Tag: Keith Kupferschmid

Press Release: Copyright Alliance Statement on Maryland Court Granting Preliminary Injunction to Publishers in eBook Licensing Case

Washington, DC—February 17, 2022—Today, the Copyright Alliance released the following statement in response to the news that the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland ruled in favor of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), granting a preliminary injunction that suspends the eBook licensing law at the center of the AAP v. Brian Frosh case:

According to Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid, “We are thrilled to learn of the Maryland court’s decision in granting a preliminary injunction in the case involving AAP challenging the state’s unconstitutional eBook licensing mandate, and in concluding that AAP has clearly satisfied the four preliminary injunction factors. We have believed all along that the eBook legislation would be preempted and that the court would reach the right decision, as it has clearly done. 

“The bill would have forced publishers to license their eBooks to libraries on terms that are determined by the state of Maryland (not by publishers). The court explicitly recognized that this sort of forced transaction between publishers and libraries would effectively strip publishers of their exclusive right under the Copyright Act to decide whether, when, and to whom to distribute their copyrighted works.

The court also made clear that forcing publishers to offer licenses for electronic literary products on terms that would enable public libraries to provide library users with access to the electronic literary product will not necessarily increase access to those products for library users over time, and that it is only through the protection of copyright law that books and other creative works may be generated and distributed at all.“In its decision, the court recognized that, ‘The economic philosophy behind the [Copyright] [C]lause…is the conviction that encouragement of individual effort by personal gain is the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors’ and that ‘[C]opyright law serves public ends by providing individuals with an incentive to pursue private ones.’ We agree with the court’s decision and offer our thanks for it coming to the right conclusion.”
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ABOUT THE COPYRIGHT ALLIANCEThe Copyright Alliance is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest and educational organization representing the copyright interests of over 1.8 million individual creators and over 13,000 organizations in the United States, across the spectrum of copyright disciplines. The Copyright Alliance is dedicated to advocating policies that promote and preserve the value of copyright, and to protecting the rights of creators and innovators. For more information, please visit https://copyrightalliance.org.

Press Release: Copyright Alliance Hosts Two April Panels to Celebrate World IP Day/Week 2021

The Copyright Alliance will celebrate World IP Day/Week 2021 from April 26–30. World IP Day is recognized on the same day in April of each year to remind everyone of the critical role that intellectual property plays in encouraging creativity and innovation. During the week of April 26–30, the Copyright Alliance will join our members, partners and countless creators and organizations around the world to mark the occasion by sharing blogs and videos, hosting virtual events, and much more—all designed to celebrate the fact that IP helps the global arts scene to flourish and enables the innovation that drives human progress. The 2021 WIPD theme, as determined by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), is IP & SMEs: Taking Your Ideas to Market. 

According to WIPO, “Every business starts with an idea. Each of the millions of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that operate across the globe every day started with an idea that took shape in someone’s mind and made its way to market.”  The World IP Day panels planned by the Copyright Alliance are as follows: 

Creative Enterprises: Small Business, BIG Impact; April 27 at 1 p.m. ET: In keeping with this year’s World IP Day theme, IP & SMEs: Taking Your Ideas to Market, the Copyright Alliance is pleased to host a panel discussion featuring a variety of creators and advocates on what it takes to grow and monetize a creative business, the challenges faced running a business during the pandemic, how intellectual property helps to fuel the creative and business processes, and much more! Panel participants include: Janet Hicks, VP, Director of Licensing, Artists Rights Society; Ryan Edwards, Creator and Owner, MASARY Studios; Kick Lee, Founder and Director, Cincinnati Music Accelerator; Rachel Lackey, Creator and Owner, Green Pea Press; Danielle Van Lier, Assistant General Counsel, SAG-AFTRA (moderator). Follow our Facebook page for updates on the panel, as well as to attend the event at 1 p.m. ET on April 27. 

Small Enterprises Making a BIG Difference: Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts; April 28 at 1 p.m. ET: The Copyright Alliance is pleased to host a second panel discussion featuring representatives from Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA) groups across the country, including The Ella Project (New Orleans), VolunteerLawyers and Accountants for the Arts (St. Louis), Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts New York, Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, Philadelphia Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, California Lawyers for the Arts, Arts and Business Council Nashville, Arts and Business Council Boston, Springboard for the Arts (Minnesota), Colorado Attorneys for the Arts, and Lawyers for the Creative Arts (Chicago). The panel will focus on how VLA groups support creators and their businesses by providing copyright information to help ensure their rights and fuel their growth. Follow our Facebook page for updates on the panel, as well as to attend the event at 1 p.m. ET on April 28.


In honor of WIPD 2021, Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid shared the following message with the creative and copyright communities, one that speaks to the history of copyright law and intellectual property protections, as well as articulates their continued importance today:  

It’s a well-known principle that copyright and intellectual property protections benefit society by incentivizing creativity and innovation. And at a time when the U.S. economy and economies around the globe are experiencing unprecedented hardships, including recovering from the perils of a global pandemic, we need strong and vibrant copyright law now more than ever. In the spirit of celebrating World IP Day 2021, I’m pleased that our 2021 panel events will highlight numerous creators who were able to continue developing their arts and their businesses during 2020 despite unprecedented hurdles. We will also highlight Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts Groups (VLAs) around the country, organizations that work as strong advocates for creators and copyright protections day in and day out. I, along with the entire Copyright Alliance team, wish you all the best for a Happy World IP Day, and a very successful year ahead! – Keith Kupferschmid, CEO, Copyright Alliance 

For World IP Day blogs, video messages from elected officials, and much more, visit the Copyright Alliance World IP Day 2021 webpage.

@Unite4Copyright: CASE Act Signed Into Law: What This Means by @tvcarrington and @keithkup

[Editor Charlie sez:  We all owe a huge thank you to the massively effective campaign by the Copyright Alliance to pass the CASE Act and outflank the unscrupulous grift by Senator Data Center (@ronwyden) and Google’s Army of the Dead.  Their summary of the terms of the new copyright small claims court in the CASE Act is a must read!]

On December 27, creators across the country collectively celebrated as the CASE Act was signed into law. Naturally, many of you have questions about the how the new small claims process will work. Below, we answer some of the questions we’ve heard so far, and provide some need-to-know details.

Read the post on the Copyright Alliance blog.

Wyden Alley

@keithkup: Why is No One Talking About this Provision of the CASE Act? It’s Because It Benefits Users of Copyrighted Works

[Google shilleries are shifting into overdrive to attack the copyright small claims legislation–Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Engine have launched their FUD campaign (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) to create their usual maelstrom of half truths and outright fraud against consumers as directed by their corporate masters from Silicon Valley. The truth doesn’t fit the narrative.]

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019 (the CASE Act), H.R. 2426 and S. 1273, a bill that would create an optional small claims tribunal within the U.S. Copyright Office, was introduced by Congress in May 2019. Before that, it had been introduced in different forms in prior Congresses as well. Over that time, and especially this year, just about every aspect of the bill has been held under a microscope, poked and prodded and discussed ad nauseum. There has been so much analysis and discussion of the provisions of the CASE Act that it’s hard to believe that there could possibly be some aspect of the bill that has gone unnoticed. But in fact, there is one aspect of the bill that has largely gone undiscussed. It’s time for that to change….

Anti-copyright groups like EFF, Public Knowledge and Engine counter that these protections are essentially ineffective because most of the recipients of takedown notices are individuals who do not have the money to sue in federal court [2] and because these recipients are often too afraid to file DMCA counter-notices because of the requirement in the DMCA that the counter-notice include a “statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located.…” [3] As a result, these groups argue that, despite the statutory protections and defenses afforded to recipients under the DMCA, the DMCA takedown process is being misused because users with meritorious fair use and misrepresentation claims are not able to avail themselves of them.

If only there were a solution for this—perhaps some legislation in Congress that might help address these concerns. In fact, there is and it’s called the CASE Act, a bill that would create an optional small claims tribunal to resolve the following types of claims by both copyright owners and users of copyrighted material…

Read the post on the Copyright Alliance blog.

@keithkup: Fighting for the Future by Misrepresenting the Past

It’s generally well known by those following copyright issues, that the U.S. Copyright Office is engaged in a study of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the provisions of the Copyright Act that provide for (among other things) the notice and takedown process and Online Service Provider (OSP) safe harbors.

Unfortunately, one group – Fight for the Future (FFF) – seems to be doing its best to disrupt and derail the Copyright Office’s efforts and to make people think that the process is “rigged against the public interest.”

For example, during the Copyright Office’s request for written comments period, they, along with YouTube channel ChannelAwesome, orchestrated a last-minute campaign in which they urged their followers to protest DMCA abuse by submitting comments to the Copyright Office which were generated merely by clicking on the “I’m in” button at www.takedownabuse.org. While they did suggest that submitters could alter the model comments on the site, in fact relatively few actually did. (I should point out that the site no longer provides model comments.)

The campaign resulted in so many comments being submitted in such a short period that it crashed government servers and made it very difficult for interested parties to review all the comments.  FFF could have notified its followers earlier so that the comments were not submitted at one time.  Better yet, since virtually all the comments were identical, they could have simply submitted a petition with 80,000 or so names included, rather than 80,000 identical submissions that crashed the system.

More recently FFF posted a blog that misrepresented the two-day section 512 roundtable discussion that occurred in San Francisco in an effort to get its followers upset enough to rail against the process, the Office and others, like the Copyright Alliance, who simply do not share many of FFF’s views.  I know because I was there.

Read the post on the Copyright Alliance site.