was surprised to discover that it was filed in the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico by a law firm that appears to be comprised of five attorneys located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, population: 85,000.

There is definitely an interesting story about how a UK corporation created by the heirs of Arthur Conan Doyle connected with a five-attorney firm in Santa Fe.

As mentioned, Plaintiff is a UK corporation.

Defendants are:

• a Delaware corporation,
• a UK corporation,
• limited liabilities formed in
  • Delaware,
  • Georgia and
  • California,
• two residents of London
• a resident of Florida.

As it happens, the Santiago E. Campos Federal Courthouse is located in Santa Fe, likely a short walk from the offices of the attorneys representing the Conan Doyle Estate and not a short walk for any of the parties to the lawsuit or their preferred defense attorneys.

There are a total of five permanent Federal District Court judges and one temporary District Court judge in New Mexico. For comparison, California has 60 permanent Federal District Court Judge positions, New York has 52. (per https://www.uscourts.gov/)

PG doesn’t know how busy these New Mexico judges are, but expects none of them wished for a complex copyright lawsuit involving parties from all over the place to land on her/his docket.

Most Federal District Judges in New Mexico and elsewhere are current on the rules of criminal procedure and how to try a drug case. Copyright infringement? Not so much.

PG is pretty certain there are not enough qualified intellectual property trial attorneys with offices in Santa Fe to represent each of the defendants.

The Santa Fe airport boasts daily flights to to Denver, Dallas and Phoenix, so IP trial attorneys located in Los Angeles, New York or London won’t have an easy time getting to court.

PG hasn’t considered the question of federal jurisdiction and venue for a lawsuit involving as many parties from as many places as the Conan Doyle suit includes, but suspects that New Mexico federal courts could probably hear this case.

This case was filed at the end of June. PG hasn’t checked the court records to see if all the defendants have been served with papers and what has happened since the suit was filed.

However, PG will predict that the first response of the defendants has been/will be to strenuously attempt to have the case transferred to someplace with a lot more qualified attorneys and much better air access than Santa Fe.

He also suspects that a more than a few of the defendants had no idea where Santa Fe was when they were served with court papers.

PG is certain that this will be an entertaining (at least for him) case to follow.

[Let PG know in the comments or via the Contact Link if you are not seeing an embedded copy of the Complaint filed in this case and want to see it. When PG tested this post, he could usually see the PDF, but sometimes received an error message.]

From Publishing Perspectives:

Today (June 1), four publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers—including three of the Big Five—have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The suit asks the court to enjoin the archive’s scanning, public display, and distribution of entire literary works—which it offers to the public through what the association terms “global-facing businesses” branded the Open Library and National Emergency Library. These are found at both openlibrary.org and archive.org.

The Internet Archive, the association states in media messaging this morning, “has brazenly reproduced some 1.3 million bootleg scans of print books, including recent works, commercial fiction and non-fiction, thrillers, and children’s books.”

. . . .

In making the announcement of today’s court filing, Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the association, says, “Today’s complaint illustrates that the Internet Archive is conducting and promoting copyright infringement on a massive scale. In scanning and distributing literary works to which it has no legal or contractual rights, the archive deliberately misappropriates the intellectual and financial investments of authors and publishers and brazenly ignores the copyright law that Congress enacted.

“IA operates with profound disrespect for the value chain of copyright, in which authors, publishers, bookstores, platforms, educational institutions, and libraries work together for the benefit of society, whether during prosperity or a pandemic.”

. . . .

The American association has had quick support this morning from its counterpart organization in the UK market.

From London, Publishers Association CEO Stephen Lotinga says, “We stand fully in support of this action by the Association of American Publishers, which reflects the very significant concerns held by publishers and authors about this site.

“The Internet Archive purports to be a library but it is not and behind that guise it is facilitating the distribution of millions of pirated books without paying a penny to the authors and publishers who produce them.

“We are living in unprecedented times, and that’s why publishers have gone out of their way to make content accessible to those who need it, but there’s no excuse for anyone to use the current crisis to infringe copyright in this way.”

. . . .

“We offered to work with Internet Archive in 2017 to create a licensing system that would make the ‘Open Library’ compliant with copyright law, and that offer was rejected. The Internet Archives’ unwillingness to work with authors and publishers to make their program legal unfortunately made a lawsuit the only recourse.”

. . . .

“Despite the self-serving library branding of its operations,” the AAP’s staff writes, “the Internet Archive’s conduct bears little resemblance to the trusted role that thousands of American libraries play within their communities and as participants in the lawful copyright marketplace.

“The Internet Archive scans books from cover to cover, posts complete digital files to its Web site, and solicits users to access them free by signing up for Internet Archive accounts. The sheer scale of the Internet Archive’s infringement described in the complaint—and its stated objective to enlarge its illegal trove with abandon—appear to make it one of the largest known book pirate sites in the world.

“The Internet Archive publicly reports millions of dollars in revenue each year, including financial schemes that support its infringement design.

“In willfully ignoring the Copyright Act, the Internet Archive conflates the separate markets and business models made possible by the statute’s incentives and protections, robbing authors and publishers of their ability to control the manner and timing of communicating their works to the public. The Internet Archive not only conflates print books and ebooks, it [also] ignores the well-established channels in which publishers do business with bookstores, e-commerce platforms, and libraries, including for print and ebook lending.

“As detailed in the complaint, the Internet Archive makes no investment in creating the literary works it distributes and appears to give no thought to the impact of its efforts on the quality and vitality of the authorship that fuels the marketplace of ideas.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

PG notes that, among its other activities, The Internet Archive hosts a Malware Museum, including code from which the Archive assures its users, it has removed “destructive routines”.

The Internet Archive also includes a Donation Page, which includes the following message:

We need your help to ensure that anyone curious enough to seek knowledge will be able to find it here, for free. We’re an independent, non-profit website that the entire world depends on.

PG is no friend of the large traditional publishers who have filed this suit and does not like many of the things they do.

However, in this matter, PG is not sympathetic with the Internet Archive’s actions with respect to books. The IA provides lots of other useful services, including scanning copies of public documents, including some patent applications, court pleadings, out-of-copyright materials, etc.

However, considering the world-wide reach of IA, it also provides materials, including entire books, that others can download from anywhere in the world, then, among other things, resell on a commercial basis with little fear of discovery by the original author or punishment.

To be clear, if the Internet Archive stopped accepting material protected by copyright tomorrow and removed all such material from its online collection, that would not mean that book piracy would immediately stop. There are other avenues diligent would-be book thieves could pursue, but it would certainly make their work harder and, likely, less-profitable.

From Forbes:

Broadway bootlegs might soon get the boot.

Last week, the U.S. Copyright Office released a report urging federal legislators to change the law in an effort to slow the spread of pirated content like unlicensed recordings of Broadway shows on the Internet. Enforcing Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act nowadays has “resulted in an increasing burden on rights-holders to adequately monitor and enforce their rights online, while providing enhanced protections for online service providers in circumstances beyond those originally anticipated by Congress,” stated its spokesperson.

Designed to foster the growth of online commerce in the early days of the Internet, the legislation protects online platforms from being held liable for copyright infringement when their users post copyrighted material without permission, as long as the online platforms meet certain requirements. In addition to having special policies in place, the companies must not receive a financial benefit directly from any pirated content, know about its presence or any red flags that it exists, or allow it to remain on their websites after its presence has been reported.

“As to the development of online services, it is reasonable to state that Section 512 has achieved this purpose,” stated Raza Panjwani, an attorney who worked for the Public Knowledge public interest group. “Online platforms ranging from YouTube, to Facebook, to Tumblr, to Twitter, to Wikipedia, to innumerable subject matter specific discussion forums, have arisen thanks to the legal certainties provided by Section 512,” he said.

However, a lot has changed since the law was introduced in 1998.

When Section 512 was written, the Internet had only recently expanded beyond the closed platform or “walled garden” websites like America Online and Prodigy. “There was no Facebook or YouTube or Twitter; the first MP3 player had just been launched, and Napster, which popularized peer-to-peer file-sharing, would not exist until the following year,” recalled the spokesperson for the Copyright Office.

. . . .

However, with the growth of the Internet, the distribution of Broadway bootlegs has exploded.

Instead of being distributed on dusty VHS tapes like in the 1990’s, bootleg recordings of Broadway shows are now streamed on popular video-sharing platforms like YouTube, stored on foreign file hosting services like Mega, and traded in online communities like LiveJournal. Hundreds of thousands of unlicensed files are floating around the Internet, and one poll found that over 97.9 percent of theatre enthusiasts under the age of 20 have seen a Broadway bootleg.

Many rights-holders believe that the procedures that Section 512 put in place are not effective in combating copyright infringement on the Internet.

“Copyright owners send millions of notifications, yet these collectively have had little impact toward reducing the volume of infringing material available through the numerous sites employing the safe harbors to shield their responsibility for the persistent presence of such material,” argued Allan Robert Adler, the general counsel for the Association of American Publishers trade group. When pirated content is finally removed from a website, it often pops up again somewhere else, requiring rights-holders to spend a ton of time and money monitoring websites and mailing take-down notices. Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of Hamilton, had to hire someone full-time to search for bootleg recordings of the show, and an executive at the record label Warner Music Group estimated that “it would take at least 20-30 people, at a fully-loaded cost in excess of $2 million per year, and probably the use of an outside content monitoring contractor at additional expense, to meaningfully affect (but not entirely block) just WMG’s top 25 album releases on YouTube.”

. . . .

According to Section 512, in order for an online platform to be shielded from liability, it must have “adopted and reasonably implemented … a policy that provides for the termination in appropriate circumstances of subscribers and account holders of the service provider’s system or network who are repeat infringers.” The platforms must have plans for blocking repeat infringers to make sure that they do not continue to post pirated content on their websites.

However, federal judges interpreting the law have not made up their minds over what makes someone a “repeat infringer.” Some judges think that it refers to someone accused of committing copyright infringement, and some judges think that it refers to someone found in court to have committed copyright infringement.

The Copyright Office believes that Congress originally intended the phrase to refer to only someone accused of committing copyright infringement, and it now insists that legislators should update the statute to make the language more clear. Websites should not wait for a court to find the person who shares multiple Broadway bootlegs liable before closing his or her account and putting a stopper on the source of pirated content.

In addition, there has been some confusion over how much Internet platforms must know about the existence of Broadway bootlegs on their websites before they are required to remove them. Other than when the companies receive a take-down notice or actually know that there is copyright infringement, the statute demands them to act whenever they see red flags or are “aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent.”

Some courts have taken the position that red flags exist when Internet platforms are aware of facts that would make a specific instance of copyright infringement “objectively obvious to a reasonable person.” The facts must relate specifically to the pirated content, and general knowledge that most videos on a website contain pirated content would not be considered a red flag.

Link to the rest at Forbes

Following are excerpts from a website called Similar Works. As the website states, the purpose of this site is to help protect authors from plagiarism of their books.

Beginning of Excerpts:

Protect your book from plagiarism

Similar Works is a web application built to protect authors from having their work exploited and their stories taken from them.

Upload your book to Similar Works and we’ll scan the text against other titles and keep monitoring — and alert you when we find any matches.

. . . .

How It Works

The Similar Works system analyzes ebook files and identifies matching text.

Books are submitted by authors and publishers who wish to protect their copyright, or concerned readers who believe they have found a work containing plagiarized material.

Similar Works reviews all books manually before accepting them into the archive.

Once a book is accepted, the system checks that book against all other titles already added.

If we find text matches that look suspicious, we contact the author or publisher and provide information so that they can take further action to protect their copyright.

We continue to check every time a new book is added to the archive.

Our Book List shows titles that have already been added, as well as a summary of similarities that have been detected called the Similarity Band.

. . . .

The Similarity Band

The Similarity Band is a visual representation of the similarities that our system finds in books.

Each Band is a generated watermark which represents the book’s text, from beginning to end, going from left to right. This is the text as it appears inside the digital file which is uploaded into the Similar Works archive, so it includes things like the copyright notice, the table of contents, disclaimers, back matter, and samples of other books.

When every book is run through the master algorithm, the text is split into logical chunks, usually consisting of no more than a sentence or two. The Band is generated by lining up all the chunks in order, and then recording a color depending on whether a similarity has been detected within that chunk or not.

. . . .

The Band can tell you a lot about how books are related to each other! For example, if a book has a lot of stripes on the far right side of the Band, then there are similarities detected near the end of the text. That probably indicates that the same back matter or samples appear in another book. Stripes on the left indicate similarities detected near the start of the text, and they are probably disclaimers or generic copyright notices.

(We do our best to filter out disclaimers and other generic language used by a lot of authors, so hopefully you won’t see too many of those.)

Unfortunately, the algorithm can only identify similarities. It can’t tell us why the similarity exists.

Common Phrases or Quotations

If you see only one or two stripes, then those are likely common phrases. The sensitivity of the master algorithm is carefully tuned to try to avoid this, but it’s not always successful. These can also be quotations.

Here’s an example of a Similarity Band for The Best of Relations, by Catherine Bilson. You can see that there is a single white stripe indicating a similarity about two-thirds of the way through the book. That similarity was identified as coming from none other than Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen – which is not unusual, as The Best of Relations is based on Pride and Prejudice! In this case, it’s a famous line from Jane Austen’s classic that Catherine Bilson added to her novel.

I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit.

The Best of Relations/Pride and Prejudice

What Does Plagiarism Look Like?

This is the Similarity Band for Royal Love, a romance novel by Cristiane Serruya. Royal Love is currently part of an ongoing court case filed by famed romance author Nora Roberts against Cristiane Serruya in April 2019, accusing her of plagiarizing lines from as many as forty other romance authors.

The Similar Works system has identified many similarities in Royal Love, spread throughout the book.

In addition to potentially being a great help to authors, PG thinks this is a fascinating field of analysis.

Here’s a link to Similar Works

Note:

Some visitors to TPV have reported difficulties in seeing the embedded PDF documents in this post. PG first observed this problem this morning – Thursday, May 21 – (everything seemed to work as planned for PG yesterday) and managed to get the embedded PDFs to show up after refreshing the screen a couple of times. You may want to try holding down your Shift key when you refresh the screen.

As you can see below, PG has provided an alternate way for you to view the documents if the embeds don’t work/haven’t worked for you. PG apologizes for any aggravation this issue has caused.

Beginning Original Blog Post:

As observant visitors to The Passive Voice have noticed, PG included a post titled Plagiarism 2020 yesterday. Today, we’ll talk a bit more about plagiarism, focusing on filings in an interesting lawsuit pending in the US District Court in the Central District of California.

Here are the principal pleadings to date.

NOTE: If you have difficulty viewing any of these PDF documents in this post, following is a link to a shared Dropbox folder that contains all the documents, numbered in the order in which they were filed with the Court (You don’t need a Dropbox account to access this folder) https://www.dropbox.com/sh/562g9gujbnkapzc/AAAH0VLzlOXC8KS3znDq9kxya?dl=0

PG will provide a bit of explanation and commentary. (You can page through each document by moving your cursor over any page, which will reveal up and down arrows plus a zoom feature.)

If you are easily bored and want to see the most interesting document PG found during his exploration of the Court’s files (which are public records), you can scroll way, way down to the end of this post to view Exhibit C to one of the documents you will read about if you don’t immediately jump to the end.

Exhibit C appears to be the result (perhaps only part of the results) of a computerized analysis comparing the entire text of each of the two books at issue in this case to determine the ways in which they are similar to one another – the core question in a copyright infringement case that does not involve actual copying of all or a substantial portion of a copyright-protected work.

If this type of analysis proves useful and is accepted by courts, the subjective opinions of various “experts” who compare each of the texts by reading them and creating conclusory lists or summaries of similarities or differences may be replaced by something that is more objective and can provide a basis for a more accurate and predictable standard for where the line is between “inspired by” and “copied from” lies.

The Complaint

The Complaint is filed on behalf of Pamela DuMond, an individual author.

The Complaint names four different defendants:

• Farrah Reilly a/k/a Emma Chase (for those visitors to TPV from outside of the United States, AKA stands for “Also Known As”. PG assumes Farrah Reilly is a pen name under which Ms. Chase writes.)
• Emma Chase LLC – It appears that Ms. Chase may operate a limited liability company which may or may not have rights to her book and/or receive proceeds from her book.
• Diversion Publishing Corporation d/b/a (Doing Business As) Everafter Romance
• Simon & Schuster, Inc. (a very large American publisher)

Per a later paragraph in the Complaint, Diversion Publishing published a print version of Ms. Reilly’s book and Simon & Schuster published an audio version of the book.

The Complaint is fairly self-explanatory and what PG would expect to see in a case like this.

Rule 8 of The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure describes what a complaint must contain

(a) Claim for Relief. A pleading that states a claim for relief must contain:

• (1) a short and plain statement of the grounds for the court’s jurisdiction, unless the court already has jurisdiction and the claim needs no new jurisdictional support;
• (2) a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief; and
• (3) a demand for the relief sought, which may include relief in the alternative or different types of relief.

PG also notes that the Summons (a court notice to Defendants that they have been sued) was issued in late October, 2019. In November, 2019, two attorneys entered an appearance on behalf of all the defendants except Simon & Schuster.

In January, 2020, these two attorneys withdrew and were replaced by the S&S attorneys, so all the defendants are currently represented by the same attorneys, originally hired by S&S.

The Motion to Dismiss

The second document is a Motion to Dismiss filed by the Defendants.

A few things caught PG’s immediate attention.

• The names of three attorneys appeared on the motion, all from the same firm
• One attorney was from the California office of the firm – the defendants needed an attorney admitted to practice in California to file the response and provide ongoing information about California civil procedure, etc.
• Two attorneys are from the New York office of the firm and were permitted to participate in a California court case pro haec vice – for this case only.
• The defendants’ law firm is one of the 100 largest in the United States, with offices in New York, Anchorage, Bellevue (suburban Seattle), Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle (in addition to the office in Bellevue) and Washington DC.
• PG concludes that Simon & Schuster is completely running the case via the attorneys they originally hired and who, thereafter, in January, 2020, undertook to represent the rest of the defendants..
• A large firm like the one representing the defendants would almost certainly have competent IP litigation attorneys in California, likely in both the LA and San Francisco offices. However, they’re using two New York attorneys, Elizabeth A. McNamara, a full partner with more than 30 years of experience, with lots of litigation, in IP and media matters, and Kathleen Farley, an associate focusing on media in addition to an LA IP associate. PG suspects a 20-minute court hearing in California would generate a significant number of billable hours sitting on an airplane for the New York lawyers.

The Motion to Dismiss is a 28-page document. PG doesn’t know what the current large-firm New York City rule-of-thumb per-page cost for a serious litigation document is, but PG suspects we’re looking at a serious five-figure fee just for drafting this document. If the court sets oral arguments on the motion, PG suspects an additional five figures will be spent by Defendants if the New York lawyers show up.

The biggest question on PG’s mind is, “Why is Simon & Schuster spending so much money defending this case?”

PG doesn’t know how many audiobooks S&S sold before the Summons arrived, but the dollars it has received and would generate if the audiobook continued to be sold would seem to be much less than the costs of defense. PG has no inside knowledge about settlement discussions, if any, but PG bets that S&S could get a release from Pamela DuMond, the author/plaintiff for less than it’s spending on its New York and California lawyers.

However, the fact that S&S offered to have its lawyers represent the rest of the defendants as well is an indication for PG that S&S wanted to control the defense of the case and is likely in the battle for the long haul.

Back to the merits of the Motion to Dismiss.

As PG mentioned much earlier, under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a Plaintiff need only provide a “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief;“

After reading the Complaint, PG thinks it’s pretty clear what Ms. DuMond thinks the Defendants did wrong. If the Defendants are seriously confused, the process of discovery – depositions, interrogatories, etc., etc., – will offer plenty of opportunity for Defendants to clear up any questions they may have.

The Defendants argue that the Complaint only mentions a few examples of plagiarism/copyright violations. PG thinks these are clearly identified as just some of the similarities, not all of them.

One thing the Motion to Dismiss does demonstrate is that S&S is going to attempt to make litigation expensive for the Plaintiff.

Plaintiff’s Opposition to Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss

For PG, this is where things became more interesting.

The copying and copyright infringement of the Defendants was
most likely the result of digital text spinning followed by a re-write and polish. Text
spinning — also called automatic paraphrasing — is performed by computer software
containing a built-in thesaurus.

While digital text spinning results in the alteration of the original work, it also results in nonsensical phrases, awkwardly constructed sentences, patterns, repetitions, and other anomalies — all of which exist in the Defendants’ Copy. What else could explain why the very unique word “Rome” occurs at exactly 67% of the way through the digital version of the Work and at exactly 65% of the way through the digital version of the Copy; and the very unique word “Beyoncé” occurs at exactly 95% of the way through the digital version of the Work and at exactly 95% of the way through the digital version of the Copy. Defendants will argue that the exact same word placement is a remarkable coincidence or that the word is not a form of protected expression.

As detailed below, the digital versions of the Work and the Copy show similarities
that are so striking as to preclude the possibility that Ms. DuMond and Defendant
independently arrived at the same result. The Appendix is replete with similarities that
are similarly placed in the Work and the Copy. This Court should employ a digital
analysis of the Work and the Copy, rather than the antiquated paper analysis urged by the Defendants.

But the Work and the Copy share more than striking similarities in names, stock characters, or trope – they share hundreds of copyrighted elements including written dialogue, written plot points,written character traits, and written scenes, to name a few.

Computer Analysis of Similarities of the Two Works

If you’ve made it this far, PG congratulates you and suggests you may wish to apply to law school.

The following document is the one that interested PG the most. It is attached to the Plaintiff’s Opposition to the Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss as Exhibit C and appears to be one of the products of a computer analysis of the two works – Ms. DuMond’s original book and the one she claims violates her copyrights – to determine how similar the two works are.

As with earlier embedded PDF files, if you can’t see this one in your browser, you can access it at the shared Dropbox folder – https://www.dropbox.com/sh/562g9gujbnkapzc/AAAH0VLzlOXC8KS3znDq9kxya?dl=0

From The Authors Guild:

On Monday, March 23, the U.S. Supreme Court held that states are immune from copyright liability. This is troubling because it means that state universities and libraries can abuse copyright as much as they want without liability to publishers or authors. The Court’s decision in Allen v. Cooper invalidated a 1990 amendment to the Copyright Act which had allowed copyright holders to sue states for copyright infringement.

In Allen v. Cooper, plaintiff Allen and his production company were photographers with exclusive rights to document the exploration of the pirate Blackbeard’s shipwrecked vessel, but the state of North Carolina used Allen’s photographs and videos without his consent. Although the parties entered into a settlement agreement requiring the state to compensate Allen, Allen found out that the state had continued to use the copyrighted works after the date of the settlement agreement. The Supreme Court dubbed the alleged copyright infringement “a modern form of piracy.”

. . . .

While it found that states are immune (again) from copyright infringement actions, the Supreme Court nevertheless left a legislative door open: “That conclusion, however, need not prevent Congress from passing a valid copyright abrogation law in the future.” The Court recognized the need to protect the interests of copyright holders—even from the states—saying “That kind of tailored statute can effectively stop States from behaving as copyright pirates. Even while respecting constitutional limits, it can bring digital Blackbeards to justice.”

Link to the rest at The Authors Guild

From World Intellectual Property Review:

Depicting sports stars’ tattoos in video games does not infringe copyright owned by the tattoo artist or their licensee, a US federal court has ruled.

In the first written judgment on tattoo copyright in the US, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York yesterday, March 26, ruled that video game developer and publisher Take-Two Interactive was free to reproduce the designs featured in the real-life tattoos of basketball players like LeBron James in its “NBA 2K” series.

Take-Two, and its subsidiary 2K, had been facing copyright infringement claims brought by Solid Oak Sketches, a tattoo licensing firm which purchased the copyright for James’ tattoos, as well as other basketball players Eric Bledsoe and Kenyon Martin.

. . . .

According to the court, when artists tattoo someone, they grant an implied, nonexclusive licence to their work where it can be reasonably expected to become part of a person’s likeness.

In the case of the basketball players, the artists would have known that they were well-known figures and likely to appear in public, on TV, and in the media.

“Defendants’ right to use the tattoos in depicting the players derives from these implied licenses, which predate the licenses that plaintiff obtained from the tattooists,” judge Laura Swain wrote.

. . . .

Irrespective of the implied licence, the reproduction of the tattoos in the “NBA 2K” games qualified as de minimis use, and did not require the consent of any copyright owner, the court concluded.

Judge Swain wrote that “no reasonable trier of fact could find the tattoos as they appear in ‘NBA 2K’ to be substantially similar to the tattoo designs licensed to Solid Oak,” as they cannot be identified or observed during gameplay.

The court found that the tattoos appear only fleetingly and are obscured by the rapid motions of the in-game players. 

Link to the rest at World Intellectual Property Review

From Variety:

A federal judge has handed a big win to Katy Perry, overturning a copyright infringement verdict regarding her hit song “Dark Horse.”

Judge Christina A. Snyder issued a ruling on Tuesday vacating the jury’s verdict, finding that the short musical phrase at issue is not original enough to warrant copyright protection.

The jury had found last July that “Dark Horse” included an eight-note ostinato that was stolen from “Joyful Noise,” a song by the Christian rapper Flame. The jury awarded $2.8 million in damages.

Snyder found that the jury’s verdict was not supported by the weight of the evidence in the case.

“It is undisputed in this case,” Snyder wrote, “that the signature elements of the 8-note ostinato in ‘Joyful Noise’… is not a particularly unique or rare combination.”

Snyder drew on the testimony of the plaintiff’s expert witness, musicologist Todd Decker, in coming to her conclusion that the jury got it wrong.

“A relatively common 8-note combination of unprotected elements that happens to be played in a timbre common to a particular genre of music cannot be so original as to warrant copyright protection,” she wrote.

. . . .

The decision is the second piece of good news in as many weeks for music labels and major acts, which have felt besieged by frivolous copyright litigation over the last few years. Last Monday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a jury verdict finding that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” did not infringe on an earlier song by the band Spirit.

Link to the rest at Variety

Here’s an earlier video, created prior to yesterday’s reversal of the jury verdict as described in the OP.

From The Biederman Blog:

It may be true, as some songs have averred, that playas gon play, and haters, they gonna hate.

But federal district judges, well, they rule.

And, when asked to decide matters with elements that they may deem legally triflin’, their honors sometimes can just zing parties before them.

That was the case with U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald in Los Angeles, as he took up a copyright infringement suit filed by the songwriters of 3LW’s 2001 piece, Playas Gon’ Play.

They asserted that pop diva Taylor Swift  violated their copyright  for Playas with her hit Shake It Off  (to hear it, click on image above), which became a Billboard No. 1 hit in 2014 and stayed on the charts for 50 weeks. In contrast, Playas  “peaked at No. 81 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. . . [with] more than 1,000,000 units were sold.”

The judge zeroed in on plaintiff’s claims about infringing lyrics, 3LW having sung: “Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate.” Swift, on the other hand, crooned, “Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”

Fitzgerald, in a rebuke that cuts multiple ways at the creativity of the works before him, found that:

In sum, the lyrics at issue – the only thing that Plaintiffs allege Defendants copied – are too brief, unoriginal, and un-creative to warrant protection under the Copyright Act.

He granted the motion by Swift and other named defendants, tentatively, to dismiss the case, in what might be deemed an artistic Pyrrhic victory. 

Link to the rest at The Biederman Blog

From Artnet News:

In a sweeping 32-page decision eviscerating the legal arguments of a disgruntled Queens real estate developer, a US Appeals Court affirmed the rights and monetary damages awarded to a group of graffiti artists whose works were destroyed without warning or consent in 2013.

The artists sued the developer, Gerald Wolkoff, in 2013 for violating their rights after he whitewashed their work at the famous 5Pointz graffiti art mecca in New York to make way for condos. A jury ruled in favor of the artists in November 2017, but it was up to a judge to determine the extent of the damages.

In February 2018, Brooklyn Supreme Court judge Frederick Block awarded the artists a total $6.75 million in a landmark decision. The sum included $150,000—the maximum legal penalty—for each of the 45 destroyed works at the center of the case.

The trial was a key test of the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), which grants visual artists certain “moral rights” for their work. Previous VARA cases rarely made it to trial, and were instead settled privately.

But the act, which was added to copyright laws in 1990, disallows the modification of works in ways that could be considered harmful to artists’ reputations, and grants protections to artworks deemed to be of “recognized stature.”

Link to the rest at Artnet News

Photos of the art prior to destruction are at the OP.

Note from PG: The reason that the following item and the congressional hearings it describes is important for indie authors is that §512 impacts the least-expensive way of dealing with online piracy of an author’s work – DMCA Takedown Notices (go here and here for an overview if you don’t know what those are).

From The Illusion of More:

Early last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first in what will be a year-long series of hearings (roughly one per month) to review the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Almost as old as the publicly-available internet itself, the 1998 DMCA expressed the best efforts of Congress to predict how the digital market might evolve and to, therefore, strike a balance between the interests of internet service providers (ISPs) and copyright owners.

Over the intervening twenty-two years, much—MUCH—has been written, debated, shouted, flung wailed, opined, and scorned about the DMCA, specifically Titles I and II of the five-title statute.  If we ask the tech-centric/copyright-skeptics, they are likely to say that Title I (§1201) is a disaster and that Title II (§512) is working just fine; while the creator/copyright proponent will tell us exactly the opposite.

. . . .

What I will reiterate in this post is that the greatest concern to creators of every size is the conditional liability shield (“safe harbor”) provided to web platforms by §512.  It is the foundation of the oft-described “whack-a-mole” problem whereby the independent author attempts to remove infringing uses of her works one-by-one, only to have them reappear on the same platform(s) faster than she can prepare new notices.  (And “whack-a-mole” can be just as big a problem for a small business like an apparel maker as it is for a traditional artist like a musician.)  

In response to this futile battle with online infringement, authors often give up enforcement via the DMCA takedown process (resigned to donating even more revenue to billion-dollar corporations) while they ask as a community why the major platforms in particular cannot do a better job of preventing protected works from being chronically re-uploaded without license.

. . . .

What is “Red Flag” Knowledge?

Unfortunately, you will get different answers depending on whom you ask, including a court split on the matter if you ask either the Second or the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  But in everyday life, “red flag” knowledge is a reasonable, common-sense inference that one can draw from a modest amount of empirical evidence and experience.  If you enter the house to find trash strewn across the floor and a chagrined puppy in the corner, you will not need training in forensic science to have “red flag” knowledge that either the dog has committed a misdemeanor, or he has been artfully framed by the cat.  

That roughly describes the degree of analysis Congress intended ISPs to perform when encountering evidence of copyright infringement on their platforms.  As Professor Aistars noted, “Although Congress did not obligate service providers to actively seek out infringements, it did require them to act expeditiously to remove infringing materials once they have knowledge or awareness of infringing activity on their networks.”

. . . .

For example, let us imagine that the users of a web platform we’ll call Vimeo are making videos using some famous music we’ll call Beatles songs.  Any ordinary observer can reasonably assume that these users probably did not license these sound recordings; yet in the case Capitol Records v. Vimeo, the Second Circuit held, on the issue of “red flag” knowledge, that the platform’s operators would have needed either legal or music-industry expertise in order to discover infringement.

Keeping in mind that voluntary removal of material based on “red flag” knowledge of infringement is a condition of an ISP’s “safe harbor,” decisions like Vimeo do more than erase this part of the statute—they exacerbate a culture of infringement through court-sanctioned willful blindness.  And as Aistars added in her testimony, “Pointedly, this occurred in a case where discovery had revealed emails from managers to employees winkingly encouraging infringement.”  Thus, Aistars is among those who would advocate clarifying the meaning of “red flag” to restore the intent of §512.

The Vimeo emails Aistars mentions are typical of the shoulder shrugs and middle fingers creators are used to receiving from many platform operators, and application of the DMCA to date has unquestionably fostered cultural attitudes anathema to the kind of cooperation between ISPs and rightsholders Congress specifically intended to promote two decades ago.  Further, unintended endorsement of this culture among site operators may be exacerbating a persistent misunderstanding among individual and commercial users that the internet is a realm of automatic immunity.

. . . .

Anticipating the likelihood that, if there is to be any revision to §512 at all, “red flag” will be a major point of debate, Professor Tushnet warned against what she and others see as throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.  “If there is one message I would ask the members of the Committee to take away today,” she stated in her opening testimony, “it is that most beneficiaries of §512 are not Google or Facebook.”  Tushnet cautions that if we were to amend §512 solely as a response to the challenges creators face on very large, commercial platforms like YouTube, we risk simultaneously putting compliant, smaller platforms out of operation and facilitating even greater monopolization by the largest entities.

As a statistical matter, Tushnet is making a “few bad apples” argument, except for the fact that some of the baddest apples in the bunch happen to be the most powerful, wealthiest internet companies in the world.  So, even if we take her premise and data at face value (i.e. that millions of compliant sites rely on §512 to exist), this does not recommend ignoring the catalog of evidence that application of the DMCA has promoted willful blindness among the operators of major ISPs.  Simply put, if twenty-million sites operate without harm while one site does harm to twenty-million creators, we still have a problem if the law shields that one site from liability.  So, the status quo cannot be the final answer.  

As a practical consideration, Tushnet’s argument is based on the assumption that a more clearly defined restoration of the intent of “red flag” knowledge can only be implemented by technological measures, which only the largest ISPs can afford.  

. . . .

As Tushnet testified, her own Organization for Transformative Works site hosts over “four-million works” yielding 1.2 billion page views per month, while the site receives takedown notices at a rate of less than one per month, most of which are invalid.  Assuming these data are correct, the site to which she refers seems barely relevant as an example. It is a large fanfic platform with what appears to be a vast amount of material—mainly short works of written text—that is highly unlikely to infringe.  No sound recordings.  No photographs.  No film clips.  At most, some fanfic writer could maybe—and I mean maybe—run afoul of a derivative works right. 

From a cursory review of OTW, it is not at all evident that adopting a clearer, statutory definition of “red flag” (in order to hold the majors accountable) would force a site like this one to invest in prohibitively expensive technology in order to remain complaint.  If the platform is indeed receiving takedown notices at a rate of less than one valid notice per month, this is most likely evidence that the site hosts little to no infringing material—and that when notices are received, human review is sufficient to the task.  Further, the fact that the site hosts “fandoms” for a long list of works owned by major motion picture studios indicates that infringement must be very low to near zero if it has not invited the attention of an industry with the resources to send notices in volume.  

Link to the rest at The Illusion of More

From The Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice:

Online marketplaces reach potential customers all over the world, but can also be used for goods infringing intellectual property rights. Even when online marketplace operators do not themselves participate in such transactions, they do draw economic benefit therefrom, e.g. by charging a fee per transaction. So, to what extent can they be held liable for the sale of infringing goods through their platforms? 
Whereas such operators qualify as providers of information society services in the sense of the E-Commerce Directive, they are also intermediaries in the sense of Article 11 of the IP Enforcement Directive. And like any economic operator, they must abide by the trade mark laws and other legislation. 
The interpretation of these distinct sets of rules has given rise to a number of decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Certain aspects seem to have been settled by now, but many issues remain open. Absent contributory infringement in EU trade mark law, one of the most pressing questions is if, and to what extent online marketplaces can be held liable for direct trade mark infringement.

. . . .

The Coty/Amazon case (C-567/18), currently pending before the CJEU, might shed some light over the first question, namely the liability for direct trade mark infringement of online marketplace operators, especially when they engage in additional services like they often do nowadays. Such additional services can include supplying the goods to buyers, assisting sellers in promoting the sale of their goods. 
The teaching to be expected from the Coty/Amazon judgment will largely depend on how the CJEU will interpret the preliminary referral. If it sticks to the facts as presented to it by the German Supreme Court, then it will probably not go as far in its analysis as did the Advocate General, who opened the door to direct liability for trade mark infringement of online marketplace operators, and by extension, online intermediaries in general. Hence, further guidance might be on its way … or not just yet. 

. . . .

Liability for direct trademark infringement should not be accepted too soon, at least if online marketplace operators clearly communicate their role to the consumer. After all, establishing a direct trade mark infringement requires an adverse effect on one of the functions of the trade mark. At least as far as the essential origin function is concerned, no impairment thereof can be presumed if the advertising is not misleading as to the nature of the operator. As stated by the Advocate General in L’Oréal/eBay, in 2011, and even more so today, consumers are used to the existence of various intermediary economic activities. 
Of course trade mark owners should not be left without ammunition. An equitable balance between the interests of online marketplace operators and the interests of trade mark owners could be found by imposing higher monitoring duties on online marketplace operators assuming an ‘active’ role. Where such ‘active’ intermediaries cannot benefit from the hosting exemption, they can be liable for tort if they have not been sufficiently diligent and a causal link exists between their lack of diligence and the damage suffered. Requiring them to display a higher degree of diligence could therefore solve a lot. It would make sense to have a proactive monitoring duty the extent this is proportionate to the degree of their involvement. 

. . . .

In this area – the prevention of infringements – an important challenge for online marketplace operators lies in setting up more performant technologies to reveal potential trade mark infringement by their customers/vendors. Automated identification and/or enforcement and voluntary, non-judicial takedown mechanisms established between online intermediaries and IP rights owners are bound to become increasingly important.

Link to the rest at The Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice

It’s not easy (at least for PG) to discover how many trademarks there are in the world. According to the latest information (2016) he could find from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), there were an estimated Seven Million trademark applications worldwide just during that single year.

PG downloaded a spreadsheet from WIPO summarizing trademark filings on a country-by-country basis from 1980 to 2018. The spreadsheet was 42 columns wide and 203 lines long. For those who may be arithmetically-impaired (as PG is) that is more than 8,500 separate data points.

These numbers show a total of more than 22 million trademark applications filed during that time.

Some trademarks disappear and others go on and on and one. In the US, trademark rights can last indefinitely as long as the owner continues to use the mark to identify its goods or services. The term of a federal trademark is 10 years, with 10-year renewal terms.

Per Wikipedia, the oldest U.S. registered trademark still in use is trademark reg. no 11210, . . . a depiction of the Biblical figure Samson wrestling a lion, registered in the United States on May 27, 1884 by the J.P. Tolman Company, now Samson Rope Technologies, Inc., a rope-making company.

Additionally, although trademarks are typically issued on a country-by-country basis but international treaties provide that trademarks registered in one nation will be recognized and enforceable in other treaty nations. Under The Madrid System (named after the city where the two underlying treaties were negotiated) is a system for the international registration of marks. It provides a means to seek protection for a trademark simultaneously in a large number of jurisdictions.

One additional complication – trademarks are issued for a particular class of goods/services so different individuals or companies may own identical trademarks that are enforceable for different categories of goods or services. For example, in the US, Ace is a trademark for hair brushes and Ace is also a trademark for stapling machines and The American Council on Education.

So, how does an online marketplace like Amazon build a system that can allow it to determine whether the name of a product sold on its marketplaces around the world infringes the trademark belonging to another individual or company without hiring the largest collection of trademark attorneys in the world?

Multiple countries, lots and lots of different product categories and a legal regimen for enforcing trademarks that may be applied differently in one nation than it is in another.

Here’s a link to a New York Times story about how a trademark can lose its protection if it becomes generic.

From The Art Newspaper:

The Spanish billionaire who tried to smuggle a Picasso painting out of Spain has been sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined €52.4m. Jaime Botin, part of the Santander banking dynasty, was convicted by a court in Madrid earlier this week.

The work, Head of a Young Woman (1906), was seized from Botin’s yacht, known as Adix, off the coast of Corsica, France, in 2015. According to Spain’s strict heritage laws, permits are required for exporting items more than 100 years old, which can be classified as “national treasures”.

. . . .

According to Bloomberg, prosecutors argued that Botin, who bought the work in 1977, was smuggling the painting out of Spain and hoped to sell the piece at a London auction house. But Botin said he was taking the painting to Switzerland for safekeeping.

The work was originally due to be sold at Christie’s London in February 2013, but the Spanish culture ministry subsequently barred the work from being taken abroad. Ownership of the work has since been transferred to the Spanish state.

Link to the rest at The Art Newspaper

From The Illusion of More:

Anyone who is consistently engaged on copyright issues is used to hearing the rhetoric from the major critics, who say things like We support creators while they advocate policies that will further erode authorial rights.  Whether these parties engage in this kind of chicanery in order to sacrifice artists at the altar of Big Tech, or they do it just because they are petty iconoclasts is subject to a case-by-case consideration.  But if that same I care about you message is delivered by a senator to his constituents, it is acutely disappointing when he returns to the cloister of Washington D.C. and totally screws them over.  

The fact that Senator Ron Wyden was going to do exactly this to Oregon’s creative community is prefaced in at least two town hall meetings captured on videos that I have seen.  In one of these clips (which has not been made public), Portland-based photographer Tim Trautmann asks the senator about releasing his one-man hold on the CASE Act.  After assuring the artists, musicians, photographers et al in attendance that he is “very sympathetic” to the need for a small-claim copyright option, Wyden then patronizes his constituents in a rather cloying display in the political art of hokum.  First, by alluding to a mostly-false narrative in which he negotiated the amendments necessary to pass the Music Modernization Act (2018), Wyden then cites this unearned credential to imply that he will likewise help shepherd the CASE Act to passage with a few minor amendments that he personally believes are necessary.

From there, the senator rather predictably aped the tech-industry talking point that “teenagers and grandmothers posting memes could be harmed” by the small-claim copyright process, lapsing into cringy rhetoric, telling the “good people” in the room that he knows they do not want to hurt teenagers and grandmothers.  In a similar video clip captured at Newberg by Trautmann, Wyden does the “grandmothers and teens” spiel along with other familiar, industry talking points, including the fallacious assertion that the small-claim tribunal would provide fresh opportunity for copyright trolls to ply their dark arts. 

. . . .

Presumably the good people in those rooms know that Senator Wyden can read the bill and at least acknowledge its many safeguards designed to alleviate the very concerns the senator pretends that he alone is now raising.  Not the least of these would be the mandate that the small-claim tribunal is VOLUNTARY.

. . . .

So, after blowing all that smoke around various rooms in the state, Senator Wyden returned to D.C. and asked for changes to the CASE Act that would effectively obliterate its whole purpose for existing—a.k.a. poisoned pills.  For instance, his proposal to reduce the damages caps by 95% of their current level is not only too extreme a revision to call a “compromise,” but it shows the senator’s underlying contempt for the bill, for copyright in general, and, by extension, for those constituents he basically blew off in the town hall meetings.  A damages cap as low as $750 for a single claim (Wyden’s proposal) is so low that it barely covers the cost of filing the complaint and is, consequently, no deterrent to the kind of real-world infringements most rights holders have a problem addressing. 

. . . .

On a phone call with several Oregon creators, another Portland-based commercial photographer, Michael Shay, relayed an anecdote about Trautmann that is exemplary of the conflicts the CASE Act was written to resolve.  After a local restaurant used one of Trautmann’s images without permission on its website for promotional purposes, the photographer requested a very reasonable few hundred dollars for the continued commercial use of the photo.  “When the restaurant did not respond to letters and phone calls from his lawyer,” says Shay, “Trautmann expressed frustration about the situation to friends on social media, and that led to resolving the issue.” 

I know.  We can almost hear the chorus of tech-utopians exalting the use of social media pressure as a form of enlightened, DIY justice.  But as Shay observed, social media “shaming” (i.e. a public fight) is not a very healthy solution for anybody involved—neither the copyright owner nor the infringing user—least of all in a relatively small community like Portland.  On the contrary, civil laws exist in part to keep society from devolving to tribes of bullies; and very few copyright owners want to resort to bullying just so they can be fairly compensated for the use of their works.  “I very reluctantly went to social media to talk about this issue at all,” Trautmann later told me.  “I confided my feelings to one friend on Facebook, who then wrote a scathing review of the restaurant on Yelp!, and that resulted in settlement of the infringement matter.” 

So, as indicated in my last post on this topic, Senator Wyden might want to look beyond his personal biases about copyright and the CASE Act and take a more holistic view of the community he was elected to serve.  A copyright small-claim board is a civilized, voluntary (did I mention voluntary?) solution to a conflict between two members of a community—the copyright owner and the average commercial infringer like that restaurant—not the least consideration being that the restaurant would lose big in a federal case, if Trautmann had to file a lawsuit. 

Link to the rest at The Illusion of More