Lawyers for songwriter Sammy Cahn and four music publishers have until June 26 to retrieve six sealed documents filed in the July 1990 complaint (case 1:90-cv-04537) they brought to stop Sony from importing and selling digital audio tape recorders in the U.S. Clerks at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan will destroy the documents, which remain sealed, if they’re not picked up by the deadline, said court notices (in Pacer) posted May 25. Cahn and his fellow plaintiffs -- JAC Music, Fort Knox Music, Trio Music and Peer International -- with support from the National Music Publishers’ Association and the Songwriters Guild of America, sued Sony for contributory infringement on grounds that the company's digital audio tape recorders produced perfect copies that would inhibit future sales of commercial sound recordings. The complaint was terminated a year later after the consumer electronics industry reached the compromise legislative deal with the recording industry, music publishers and songwriters that became the framework for the Audio Home Recording Act. President George H.W. Bush signed the AHRA into law in 1992. Cahn died in 1993.

The Supreme Court ruled in​ Impression Products v. Lexmark International Tuesday against the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on domestic and international patent exhaustion. “A patentee’s decision to sell a product exhausts all of its patent rights in that item, regardless of any restrictions the patentee purports to impose or the location of the sale,” said Chief Justice John Roberts. The Supreme Court voted 8-0 to overturn precedent for domestic patent exhaustion and 7-1 to nix international exhaustion precedent. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented on international exhaustion, contending a company retains overseas patent rights at sale. Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t take part. The Federal Circuit had said a company could choose to exhaust only some of its patent rights at the time of a product’s sale, opening up the possibility of an infringement lawsuit if a user violated a company's reserved rights. The “misstep” in Federal Circuit “logic is that the exhaustion doctrine is not a presumption about the authority that comes along with a sale; it is instead a limit on ‘the scope of the patentee’s rights,’” the Supreme Court ruled. It's a disappointment but confirms that Lexmark’s “return program agreement remains clear and enforceable under contract law,” said General Counsel Bob Patton in a statement. Impression is happy the court "reaffirmed important limits on the scope of patent rights,” said counsel Andrew Pincus of Mayer Brown. The decision “is a strong recognition that consumer rights have primary importance,” said Public Knowledge Patent Reform Project Director Charles Duan.

The operators of YouTube channel The Cartoon Channel will remove a video containing Looney Tunes content for which ComedyMX is the copyright holder, said a notice (in Pacer) of conditional settlement filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. ComedyMX, which operates its own YouTube channels, sued The Cartoon Channel and its principals in 2015. YouTube is part of Alphabet/Google.

Facebook added products for digital piracy to its banned commerce list this month. It's including "products or items that facilitate or encourage unauthorized access to digital media" to goods and services not allowed to be sold via Facebook, it confirmed Friday. Facebook's commerce policy also bans sale of animals, tobacco items and alcohol.

Samsung must send the Patent and Trademark Office a “disclaimer” by late November saying it makes no claim “to the exclusive right to use ‘HDR10'” apart from the “HDR10 Plus” term it’s seeking to register as a trademark, said a notice: HDR10 is in “widespread” use “to refer to the industry standard format used in a wide variety of devices and in connection with streaming services, specifically transmission and streaming of programming in the HDR10 format.” Company representatives didn’t comment Thursday.

The Copyright Office published two final rules Friday. One amends the CO’s regulations for handling copyright applications, fee and other material submissions during disruptions or outages of its electronic systems, and the other allows cable operators under Copyright Act Section 111 statutory licenses to electronically sign and submit statements of account for broadcasting retransmissions, the office said in separate Federal Register notices. The outage rule allows the register of copyrights to assign the date of a copyright-related submission's receipt as “the date on which she determines the material would have been received but for the disruption or suspension of the electronic system.” The CO ordinarily views the submission date as the date the submission was made (see 1703020065). The Section 111 rule allows e-signatures on all related forms but gives cable operators the option to continue to use handwritten signatures on paper forms, the CO said.

A Copyright Office NPRM Thursday would amend rules for recording transfers of copyright ownership, notices of copyright termination and other copyright-related documents. The CO said it's part of planned development of a fully electronic recordation system. The CO must “make a number of policy decisions critical to the design of the to-be-developed system,” the office said in the Federal Register: Several of the changes “could be implemented in the near future, without the new system.” The NPRM would in part update document submission rules to allow for e-submission and would lay out the process for an applicant to submit information directly via e-recordation. The CO still would require submission of official documents through the portal but would be able to swiftly index the information via user-submitted data. The office plans closer to the program's launch to evaluate how to structure fees under the e-recordation plan. The CO said it would, as planned, begin “making all documents recorded after the launch of the new arrangement available on the internet, regardless of whether the document was submitted through the new approach or via the paper process.” The office said it “sees no reason why someone should be required to travel to [Washington], or to make an expensive search and retrieval request to view these records.” The CO said it plans to issue a separate NPRM later on making “documents recorded prior to the system's introduction available online.” Comments are due July 17.

Arris filed a Tariff Act Section 337 complaint at the International Trade Commission earlier this month, seeking a ban on imports of Sony consumer electronic devices that allegedly infringe its patents. Sony allegedly is importing patent-infringing TVs, including Android TVs, gaming consoles such as the PlayStation 4, smartphones and tablets, including Sony’s Xperia line, and network-enabled Blu-Ray/DVD players. The ITC seeks comments by May 23, it said in Monday's Federal Register. Sony didn't comment Tuesday.

A coalition of top tech sector stakeholders and a separate coalition of library and public interest groups are urging the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to either rehear Mavrix Photographs v. LiveJournal or set an en banc hearing. A three-judge 9th Circuit panel ruled last month against LiveJournal, saying moderators of the website's “Oh No They Didn’t!” gossip blog can be considered to have enough knowledge of copyright infringement contained in blog posts to undermine Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 512 safe harbors (see 1704100040). Facebook, Google, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, the Internet Association and other tech interests jointly urged 9th Circuit reconsideration of Mavrix, arguing in an amicus brief that the panel's ruling deviated from Section 512's language and legislative history. The original ruling, if allowed to stand, would “make it more difficult for LiveJournal (and other service providers) to ensure that their operations are protected” under Section 512, the tech entities said. “The panel’s decision threatens to expose online services to a possible loss of DMCA protection simply because they make efforts to screen content that users submit for posting. If the panel intended that result, its decision is profoundly mistaken, and it will harm not just service providers and their users, but copyright owners as well.” The ruling “runs directly contrary” to Congress' intent in enacting Section 512 “by penalizing service providers who use moderators,” said (in Pacer) the American Library Association, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and others. “The possibility that an online platform might lose its DMCA safe harbor by virtue of moderating its service obviously would strongly discourage the platform from doing so. That, in turn, would upend the actual practices of scores of platforms and services who have responded to Congress’s clear signal that they would not be penalized for using moderators.”

SoundExchange said it bought music licensing collective Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency. The groups “will integrate and streamline the administration and distribution” of sound recording and music publishing royalties and “continue to work independently and serve their current customers while also exploring collaborative opportunities such as sharing core services,” SoundExchange said in a Monday news release. “The acquisition of CMRRA helps us increase efficiencies while also extending service to the publishing sector,” said SoundExchange CEO Michael Huppe.