3 Count: Clean Slate

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1: House Judiciary Chairman Plans Comprehensive Review of US Copyright Law

First off today, Sean Hollister at The Verge reports that Representative Bob Goodlatte, who is the head of the House Judiciary Committee, announced in a speech in honor of World Intellectual Property day that his committee will begin performing a review of U.S. copyright law in the coming months.

The move comes after Register of Copyrights, Maria Pallante, called for Congress to begin drafting the “next great copyright act” to completely replace the Copyright Act of 1976, the last major revision.

According to Goodlatte, the hearings will be to determine whether the existing laws are working given the changes in technology and then take a look at what changes, if any, need to be made.

2: China Court Fines Apple $118K for Copyright Breach

Next up today, Kevin Kwang at ZDNet reports that a Chinese court has ordered Apple to pay some 730,000 yuan ($118,000) to three authors whose books were available illegally via Apple’s iOS App Store.

According to the court, since all of the authors were well-known and best-sellers in the country, Apple should have known that the books were uploaded illegally and taken action. The lawsuit was part of the second batch of such lawsuits filed by the Writers’ Right Protection Union, which is a Chinese group protecting authors’ copyrights.

The judge in the case also warned other providers of similar app stores saying that they need to improve their verification systems to avoid similar lawsuits.

3: Pirate Bay Finds Safe Haven in Iceland, Switches to .IS Domain

Finally today, Ernesto at Torrentfreak writes that The Pirate Bay, the largest and most notorious BitTorrent tracker, has announced that it has moved to a new domain, this time to Iceland using the .is extension.

The move comes shortly after The Pirate Bay’s attempt to move to a Greenland domain (.gl) failed after Greenland authorities revoked the domain within 48 hours. That move, in turn came after The Pirate Bay began to be concerned about the possible revocation of their Swedish domain (.se).

Iceland has said that they will not revoke the domain without a court order and there is no litigation taking place to do so yet. The country also earned a reputation for providing domains to controversial sites after it offered use of its domain extension to Wikileaks in 2010.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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