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“While I applaud the spirit of the Vinyl Vaults project, the copyright laws of the United States are a significant obstacle to any such effort. Unfortunately for Amoeba and music fans, U.S. copyright laws governing music are antiquated. Basically, unless a music composition was published before 1923, most compositions remain under copyright until 2019 or later. Much of the types of work in the Vinyl Vaults project will likely be protected until 2067. Accordingly, any project such as Vinyl Vaults must give serious consideration to avoiding copyright infringement claims made by copyright owner(s).

Daar adds that the rare nature of the music in Vinyl Vaults provides no defence legally. “The United States copyright laws do not contemplate or provide an exemption for out of print music compositions. In addition, there is no legal excuse for infringement even if it is done in good faith and the money from the infringement is held in trust. Accordingly, unless Amoeba has the express permission of the correct copyright owner(s) it runs the risk of being liable for copyright infringement,” he says.

“U.S. law is far from clear on how to deal with orphaned works, which is music where there is no clear knowledge of ownership. With the Vinyl Vaults project, Amoeba is charging for each download of its digitised and remastered tracks. Amoeba may be acting above board in its claims that it first seeks to track down and obtain the permission of rights holders (assuming who owns the rights is going to be clear) and then hold in trust the money paid for downloads for those it cannot find. However, it would appear that for such tracks, Amoeba may be found guilty of infringement if a copyright owner came forward and brought a copyright infringement lawsuit.”

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The haul of counterfeit swag sprawled across 15 feet of prime display table in a Midtown Manhattan hotel.

Stacks of football jerseys, with the names of stars like Peyton Manning and Russell Wilson. Heaps of knit watch caps, embroidered with the fierce-beaked bird logo of the Seattle Seahawks, or the strapping, bucking horse of the Denver Broncos. T-shirts and baseball caps, propped against boxes that were marked “Homeland Security EVIDENCE.”

That was just a taste of at least 202,000 items seized by federal agents in recent weeks because they had bogus National Football League trademarks. The rest will remain in warehouses until it is no longer needed as evidence, said John Sandweg, the acting director of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement division.

And then?

“Then it is destroyed,” Mr. Sandweg said.

With much of the country in the steeliest grip of winter, Mr. Sandweg was asked if there weren’t better uses for the clothing than shipping it to industrial shredders or incinerators.

“It’s counterfeit — what else can we do with it?” Mr. Sandweg said.

He added: “We are required to destroy it by law.”

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As society has reached a consensus that there’s no way to control everything children see, the number of indecency complaints has decreased significantly. When Miley Cyrus twerked at the Video Music Awards last summer, the FCC received only 161 complaints (of course, as a cable channel, MTV doesn’t answer to the commission anyway). The moment became fodder for celebrity bloggers and morning show chatterboxes but was never treated as a problem that needed to be legislated away. The PTC dutifully issued a statement denouncing MTV for “sexually exploiting young women,” but no national outcry resulted. Perhaps not coincidentally, CBS never actually paid a fine in connection with Nipplegate — an appeals court ruled in 2008 and again in 2011 that CBS could not be held liable for the actions of contracted performing artists and that the FCC had acted arbitrarily in enforcing indecency policies. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2012.

So for Powell, the halftime show represents “the last great moment” of a TV broadcast becoming a national controversy — the last primal scream of a public marching inexorably toward a new digital existence: “It might have been essentially the last gasp. Maybe that was why there was so much energy around it. The Internet was coming into being, it was intensifying. People wanted one last stand at the wall. It was going to break anyway. I think it broke.

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“While EA Sports has an exclusive license to use names, plays and other elements of the league, the N.F.L. has editorial oversight. Mr. Langley and others vet thousands of pages of recorded scripts and delete inappropriate dialogue, like the harshest trash talk. Chop blocks, helmet-to-helmet hits and other illegal plays are not permitted in the video game — even with accompanying penalties — despite the other efforts at realism. This stems not only from the league’s fastidiousness about its image but also from Mr. Madden’s insistence that the game be exciting and educational.”

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“It was not quite a lecture on contemporary art or postmodern sensibility, but in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Thursday, the painter and sculptor Jasper Johns discussed his methodology, corrected a lawyer on the pronunciation of the artist Robert Rauschenberg’s name and said, quite firmly, that he had never authorized a foundry owner to reproduce one of his famous works depicting the American flag.”

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“Daniel L. Spuck of Mercer, Pa., has filed a motion against the NFL to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania for “a temporary emergency injunction” on the basis that the Chargers should not have been in the postseason because of a missed call in the Week 17 game between San Diego and Kansas City. The filing came before the first round of the playoffs.”

– http://www.baltimoresun.com/sports/baltimore-sports-blog/bal-san-diego-chargers-nfl-playoffs-injunction-20140108,0,6127233.story?track=rss&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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On Tuesday, the commission charged four companies with deceptively marketing weight-loss products, asserting they made “unfounded promises” that consumers could shed pounds simply by using their food additives, skin creams and other dietary supplements.

The four companies — Sensa Products, L’Occitane, HCG Diet Direct and LeanSpa — will collectively pay $34 million to refund consumers. They neither admitted nor denied fault in the case.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/business/us-charges-4-companies-with-deception-in-weight-loss-products.html?ref=todayspaper

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The Colorado nuns’ group, the Little Sisters of the Poor, is a religiously affiliated organization that is exempt from the health law’s requirement that employer insurance plans cover contraception without a co-pay. The audacious complaint in this case is against the requirement that such groups sign a short form certifying that they have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, a copy of which would go to their third-party insurance administrator. The nuns say that minor requirement infringes on religious exercise in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Under that law, the federal government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless the government demonstrates that the burden is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling interest. The certification requirement, an accommodation fashioned by the Obama administration to bolster the protection of religious exercise without depriving women of an important benefit, does not rise to a substantial burden. A federal trial court denied a preliminary injunction on that basis and a federal court of appeals declined to issue an injunction pending appeal, though decisions in some similar cases have come out differently.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/opinion/no-burden-on-religion.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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Today’s patent mess can be traced to a miscalculation by Jimmy Carter, who thought granting more patents would help overcome economic stagnation. In 1979, his Domestic Policy Review on Industrial Innovation proposed a new Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which Congress created in 1982. Its first judge explained: “The court was formed for one need, to recover the value of the patent system as an incentive to industry.”

The country got more patents—at what has turned out to be a huge cost. The number of patents has quadrupled, to more than 275,000 a year. But the Federal Circuit approved patents for software, which now account for most of the patents granted in the U.S.—and for most of the litigation. Patent trolls buy up vague software patents and demand legal settlements from technology companies. Instead of encouraging innovation, patent law has become a burden on entrepreneurs, especially startups without teams of patent lawyers.

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– http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579252662325112076

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