FRE-Bird: An Evidentiary Tale of Two Colliding Copyrights

Sound recordings are not musical compositions. Sound recordings embody musical compositions. Thus, when sound recordings appear in musical composition infringement trials, they do so as an imperfect facsimile of the composition they actualize. As a result, they can confuse and mislead juries tasked only with evaluating the similarity of the underlying composition. On the other hand, music is an aural medium: how can juries be expected to compare two songs without listening to their commercial embodiments? Several recent cases have hinged on the admissibility of sound recordings in composition infringement trials. In doing so, they have implicated three fundamental questions: (1) Where does composition end and sound recording begin? (2) How has the evolution of creative and business practices in the music industry complicated the formerly tidy separation of composition and performance/recording? (3) What are the policy implications for courts defining “composition” more broadly or more narrowly, and how do these interact with the underlying policies governing sound recording evidentiary decisions? This Note targets a seemingly simple question: how should courts approach the use of sound recordings in composition infringement trials? Any thorough answer, however, must grapple with the many underlying creative, industry, and public policy complexities that bear on that debate. Thus, this Note necessarily traces the historical convergence of composition and recording in creative, industry, and judicial contexts. It then discusses the underlying policy arguments that favor and oppose the unrestricted use of sound recordings in composition infringement trials. Finally, it marshals all of this context into a proposed “Triad” judicial framework that explicitly links a court’s inquiry into the “compositionality” of a recorded element to litigants’ burdens in seeking to admit, or preclude, that element as evidence of substantial similarity among compositions

Something Old, Something New: Forecasting Willing Buyer/Willing Seller’s Impact on Songwriter Royalties

Mechanical royalties payable to songwriters for digital reproductions of their works on services such as Spotify and Apple Music are determined through a convoluted quasi-trial in front of an administrative body called the Copyright Royalty Board (“CRB”). The CRB is itself governed by statutory rate standards that constrain the types of evidence and analyses it may consider when setting royalty rates. In 2018, Congress passed a much-heralded, consensus piece of music legislation called the Music Modernization Act (“MMA”). The MMA attacked a broad swath of issues across the music industry, including, most visibly, establishing a blanket license for digital mechanical licenses, and a statutory entity to administer that license. But buried within the MMA was a less-celebrated wrinkle: a provision that replaced the old 801(b) rate standard used by the CRB for mechanical royalties with a new “willing buyer/willing seller” rate standard. While the new standard was seen as a victory for songwriters, its precise practical effects remain unsettled. Will it really increase rates? If so, why? What evidence, arguments, and analysis will it allow—and foreclose—relative to the old standard? This Comment seeks to answer these questions through a comparative case study of two past CRB proceedings. First, it dissects the analyses that shaped the CRB’s Phonorecords III decision—the most recent mechanical royalty rate-setting proceeding, and the last to use the old 801(b) rate standard. Second, it undertakes a similar analysis of the CRB’s Web IV decision, the most recent instance in which the CRB applied the willing buyer/willing seller standard to a rate-setting proceeding for a different rights type (the digital performance of sound recordings). It then compares and contrasts those two proceedings to predict how willing buyer/willing seller will operate in the digital mechanical royalty context. From that comparison it concludes that, while the change does skew songwriter-friendly, there is also a significant amount of uncertainty that may render the change less significant than copyright owners hope—and music licensees fear

Bayesian and Frequentist Semantics for Common Variations of Differential Privacy: Applications to the 2020 Census

The purpose of this paper is to guide interpretation of the semantic privacy guarantees for some of the major variations of differential privacy, which include pure, approximate, R\'enyi, zero-concentrated, and $f$ differential privacy. We interpret privacy-loss accounting parameters, frequentist semantics, and Bayesian semantics (including new results). The driving application is the interpretation of the confidentiality protections for the 2020 Census Public Law 94-171 Redistricting Data Summary File released August 12, 2021, which, for the first time, were produced with formal privacy guarantees

On the Role of Context in the Design of Mobile Mashups

This paper presents a design methodology and an accompanying platform for the design and fast development of Context-Aware Mobile mashUpS (CAMUS). The approach is characterized by the role given to context as a first-class modeling dimension used to support i) the identification of the most adequate resources that can satisfy the users' situational needs and ii) the consequent tailoring at runtime of the provided data and functions. Context-based abstractions are exploited to generate models specifying how data returned by the selected services have to be merged and visualized by means of integrated views. Thanks to the adoption of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques, these models drive the flexible execution of the final mobile app on target mobile devices. A prototype of the platform, making use of novel and advanced Web and mobile technologies, is also illustrated

The Conference Assistant: Combining Context-Awareness with Wearable Computing

We describe the Conference Assistant, a prototype mobile, context-aware application that assists conference attendees. We discuss the strong relationship between context-awareness and wearable computing and apply this relationship in the Conference Assistant. The application uses a wide variety of context and enhances user interactions with both the environment and other users. We describe how the application is used and the context-aware architecture on which it was based

Effects of a Government-Academic Partnership: Has the NSF-Census Bureau Research Network Helped Improve the U.S. Statistical System?

The National Science Foundation-Census Bureau Research Network (NCRN) was established in 2011 to create interdisciplinary research nodes on methodological questions of interest and significance to the broader research community and to the Federal Statistical System (FSS), particularly to the Census Bureau. The activities to date have covered both fundamental and applied statistical research and have focused at least in part on the training of current and future generations of researchers in skills of relevance to surveys and alternative measurement of economic units, households, and persons. This article focuses on some of the key research findings of the eight nodes, organized into six topics: (1) improving census and survey data-quality and data collection methods; (2) using alternative sources of data; (3) protecting privacy and confidentiality by improving disclosure avoidance; (4) using spatial and spatio-temporal statistical modeling to improve estimates; (5) assessing data cost and data-quality tradeoffs; and (6) combining information from multiple sources. The article concludes with an evaluation of the ability of the FSS to apply the NCRN’s research outcomes, suggests some next steps, and discusses the implications of this research-network model for future federal government research initiatives

Workers’ Views of the Impact of Trade on Jobs

Although public policy is influenced by the perception that workers worry about the impact of trade on their jobs, there is little empirical evidence on what shapes such views. This paper uses new data to examine how workers' perceptions of the impact of trade are related to their career paths, job characteristics, and local labor market conditions. Surprisingly, given prior literature, we find that workers' perceptions primarily reflect local labor market conditions and education rather than labor market experiences or job characteristics