Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) generated more than $1 billion revenue during FY 2015, which ended June 30, the music rights management company said Thursday. BMI said its FY 2015 revenue total is the highest in the company's history and the “most public performance revenue generated for songwriters, composers and publishers by any music rights organization in the world.” BMI's revenue from digital performances rose 65 percent from FY 2014 to more than $100 million. U.S. media licensing generated $484 million revenue, while licensing to U.S. bars, hotels and other facilities totaled $137 million, BMI said. An additional $292 million revenue came from international licenses, the company said. BMI distributed $877 million to its affiliated songwriters, composers and music publishers -- up almost 4.5 percent from FY 2014. BMI CEO Mike O’Neill in a news release said the results are "even more impressive when you consider the negative impact to our international revenues brought on by the strengthening dollar.”

NAB and Sirius XM were among the nine entities or groups of law professors to file proposed amicus briefs with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals through Thursday on behalf of Pandora in the company's appeal of a February U.S. District Court ruling in Los Angeles. The lower court said Pandora had to pay performance royalties on pre-1972 recordings owned by Flo & Eddie, who own the copyright to The Turtles' “Happy Together” and the rest of that band's music library. Sirius XM and the other six filers on behalf of Pandora argued that District Judge Philip Gutierrez incorrectly interpreted California copyright law. The other pro-Pandora filers included the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and three groups of law school professors. Pandora and six of the nine filers previously filed in the 2nd Circuit on Sirius XM's behalf in that company's appeal of earlier U.S. District Court rulings in New York that relied on state copyright law in finding Flo & Eddie had a right to performance royalties on the Turtles' pre-1972 recordings (see 1508060052). Gutierrez essentially said the statute is "a living servitude on not only intangible products but also previously sold goods, one which would grow over time as new rights evolved,” CCIA said in its proposed brief. Gutierrez's “creation of a performance right in contravention of the Legislature’s plain intent violates the settled principle that where, as here, the declaration of a right would dramatically alter the common law and affect the interests of competing stakeholders, it must be a matter of legislative judgment and discretion,” Sirius XM said in its proposed brief. “Even assuming that California may regulate the use of pre-1972 sound recordings within its own borders, it cannot regulate in such a manner that prohibits the use of such sound recordings elsewhere in the nation,” CCIA said. “In such circumstances, the burden on interstate commerce -- including potential commerce involving members of amicus CCIA -- would be 'clearly excessive in relation to the putative local benefits.'” Gutierrez's ruling “creates an unbounded set of exclusive rights never recognized by California or Congress, and thus risks creating problematic restrictions on valuable speech activities,” Public Knowledge said in its proposed brief.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation “continues to call” on officials in nations considering the Trans-Pacific Partnership “to renounce misguided plans to extend the length of copyright by 20 years in half of the 12 TPP-negotiating countries,” EFF Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm said Tuesday in a blog post. The extension appears inevitable because it has been included in all U.S. free trade agreements since the North American Free Trade Agreement and is facing “little to no opposition” among negotiating countries, Malcolm said. “Even so, we can't simply sit back and accept this, because what's wrong is wrong. … Copyright term extension has never been about economics, it has been about placating a big content sector that takes pride in its ability to demand, and to receive, copyright laws that benefit nobody but themselves.” EFF “won't be giving up this fight and neither should those countries. Either we'll convince them to reject the unwarranted extension of the copyright term by 20 years, or we'll have given them fair warning: if they press ahead and include this term in the agreement regardless of the public's wishes, we will together rise up and defeat the TPP as a whole, just as we defeated ACTA [Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement] and SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act] before it,” Malcolm said.

“The Copyright Office’s online copyright registration system, eCO, remains offline until further notice,” the Library of Congress said Thursday. The data center was shut down Aug. 28 for a scheduled annual power outage to allow routine maintenance, but the library hasn't been able to restore access to eCO and other CO systems since it attempted to reopen the data center Aug. 30 (see 1509010062), it said. “Until service is restored, you will be unable to use the eCO system to file a copyright registration, and Office staff may be unable to access Office records.”

The Office of the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator seeks comment by Oct. 16 to help craft the next iteration of its Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement. The plan, which is administered by the Office of the Coordinator, aims to put in place the mechanisms to reduce the supply of fraudulent goods and other intellectual property infringement, while also assisting other countries in cracking down on illegal operations, the Office of Management and Budget said in Tuesday's Federal Register. Through the plan, the U.S. aims to prioritize U.S. resources for "countries where programs can be carried out most effectively with the greatest impact on reducing the number of infringing products imported into the United States, while also protecting the intellectual property rights of U.S. rights holders and the interests of U.S. persons otherwise harmed by infringements in other countries," said OMB. Following two previous three-year versions, this plan will last 2016-19. OMB requested “input and recommendations” on the broad effort to crack down on IP infringement, including through legislation, presidential action and regulatory changes, “as well as ideas for improving any of the existing voluntary private-sector initiatives and for establishing new voluntary private-sector initiatives.”

Rightscorp, a data and analytic services provider for artists and owners of copyrighted property, said it launched a Popcorn Time Protection (PTP) service for content owners who want to prevent unauthorized streaming of their content via Popcorn Time. “Popcorn Time aka ‘Netflix for pirates’ is an illegal BitTorent-based software application that has become one of the most popular ways to illegally stream movies and TV shows,” said the company in a news release Thursday. “Our new Popcorn Time Protection service is the only scalable solution for this major threat to Hollywood,” said Rightscorp CEO Christopher Sabec. “Popcorn Time is unaffected by domain blocking and by [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] takedown notices.”

The Library of Congress data center that hosts some Copyright Office systems, including the online copyright registration system, remains offline after scheduled routine maintenance (see 1508270016) over the weekend, a CO news release said Tuesday. The Library of Congress attempted to reopen the data center Sunday, “but has been unable to restore access to Copyright Office systems,” the release said. CO staff is unable to access internal shared network resources, it said. “Until service is restored, you will be unable to use the eCO system to file a copyright registration, and Office staff may be unable to access Office records.” Copyright registration can still be filed using a paper registration form during the outage, the office said. “The Library of Congress informs us that it is working to resolve the problems as expeditiously as possible, but we do not have an estimated time for service resumption.”

A recent patent filing from Samsung and Young Eun Cho, a Korean inventor based in the U.K., (US 2015/0235084) tells how a TV, tablet or smartphone screen can be adjusted automatically if the user is having difficulty viewing it. But the patent reveals that the system relies on extensive viewer surveillance. The patent was filed in 2014 but our patent searches showed Samsung has filed for similar ideas dating back a decade or more. The filing describes how the screen is paired with a video camera, which captures a running video image of the viewer’s face, and compares it with previously captured images. Changes in facial shape, eye size and eye-scroll motion, along with any changes in viewing distance and any decision to wear glasses are sent over the Internet to a remote server, the patent says. The server analyzes the data and returns a control signal, which adjusts the display to make viewing easier, for instance, by increasing text font size and increasing brightness or contrast. In 2004, four inventors working for Samsung in Korea filed claims (US 2006/0048189) for a “Method and apparatus for proactive recording and displaying of preferred television programs by user’s eye gaze.” That patent told how the screen watches the room with a camera, which analyzes the viewer’s gaze, and decides whether a program is capturing attention or whether the viewer’s eyes are wandering. When an arbitrary threshold of interest is exceeded, the system checks an electronic program guide and adds a “preferred” program tag, the patent said. When similar programs are subsequently detected in the EPG, the TV makes the decision to display and/or record, it said.

Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation were two of five groups that wrote a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman Monday asking that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement “not include measures restricting adoption of the Copyright Office’s recent proposals regarding orphan works.” Orphan works are books, articles, photos, recordings and other documents that are protected by copyright held by an unknown owner. The Register of Copyrights issued a report in May that included a “variety of proposals to expand access to copyrighted works,” said the letter, also signed by Authors Alliance, Knowledge Economy International and New Media Rights. The proposals aren't law and it’s possible Congress won't act or embrace a new approach entirely, it said. Though the groups that signed the letter vary in their preferences to how the issue should be remedied, all asked that the “TPP not adopt measures that would prevent the Congress from enacting these or other such provisions should they be needed at some point to expand access to orphaned copyrighted works.”

SAG-AFTRA officials reached a tentative three-year successor recording royalties deal Thursday with five major record labels. It includes a “groundbreaking payment formula for online streaming and non-permanent digital downloads that encompasses revenue from these types of exploitations generated outside the” U.S., the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and the labels said. The deal with the five labels -- Capitol Records, Hollywood Records, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and affiliates of Warner Music Group -- “is a significant expansion of the obligations the industry undertook in a deal originally struck in 1994, and it represents the first time the labels have included revenue generated outside the United States in any payment streams under the union's contract,” SAG-AFTRA and the labels said. All parties to the proposed deal “recognize the need for change in order to deal with the challenges and opportunities presented by new economic models in the industry,” SAG-AFTRA National Vice President-Recording Artists Dan Navarro said in a news release. “This deal starts us down that road.” SAG-AFTRA members will now need to ratify the deal.