The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) sought comment on a motion for partial distribution of digital audio recording technology (DART) fees included in the 2014 Sound Recordings Fund, in Monday’s Federal Register. An Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies (AARC) settlement agreement filed in late July said it and parties it has reached settlements with agreed to distribute 98 percent of DART fees from the Sound Recordings Fund’s subfunds for copyright owners and featured recording artists. All but one claimant to the Featured Recording Artists Subfund reached a settlement, as have all but four claimants to the Copyright Owners Subfund, AARC said. CRB said it’s seeking comment from parties on whether any “reasonable objection exists” that would preclude the distribution of the DART fees. Comments on the partial distribution motion are due Dec. 2.

The Patent and Trademark Office will perform maintenance on certain systems next week, which will make access unavailable to its online patent application filing systems, it said in a news release Thursday. The maintenance will be from 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. Nov. 7, and will affect online accessibility to its public and private Patent Application Information Retrieval systems, plus EFS-Web and EFS-Web Contingency electronic filing systems, said the PTO. During the outage, patent applicants can submit new documents, applications and fee payments by mail using procedures here, but are encouraged to transmit electronic filings before the outage period, the release said.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation praised Senate Judiciary Committee leaders Friday for requesting a Copyright Office study of the role of copyright law on the use of “software-enabled devices.” EFF said that issue is “crucial because technology and the law have evolved in a way that no one could have intended when Congress wrote the present copyright laws.” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., told Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante in a letter Thursday that “this is a complex field, and how we interact with software in our products touches on numerous important policy arenas, including intellectual property, privacy, consumer protection, public safety, cybersecurity, competition, and the evolution of the digital marketplace.” The CO should “undertake a comprehensive review of the role of copyright in the complex set of relationships at the heart of these issues,” Grassley and Leahy wrote. That review should examine how legitimate usage of software-enabled products is affected by existing copyright law, how innovation is affected by those provisions and what changes to copyright law would affect the creation and use of software-enabled products, Grassley and Leahy said. The CO said Friday it’s “pleased” to have received Senate Judiciary’s study request and “will ask for public input to ensure that the Office’s report considers the views of all in the copyright community, including copyright owners and public interest groups.” The CO is expected Wednesday to release its ruling on proposed exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 1201’s ban on the circumvention of technological protection measures. EFF, which has advocated for several of the 27 proposed exemptions under review as part of CO’s triennial Section 1201 exemptions rulemaking process, said it believes Section 1201 “has restricted customers’ freedoms to repair, understand, and improve on the devices they buy.” EFF said it believes “there is already an extensive record establishing the need to rein in Section 1201, to protect device owners from copyright abuse enabled by end-user license ‘agreements,’ and to pass other reforms that would generally improve copyright law such as reducing statutory damages and the length of time that copyrights remain in force.”

The Copyright Office’s top strategic goals for 2016-2020 include building a “robust and flexible technology enterprise that is dedicated to the current and future needs of a modern copyright agency,” the CO said Friday in a draft of its five-year strategic plan. The strategic plan is to take effect Dec. 1. The CO said it “must be a model for twenty-first century government” that's “future-focused.” The CO and the Library of Congress have faced significant criticism this year on technology issues, including a GAO report that criticized LOC for not modernizing critical systems (see 1503310046) and for a lengthy late summer outage of critical CO systems (see 1509080058). "Broad-ranging modernization efforts are needed to meet the changing needs of individual authors, entrepreneurs, the user community, and the general public," said Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante in a statement. CO systems “should inspire confidence and encourage participation in day-to-day services and transactions,” the office said in its draft strategic plan. “Custom search tools should yield quick, authoritative results. In short, technology should support all aspects of the Copyright Office’s mission and adapt to evolving needs.” The CO said it’s developing a “detailed IT plan” and will seek public comment on “specific strategies, costs, and timelines for technology objectives.” The CO is planning to expand engagement with a range of copyright stakeholders on technology issues and will “adopt industry technology standards, architectures, and cloud services” that will be compatible with current and future tech. The CO said it’s analyzing requirements for “premium on-premises and off-premises hosting solutions” for copyright systems. The CO will also strengthen its procedures for making technology investments to ensure there’s a comprehensive review of all proposed investments. The CO said it also set a strategic goal to make copyright records “easily searchable and widely available” to stakeholders. Copyright records “can fuel any number of innovative business models if captured and organized properly and provided in a timely manner,” CO said. The office plans to use business strategies to integrate its “registration and recordation systems” and will use a “robust” public records search engine that will allow for faceted searching and unlimited results. CO said it plans to work with private sector stakeholders to “formalize accepted metadata standards and increase use of unique identifiers” in copyright records. The CO also plans to advance its use of third-party programs and other technologies and ensure they’re interoperable with CO data and records. The CO said it plans to expand the number of records integrated into its online contemporary records database. Other CO strategic goals include effective administration of U.S. copyright laws, providing impartial assistance to all branches of the federal government on copyright law, recruiting a diverse expert pool and delivering “outstanding” resources to stakeholders.

MPAA wants the joint strategic plan of the Office of the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator to ensure the "highly significant resources and expertise of the federal government are deployed efficiently" against those stealing intellectual property, the association said in comments to IPEC. The comment period for the three-year joint strategic plan, which will become effective in 2016, ended last week, with conflicting suggestions (see 1510190052). MPAA said that since the implementation of the last joint strategic plan, the use of domain names for unlawful conduct, the prevalence of piracy websites prominently appearing on search engines and the use of data storage services to host websites trafficking stolen content have been key areas in which progress has been lagging. MPAA asked IPEC to address those issues in the plan being developed and to continue coordinating enforcement actions against those who steal copyrighted material. The group suggested IPEC continue to facilitate and encourage industry collaboration on initiatives to address IP theft.

Public interest groups praised the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling Friday affirming that the Google Books project to digitize portions of the world’s books is an acceptable example of fair use. A three-judge 2nd Circuit panel said Google Books’ “snippet view” is likely to cause some book sales losses, but that “does not suffice to make the copy an effectively competing substitute” (see 1510160063). The decision “is a victory for the public,” Public Knowledge Policy Counsel Raza Panjwani said in a statement: “Researchers can now spend seconds, not lifetimes, searching through libraries across the world to identify relevant books. If copyright law is truly intended ‘to promote the progress of science and the useful arts,’ then this is precisely the kind of access-enhancing use it should permit.” The 2nd Circuit ruling “stresses that the reason ‘transformativeness’ matters is that it helps justify the copying,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a blog post. “Google’s justification is plain: to provide otherwise unavailable information to the public. Relying on the court’s earlier ruling in the [HathiTrust] case, the opinion finds that Google’s use is highly transformative. The court also firmly rejects the claim that Google’s commercial nature undermined any claim of fair use.”

The Patent and Trademark Office expanded the hearing locations of its Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), it said in a news release Friday. The hearing locations now include Alexandria, Virginia; Detroit; Denver; and San Jose. A hearing location in Dallas is "in the near future," the PTO said.

Google's project to digitize portions of the world’s books constitutes an acceptable example of fair use, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Friday in a ruling. A three-judge 2nd Circuit panel affirmed a 2013 ruling by the U.S. District Court in New York, which has also rejected the lawsuit led by the Authors Guild that challenged Google’s project on the grounds that it would significantly hurt the publishing industry (see report in the Nov. 15, 2013, issue). Legal experts previously said they anticipated that Google would prevail at the 2nd Circuit (see 1410300049). Although publishing portions of books free via Google Books’ “snippet view” may “cause some loss of sales,” that “does not suffice to make the copy an effectively competing substitute,” Judge Pierre Leval said in the 2nd Circuit's opinion. Sales losses from the Google Books snippets “will generally occur in relation to interests that are not protected by the copyright” like confirming simple facts, while copyright law “protects only the author’s manner of expression,” the court said. Google Books allows a maximum of 77 percent of a book’s content to be displayed via snippet view, and those portions are divided up in a way that doesn’t allow long sequences of text to be read. “Google’s division of the page into tiny snippets is designed to show the searcher just enough context surrounding the searched term to help her evaluate whether the book falls within the scope of her interest,” the 2nd Circuit said. “Snippet view thus adds importantly to the highly transformative purpose of identifying books of interest to the searcher.” The Authors Guild believes “that the Supreme Court will see fit to correct the Second Circuit’s reduction of fair use to a one-factor test -- whether the use is, in the court’s eye, ‘transformative,’” Executive Director Mary Rasenberger said in a statement.

The Patent and Trademark Office will host two "roadshows" in November as part of its patent quality discussion series, it said in a news release Friday. Western Michigan University Law School will host the first event on Nov. 4, and North Carolina Central University Law School will hold the second on Nov. 6. PTO patent quality experts and executives will lead discussions on global patent prosecution improvements, measuring patent quality, enhancing examiner interviews and patent automation initiatives, the release said.

The Patent and Trademark Office officially opened its new location in Silicon Valley, it said in a news release Thursday. The office, located in San Jose, California, will "help the West Coast region's entrepreneurs advance cutting-edge ideas to the marketplace, grow their businesses, and more efficiently navigate the world's strongest intellectual property system," the release said. Director Michelle Lee participated in Thursday's ribbon-cutting ceremony, and in her remarks, announced the PTO's new startup partnership. Lee said the partnership is a "robust, public-private collaboration with area innovators" that will ensure startups have increased and easier access to information about intellectual property, tailor existing IP resources and programs to the needs of the startup community, and develop new IP resources where appropriate to better serve newer companies.