Posts Tagged: "copyright policy"

Stealing originally created content is extremely problematic, whether it is a blog article, a newspaper article, a book, painting, photograph or movie. If you search the Internet for practically anything you will be inundated with the same text over and over without really finding useful answers. Of course, the websites that engage in widespread plagiarism, which is just a less judgmental way to say “widespread copyright infringement,” are reaping the economic rewards of their stealing while making it increasingly difficult for those who actually create original content to survive. The infringer business model is frequently to simply copy from others who don’t have the means or ability to seek redress, and Congress is held hostage by protesters who don’t want to have to pay for free original content.

The purpose of the roundtables is to engage further with members of the public on the following issues: (1) the legal framework for the creation of remixes; (2) the relevance and scope of the first sale doctrine in the digital environment; and (3) the appropriate calibration of statutory damages in the contexts of individual file sharers and of secondary liability for large-scale infringement. The roundtables, which will be led by USPTO and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), will be held in Nashville, TN on May 21, 2014, Cambridge, MA on June 25, 2014, Los Angeles, CA on July 29, 2014, and Berkeley, CA on July 30, 2014. The meetings were called for in the Task Force’s Green Paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy released last year.

The meeting will now be held on December 12, 2013 from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. ET at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, VA and the period for post-meeting comments has been extended. The deadline for filing pre-meeting comments is November 13, 2013.