Advocating for a world where intellectual
property law serves the public interest.

China Claims U.S.’s Section 301 Investigation into Its Tech Transfer and IP Licensing Policies May Violate WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding

Last week, China warned that the U.S.'s threat of unilateral sanctions under Section 301 of the Trade Act violates its WTO commitment to settle disputes within the WTO Dispute Settlement framework, and it referred to a previous case in which a panel addresses how the U.S. could use Section 301 and stay within the bounds of the WTO framework.
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My CRTC Submission on the Bell Coalition Site Blocking Plan: Why it is Disproportionate, Harmful, and Inconsistent With Global Standards

The CRTC’s deadline for submissions on the Bell coalition website blocking plan closed last week, with more than 10,000 people and organizations filing directly with the CRTC. The interventions including a warning from the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression that the blocking plan “raises serious inconsistencies” with Canada’s human rights obligations, fears from ISPs that the plan will
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This Is Not How You Make Copyright Reform! Report from the Copyright Action Days

[Communia Association] Last week more than a hundred of copyright reform activists got together in Brussels for the the European Copyright Action Days to make it clear to EU lawmakers that the copyright reform effort that is currently being discussed in the European Parliament and the European Council is not good enough. In a series of events organized by Copyright
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New Era for Copyright in Kyrgyzstan: Secondary School Children and People with Print Disabilities Benefit from the New Copyright Law

[Electronic Information for Libraries] In March 2017, the law on copyright and related rights of the Kyrgyz Republic was amended to include important changes for the benefit of libraries, educational institutions and persons with print disabilities. There are also new provisions safeguarding access to works created through public funds. EIFL warmly welcomes the changes that, taken together, herald a new
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‘This Video is Unavailable’: Analyzing Copyright Takedown of User-Generated Content on Youtube

[Kris Erickson and Martin Kretschmer] This research investigates factors that motivate takedown of user-generated content by copyright owners. We study takedowns within an original dataset of 1,839 YouTube music video parodies observed between January 2012 and December 2016. We find an overall rate of takedowns within the sample of 32.9% across the 4-year period. We use a Cox proportional hazards
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“Paging Dr. Chickering” or Urgent Care for Copyright Fair Use After the TVEyes Trainwreck

[Peter Jaszi] Since February 27, 2018, when a panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a reversal in Fox News Network, LLC v. TVEyes, Inc. (Docket Nos. 15‐3885/86), there has been some speculation about how the decision may signal a “transformation of ‘transformative use’” in fair use jurisprudence. But while the outcome of the decision may or
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