Making Copyright Work for a Global Market: Policy Revision on Both Sides of the Atlantic

Copyright has become a more central part of society today than ever before. We have new objective evidence of the economic contribution of the copyright industries: in the United States, the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) 2012 report on “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy” found that copyright-intensive industries contributed $641 billion, or 4.4%, to the U.S. GDP in 2010, and provided more than 5 million jobs. Last year’s comparable study for Europe from the Office for Harmonization of the Internal Market (OHIM) found that copyright- intensive industries contributed 3.2% of total employment. And copyright has become more pervasive in the daily life of the ordinary person, not only as a user of content in the online environment, but also as a creator of new material and as a transformer and effectively a publisher of material created by others. As a result, almost every copyright issue these days sparks press coverage as well as public attention and debate

Session 1: The Legal Landscape

This is the transcript from a symposium on copyright exceptions for libraries and section 108 reform done in cooperation with the U.S. Copyright Office

Measurement of the Bottom-Strange Meson Mixing Phase in the Full CDF Data Set

We report a measurement of the bottom-strange meson mixing phase \beta_s using the time evolution of B0_s -> J/\psi (->\mu+\mu-) \phi (-> K+ K-) decays in which the quark-flavor content of the bottom-strange meson is identified at production. This measurement uses the full data set of proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt(s)= 1.96 TeV collected by the Collider Detector experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron, corresponding to 9.6 fb-1 of integrated luminosity. We report confidence regions in the two-dimensional space of \beta_s and the B0_s decay-width difference \Delta\Gamma_s, and measure \beta_s in [-\pi/2, -1.51] U [-0.06, 0.30] U [1.26, \pi/2] at the 68% confidence level, in agreement with the standard model expectation. Assuming the standard model value of \beta_s, we also determine \Delta\Gamma_s = 0.068 +- 0.026 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps-1 and the mean B0_s lifetime, \tau_s = 1.528 +- 0.019 (stat) +- 0.009 (syst) ps, which are consistent and competitive with determinations by other experiments.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, Phys. Rev. Lett 109, 171802 (2012

Copyright and State Sovereign Immunity: A Report of the Register of Copyrights

In March 2020, the Supreme Court held in Allen v. Cooper that Congress had exceeded its constitutional authority when it enacted legislation authorizing copyright infringement suits for damages against states.1 The Court based its decision on the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity, which generally precludes a federal court from hearing a suit against a state without the state’s consent. The Court noted that Congress has the power to abrogate state immunity, including to prevent or remedy deprivations of property without due process in violation of the Constitution. To do so, however, Congress generally must develop a legislative record demonstrating a pattern of unconstitutional conduct by states for which there are no adequate state remedies. Following the decision, Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy requested that the Copyright Office study the extent to which copyright owners are experiencing infringement by state entities without adequate remedies under state law. Over the past year, the Office has solicited public comments, held public roundtables, and conducted legal research on this issue. This report presents the Office’s findings and conclusions. Part I of the report describes the history of this study, and Part II summarizes the relevant legal background. The text of the Eleventh Amendment prohibits federal suits against states by non-residents, and courts have interpreted the Amendment to also bar suits filed by residents of the state being sued. The Supreme Court nevertheless permits federal suits for damages against nonconsenting states where Congress has validly abrogated state immunity under the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, Congress must ensure that there is congruence and proportionality between the constitutional injury and the means adopted to prevent or remedy it. Abrogation provisions that fail to meet this standard have been struck down by the Court

From Paralysis to Progress: The (Useful) Art of Copyright Pragmatism

Americans want the nation’s copyright laws to make sense, be fair, and reflect the technologies in use, argued Shira Perlmutter, chief policy officer and director for international affairs, United States Patent and Trademark Office. Her April 15 lecture at Catholic University’s law school noted that for some reason, Congress and regulatory oversight bodies have historically had a hard time meeting that reasonable expectation. Her remarks were presented as the 2014 Dean William Callyhan Robinson Intellectual Property Lecture, a series named after the author the founding dean of the law school at The Catholic University of America