It’s big business for “litigation factories that take advantages of anomalies in the patent system to extort financial settlements out of businesses large and small,” said Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler Tuesday in a blog post on the formation last week of the United for Patent Reform. Cisco is a charter member (see 1501150035). United for Patent Reform is “a broad-based coalition of businesses” that will work “to fight wanton abuse of the patent litigation system by patent assertion entities (PAEs),” said Chandler. PAEs are companies that “neither invent nor produce products, but simply buy patents for litigation value,” he said. Citing Allied Security Trust data, Chandler said PAEs bought as many patents in the first half of 2014 as they did in all of 2013. The number of lawsuits brought by PAEs in 2014 were triple those of 2006, he said. “As our coalition’s membership illustrates, this is a problem that includes businesses of all shapes and sizes.” Among the congressional remedies the coalition seeks are measures that put the “burden of litigation costs on those who bring suits that prove to be for extortion value only or where parties demand inefficient, costly litigation procedures,” he said. “Over the next weeks and months, Cisco, in conjunction with United for Patent Reform and its member companies, will make the case for patent reform in the hope that Congress will approve meaningful reforms soon. This is imperative if we’re to break the outlandish and exploitive business model that has encouraged patent assertion entities to thrive.”

SoundExchange filed notices of its intent to audit the royalty payments from CBS Radio and iHeartMedia from 2011, 2012 and 2013, with the Copyright Royalty Board, said the CRB in Wednesday's Federal Register. It said SoundExchange filed the notices Dec. 23.

MPAA sued Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technology (Xunlei), a Chinese peer-to-peer file-sharing site, MPAA said in a news release Tuesday. It said the lawsuit, which seeks damages and a public apology for Xunlei’s alleged copyright infringement, was filed Monday in the Nanshan District Court in Shenzhen, China. “A healthy, sustainable and developing online video sector will greatly benefit audiences and movie and technology businesses, however this outcome is only possible if quality film and television content is respected and protected at every stage of the value chain,” said President Mike Ellis of Motion Picture Association-Asia Pacific, which represents MPAA in the region. “For too long we have witnessed valuable creative content being taken and monetized without the permission of the copyright owner,” he said in the release. “That has to stop and stop now.” The U.S. Trade Representative cited Xunlei as a threat to intellectual property in USTR's notorious markets list in 2012 (see 1212170079). Xunlei couldn’t be reached for comment.

Restrictive copyright laws for electronics and software also apply to the Internet of Things, said Corynne McSherry, Electronic Frontier Foundation intellectual property director, in a blog post Tuesday. Licensing models for technology are bad for consumers and innovation, she said. McSherry recommended Congress repeal of Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 1201, which prohibits the circumvention of technological protection measures, except in the case of nonprofit libraries, public archives and educational institutions. She also said end-user license agreements, which govern a consumer’s use of a product’s software, should be limited. IoT shouldn’t become the “‘Internet of Things I Think I Own But Can’t Control,’” McSherry said.

The U.S. District Court in New York mostly upheld its November ruling (see 1411170043) against SiriusXM on the question of the company's failure to pay performance royalties for pre-1972 sound recordings, said court documents filed Thursday. Judge Colleen McMahon didn’t enter a summary judgment ruling in favor of plaintiffs Flo & Eddie, but said she would provide such a ruling if the two performers proceeded “individually” and not as a “class representative.” Flo & Eddie will seek class-action certification; they have until April 3 to take such action, said Harvey Geller of Gradstein & Marzano, who represents the plaintiffs. McMahon said she agreed with SiriusXM that common law copyright damages could be recovered for only three years prior to a lawsuit, which, in the plaintiff’s case, would date to Aug. 16, 2010. Flo & Eddie had argued that such damages could be recovered up to six years before a suit. SiriusXM didn’t comment.

Copyright Royalty judges opened a comment period for proposed regulations on royalty rates and terms for the digital transmission of sound recordings by new subscription services and the creation of ephemeral recordings to facilitate such transmissions from Jan. 1, 2016 to Dec. 31, 2020, said a Federal Registernotice Thursday. Comments are due Feb. 17, it said. Performing rights organization SoundExchange and SiriusXM asked the judges to adopt the two sides' settlement on royalties for music services on cable and satellite-TV, covering a period of several years. Spotify was among those seeking to participate in the proceeding. The judges proposed a monthly payment of .0179 cents per subscriber to the subscription service of a licensee for a “stand-alone contract” in 2016; .0185 cents, 2017; .0190 cents, 2018; .0196 cents, 2019; and .0202 cents, 2020. For “bundled contracts,” the proposed rate is .0299 cents for 2016; .0308 cents, 2017; .0317 cents, 2018; .0326 cents, 2019; and .0336 cents, 2020.

The Patent and Trademark Office granted Rentrak a patent for detecting and correcting TV viewership levels caused by missing or dropped set-top box viewing information, the company said Tuesday. U.S. Patent No. 8,930,978 “minimizes” the impact of outages that operators experience, Rentrak said. The patent “should give our clients continued confidence in our commitment to the best television measurement from massive and passive databases," Rentrak CEO Bill Livek said in a news release.

Recent attempts to link stolen MPAA copyright-related documents via the Sony Pictures Entertainment data breach with web censorship are “intentionally and cynically misleading,” Lawrence Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies, said in an op-ed for The Hill Thursday. The stolen copyright documents, which purportedly showed collaborative efforts between the entertainment industry, law firms and ISPs, provoked accusations from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other groups that the former parties were seeking measures similar to the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (see 1412170050). “Adhering to the old political adage that you never let a serious crisis go to waste, we now see the anti-copyright crowd cynically attempting to use this attack as an excuse to weaken efforts to combat online piracy,” Spiwak said. “Seeking to pursue all lawful means to protect valuable intellectual property is not the moral equivalent of Web censorship,” he said. The Sony documents show that MPAA and other movie studios “are still pursuing the goals of SOPA,” Mitch Stoltz, EFF staff attorney, said in an interview. “That was true before the Sony hack and it’s true now,” he said. Spiwak’s argument is “typical” of those who defend MPAA’s “censorship strategy,” in that they usually fail to “wrestle with or acknowledge the harms that come with more draconian” copyright enforcement, Stoltz said. “Examples abound” of copyright being used to “suppress speech on the Internet for any number of illegitimate reasons,” he said. “That’s the definition of censorship.”

Apple-watchers spotted a new U.S. patent (8,922,530) filed in January 2010 and granted Tuesday for a “communicating stylus,” and it has many guessing that this may mean that an iPen smart pen device is on the horizon. A close read of the patent listing Aleksandar Pance, of Saratoga, California, as the inventor and Apple as the assignee confirms that Apple is talking about an electronic pen that captures handwriting or drawing, on any surface or in 3D space, and sends it to a computer for display on a screen. But that same close read also reveals a marked shortage of hard technical facts on how this is actually achieved. The Livescribe family of pens already offers very accurate handwriting capture, but specialized paper is needed. The paper has micro-marks on the surface that form a near-invisible map. An infrared light sensor in the pen uses the map to keep accurate track of its movement over the paper. In the patent, Apple says this approach is a “problem” and aims for “a stylus that can enter data into a computing device, regardless of the surface with which it is used.” The Apple stylus will contain a “position sensing device such as an accelerometer,” which tracks position “with respect to an initial or zero point,” the patent says. This sounds similar to the error-prone “dead reckoning” used by navigation systems before GPS became available. Apple’s patent documentation offers little help on how accuracy will be improved sufficiently to capture handwriting legibly, other than to suggest the use of multiple sensors and “time stamped” radio or sonic waves, with or without “triangulation” and with or without a magnetometer to register “magnetic north.” Apple representatives didn’t comment.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a statutory royalty rate decision by the Copyright Royalty Board, in a ruling Friday. The court denied appeals by SoundExchange, which said the CRB’s rates and terms for satellite digital audio radio services and pre-existing subscription services (PSS) were too low. Music Choice and SiriusXM also appealed the 2-year-old decision, saying the rates were too high. “For Sirius XM, the rates set by the decision increased from 9% [of gross revenue] in 2013 to 11% in 2017, reflecting slight .5% rate increases each year during the term,” David Oxenford of Wilkinson Barker said in a blog post Monday. “The Music Choice royalty for PSS services went from a previously negotiated 7.5% up to 8% in 2013 and 8.5% of gross revenues through 2017,” he said. The court also decided to “leave in place the CRB’s determination that Sirius XM should be able to deduct from its royalty payments a percentage of its revenue equal to the percentage of pre-1972 sound recordings played by the service,” Oxenford said.