Bluebeat Claims It Owns Beatles Copyright By Re-recording Songs; Judge Disagrees

from the but-the-copyright-office dept

In the US, if you really want to "protect" your copyrighted works, you have to register the works. Unlike for a patent or a trademark, it's pretty much a rubberstamp process. Every so often the Copyright Office will reject a registration, but it's rare. It does still go through them all, though. Or at least it's supposed to. However, we recently wrote about the weird case of the site Bluebeat.com selling Beatles MP3s for $0.25. We noted that nowhere on the site did the company explain how it had the rights to do so, but in its response to the lawsuit filed by EMI, it explained its bizarre logic.

Basically, the company claims it somehow re-recorded the songs via a "psycho-acoustic simulation" (don't ask) and then added an image to the file, making it a totally new work (um... yeah). And then it registered the copyrights on those new recordings, claiming that the re-recording is a new work where Bluebeat.com actually owns the copyright. Its "proof" is that the Copyright Office okayed the registration -- suggesting that the rubber stamp at the Copyright Office is a bit too quick at times. A judge isn't buying it and has barred the sale of the MP3s for the time being (i.e., almost certainly forever). While it's amusing to see Bluebeat's tortured explanation, perhaps some of the blame needs to go to the Copyright Office for allowing these registrations in the first place. Of course, you have to wonder if this now also opens up Bluebeat to additional charges of false representation in registering the copyright...

In the meantime, some readers have noted that this is not the first time that the folks behind Bluebeat.com have had ridiculous interpretations of copyright law. Two and a half years ago, it sued Apple, Microsoft, RealNetworks and Adobe for not using the DRM created by Bluebeat's parent company, Media Rights Technologies. Basically, the company claimed that by not preventing the ability to rip files, these companies were violating the DMCA. Of course, that makes no sense.

Given that it's now twice that we're seeing totally foreign interpretations of basic copyright law, it almost makes you wonder if the company is doing this to make a point about the ridiculousness of copyright law, rather than for any legitimate reasons. Either that, or the company actually thinks that filing lawsuits as publicity stunts is smart. I would imagine that a judicial slapdown might correct the folks behind Bluebeat and MRT of that notion.

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Backlog At The Copyright Office Highlights Massive Problem With The System

from the it-doesn't-scale dept

As you hopefully know, you don't need to register to get a copyright these days (and haven't since 1976), but you can still register, and need to do so if you want to sue someone else for damages. So, professional creators still register copyright on pretty much everything they do -- though the process is still a bit unclear even to the experts. At the recent copyright conference at Santa Clara University, one of the more amusing moments was when someone asked about registering blog posts and how that could/should be done -- and a bunch of the world's foremost experts in copyright law (including multiple representatives from the Copyright Office) effectively threw up their hands and said they had no clue what actually needed to be registered and how. It resulted in a lot of rather awkward laughter from folks in the room.

Of course, unlike the Patent Office, where there's at least some review, the Copyright Office registration process is about as close to a rubber stamp as can be. Yet, it appears that the rubber stamp has gotten a little slow. The Washington Post has a nice article about the growing backlog at the office, causing delays in processing time to reach nearly 18 months. The main cause of the delay? A complex computer system that was supposed to speed things up. Somehow, that doesn't seem surprising.

Of course, there are a few oddities in the article. First, the Copyright Office claims it can't just staff up to deal with the backlog because it takes a year to train someone. That seems a bit excessive for what's pretty close to a rubber stamp process. Second, the article totally glosses over an important little tidbit:

The delays do not appear to be hampering the business of the major publishing houses or those willing to spend $685 for a "special handling fee" that expedites registration.

That seems rather important, because you could easily make the argument that the Copyright Office has every incentive in the world to let that backlog and its $45 applications pile up to encourage "serious" professionals to file the expedited $685 option.

Third, because it's a newspaper article, it has to include a heart-wrenching story of someone impacted by this, and so we get:

Marissa Ditkowsky, a Long Island teenager, has been checking her mailbox for 15 months for the copyright registration for three songs she wrote, recorded and sent on a compact disc to the federal government.

"We lost a whole year," said her mother, Alita, who wants to launch her guitar-strumming daughter on a music career. At 14, Marissa is too young to appear on "American Idol." Instead, she wants to sing her songs during open-mike nights at local clubs and make a professional demo she can shop to music companies.

But Alita Ditkowsky does not want her daughter to perform without a copyright, because she fears that Marissa's songs are so good, someone else will steal them. She said she learned that lesson years ago while trying to get a job at an advertising agency.

"They asked me to write an ad for the Schick electric shaver," Ditkowsky said. "So one day in my car, I hear this radio spot I had wrote for the Schick electric shaver. It was my commercial, word for word. They used it, didn't pay me for it, didn't even hire me. But legally, I had no recourse."

Yikes. She should be a lot more worried about obscurity than anyone taking her songs. Keeping her daughter away from performing open mic nights just because they haven't received the registration seems silly and incredibly counterproductive. She would still hold the copyright on the songs, she would just be limited in what she could sue over until the registration is official. Claiming that she would have "no recourse" is incorrect. The "lost year" is their own fault, not the fault of the Copyright Office.

Either way, this whole thing highlights yet another problem of any gov't granted monopoly system: the wasteful bureaucracy involved -- even in just rubber stamping things. Such bureaucracies simply don't scale as activity increases, and since we live in this world where the Copyright industry has continually tried to "educate" the public about the vast importance of securing copyrights on everything, it's no surprise that the Copyright Office is overwhelmed -- even with the computer system problems.

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Copyright Office May Have Just Added New Royalties For Webcasts

from the you-can't-be-serious dept

Well, this is just downright disturbing. Jon Healy has a quick summary of a totally unexpected and unnecessary proposed rulemaking from the Copyright Office that could add additional royalties that webcasters would need to pay (on top of the already onerous webcasting rates). Basically, the Copyright Office had been asked to decide on a totally different question concerning royalties back in 2000. That issue isn't even in question any more, as the two sides had already worked out their differences, and the Copyright Office didn't do much to give an official answer on that question anyway.

Instead, it came up with an idea out of the blue that music publishers are entitled to an additional mechanical royalty for non-interactive streams (e.g., webcasts, satellite radio, etc.). As Healy explains, this makes no sense and seems to go against previous agreements on these types of royalties. Mechanical royalties are supposed to be for actual copies of the music. Non-interactive streams are basically the same as radio -- which requires performance royalties, but not mechanical royalties.

This reminds me of the column by Rasmus Fleischer we wrote about a little while ago, where he noted how silly copyright law can get with all these different royalty rates that were designed for a different time. The borderlines between radio, streams, downloads, recordings and all other ways of accessing and hearing music are blending together, and trying to match the old rights to the new ways that people interact with music just leads to more problems -- such as multiple levels of royalties all being heaped upon the same single action, making it effectively uneconomical to actually do the most natural thing with music: play it online.

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