A little-known Senate resolution called the Local Radio Freedom Act (LRFA) is a clever move by whoever thought of it. It has no force of law but instead asks Congress to sign a pledge to enshrine an unfair and unfounded policy whereby terrestrial radio broadcasters shall never pay royalties to musical artists. Why? Because that’s how it’s always been. In ...
Tomorrow afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee IP Subcommittee will hold a hearing entitled Radio, Music, and Copyrights: 100 Years of Inequity for Recording Artists. The subject of the hearing is—at least ostensibly—to compare and contrast the royalty granting American Radio Fairness Act (AMFA) against the royalty denying Local Radio Freedom Act (LRFA). Witnesses to testify include recording artist Randy Travis; ...
The most prominent copyright lawsuit against Generative AI (GAI) to date dropped yesterday when the major record labels filed complaints against developers Suno and Udio in the District of Massachusetts and the Southern District of New York respectively. This is going to be one to watch, not just because of the size of the plaintiffs and the potential for significant ...
In December 2021, New York Governor Hochul recognized that she must veto a bill that would have prescribed the manner in which publishers may provide eBooks to public libraries. It isn’t necessary to rehash the details of that legislation—I wrote several posts about eBook bills—but only to restate the reason for the veto: the law was unconstitutional. Why? Because state ...
The Authors Guild, of which I am a member, has filed an amicus brief asking the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals to affirm a lower court ruling that Iowa’s book ban law is unconstitutional. And of course it is. The subject barely warrants legal examination because it is impossible to draft a content-focused general book ban law that does not ...
