The Copyright Office is accepting comments until Nov. 8, replies Dec. 9, on the proposed blanket compulsory license under the Music Modernization Act (see 1909130067), said the agency Tuesday. The blanket license takes effect in January 2021.

The Copyright Office’s eCO Registration System will be offline at 6 p.m. Oct. 5 until 6 a.m. the following day to “accommodate Pay.gov maintenance,” said the CO Monday.

MPAA now goes by the Motion Picture Association, including online, the group said Wednesday. That's "the name we will now be known as globally. Our U.S.-specific work will still fall under Motion Picture Association -- America," a spokesperson emailed us. Logo here.

Though the U.S.-China trade war continues with no end in sight, the good news for Broadcom’s semiconductor segment is that “we have not seen further deterioration in our business" since last quarter, said CEO Hock Tan on a fiscal Q3 call Thursday. That prompted Broadcom to leave unchanged its forecast, downgraded on its June call from the $2 billion hit from the trade war (see 1906140011), of $17.5 billion in semiconductor revenue for the fiscal year ending in November, said Tan. “Visibility” into the next fiscal year “continues to be very limited on the semiconductor side,” he said. “So we are managing the business with an expectation that we will continue to operate in a very low-growth, uncertain macro environment for the foreseeable future.” The trade war “is turning into an extended affair with lots of twists and turns in uncertainty,” said Tan. “We are assuming” trade conditions next fiscal year are “not going to change from what we're seeing now,” which means “you probably see a very uncertain 2020,” he said. Broadcom is at least three months away from being able to give clearer 2020 guidance, “but as we sit here right now,” it appears “we have hit bottom” in the semiconductor business, he said. “We're kind of staying at the bottom.” There’s not “much clarity or visibility yet or certainty that any sharp recovery is around the corner,” he said. The stock closed 3.1 percent lower Friday at $290.32. The “fundamentals” of Broadcom’s semiconductor business “remain strong,” said Tan. “We continue to benefit from the underlying trend in the IT world and insatiable need for increasing bandwidth to connect things.”

Telecom and tech issues weren’t discussed in Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, but a few candidates targeted China for stealing U.S. intellectual property. China steals “our products, including our intellectual property,” said Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. “They dump substandard products into our economy. They need to be held accountable.” The problem with China isn’t the trade deficit, but that it’s stealing IP and violating World Trade Organization rules, said ex-Vice President Joe Biden. Entrepreneur Andrew Yang said an executive friend visited China recently and “saw pirated U.S. intellectual property on worker workstations to the tune of thousands of dollars per head.” The friend asked how American workers can compete with that, Yang said, citing lost American revenue.

DirecTV advertising warning of TV channels being lost unless Congress reauthorizes the Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act is "disingenuous at best, deceptive at worst," NAB President Gordon Smith said in a letter Thursday to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. STELAR "was never intended to be permanent" and the number of U.S. households not getting local broadcast signals via DirecTV is small, Smith said. He said most DirecTV subscribers face no impact if STELA expires, and AT&T is "sadly misleading" them. He said AT&T's DirecTV doesn't need STELAR to provide local broadcast signals in the 210 U.S. TV markets. The telco didn't comment.

The House Judiciary Committee cleared legislation that would establish a voluntary small claims board within the Copyright Office (see 1909100069), despite warnings from Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. The measure passed by voice vote Tuesday. The Senate Judiciary Committee in July unanimously advanced the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (Case) Act (HR-2426/S-1273) to the floor, despite opposition from Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy & Technology. Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., successfully offered an amendment with technical revisions, including provisions that freeze caps on fees and monetary damages for three years. Lofgren supports the goal -- to allow creators filing copyright claims an alternative to federal court -- but cited free-speech concerns from the American Civil Liberties Union, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Internet Association and Mozilla. She ultimately supported this legislation, but said if speech issues on notice and takedown aren’t addressed, the plan won’t pass the Senate. It’s sad if one senator holds up bill, which has been out for a long time, said ranking member Doug Collins, R-Ga., who sponsored the bill with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. Groups like the ACLU should have participated in the public process, he added. Copyright infringement isn’t a victimless crime, and the bill will aid content creators like musicians and photographers who can’t justify costs of taking claims to federal court, said Jeffries. The Copyright Alliance applauded Tuesday's passage, saying it will help hundreds of thousands of content creators. PK said the legislation “falls short.” A small claims court “needs to be accountable, appealable, and limited to reasonable damage levels,” said Policy Counsel Meredith Rose Wednesday. “The system envisioned by CASE is none of those. It lacks meaningful appealability, and offers damage caps that are higher than the median income for over a quarter of all Americans.”

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on free trade “is critical to our economic future and congressional approval will promote America’s global digital leadership,” wrote CTA, the Information Technology Industry Council, Semiconductor Industry Association and eight other tech groups Monday, urging its ratification. “Internet-connected small businesses are three times as likely to export and create jobs, grow four times more quickly, and earn twice as much revenue per employee,” they said. “Their success is thanks to America’s digital policy framework, and USMCA will modernize North American trade rules to better reflect that framework.” Passing the USMCA “would be a significant step” toward guaranteeing North American leadership in the global digital economy and establishing a “worldwide framework to address the challenges confronting global access and usage of digital trade,” they said. Also signing were ACT|The App Association, BSA|The Software Alliance, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, CompTIA, Internet Association, Internet Infrastructure Coalition, Software & Information Industry Association and TechNet.

A Bureau of Industry and Security official acknowledged delay in BIS' proposed rulemaking for foundational technologies, saying she and other top Commerce Department officials expected the notice to have been published by now. “I personally thought foundational would be out faster than it is. It was not just higher-level people,” said Hillary Hess, BIS regulatory policy division director, at a Tuesday panel hosted by the American Bar Association. Hess and another official said in June the notice would be released soon (see 1907110044). Hess declined to give an updated timetable now. She briefly said of the proposal for emerging technologies that Commerce has been meeting with “a number of companies” to understand what emerging technologies are most important for U.S. industry and which technologies they’re interested in pursuing. Hess said Commerce created “technical teams” of engineers to tackle emerging tech categories. “They’re basically doing evaluations to look at what should be proposed for control and … what shouldn’t be,” Hess said. It’s possible the teams won’t see a need for new controls, she said. If Commerce issues controls on emerging technologies, Hess suggested the agency wants to do it soon: “We would like to get some stuff out the door.”

EchoStar appealed the U.S. Court of International Trade decision upholding denial by Customs and Border Protection of more than $276,000 in drawback claims from a video technology importer and exporter as untimely. The CIT said in June (see 1906180069) the date of filing was when a complete paper claim was submitted, not the electronic summary. The appellant/petitioner's brief is due Oct. 21, said docket 19-2299 for EchoStar v. U.S. in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. As of Friday, beyond a docketing notice (in Pacer), no additional documents were in that docket (in Pacer).