The Copyright Office announced the opening of its triennial rulemaking process for granting exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's Section 1201 rules barring circumvention of technological protection mechanisms (see 1706300066). The goal is to identify potential classes of works “to which users are, or are likely to be in the next three years, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumventing access controls,” the CO said Monday. Petitions for exemption renewal are due July 22, petitions for new exemptions Sept. 8, said the Federal Register. Comments on renewal petitions are due Sept. 8. The CO said it’s again using a “streamlined” process for “renewal of exemptions that were granted during the seventh triennial rulemaking.” Renewed exemptions will remain in force through October 2024.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr took aim at YouTube Tuesday night after reports the platform has been accidentally deleting comments critical of China’s Communist Party. Carr accused the platform of enabling propaganda: YouTube “has no problem providing a platform for Communist China propaganda. ... Yet it draws a line on the comment section of a conservative publication in America.” YouTube enforcement systems didn’t take the “proper context into account” and “incorrectly removed the comments,” a Google spokesperson emailed Wednesday. “When we were made aware of this issue, we quickly investigated and are rolling out fixes for these terms as quickly as possible.”

Sens. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., introduced legislation to sanction people or companies that “enable the significant and serial theft” of U.S. intellectual property. The bill would authorize blocking measures and asset freezes and allow the president to include an entity on the Commerce Department’s denied persons list. “This bipartisan legislation will help end foreign theft of innovative technologies invented in the United States and will send a strong signal to bad actors across the globe,” Van Hollen said Thursday. The U.S. should “stop leaving an open door for China and other adversaries to steal," IP said Sasse.

Five months after Sonos charged Google with stealing the technologies in five of its multiroom audio patents (see 2001070041), Google returned the favor Thursday afternoon in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Sonos is stealing "substantial volumes of Google’s technology, including patented Google innovations in search, software, networking, audio processing, and digital media management and streaming,” alleged its complaint (in Pacer). It said Sonos hardware products and software and service offerings infringe five Google patents, the identical patent count in the Sonos allegations against Google. “Sonos has made false claims about the companies’ shared work and Google’s technology in the lawsuits that Sonos filed against Google earlier this year,” said the complaint. “While Google rarely sues other companies for patent infringement, it must assert its intellectual property rights here.” Google is "disappointed that Sonos has made false claims about our work together and technology," emailed spokesperson Jose Castaneda. "We are reluctantly defending ourselves by asserting our patent rights. While we look to resolve our dispute, we will continue to ensure our shared customers have the best experience using our products.” Sonos didn’t comment. Sonos and Google earlier Thursday declared they're deadlocked in the discovery phase of the Tariff Act Section 337 investigation at the International Trade Commission into the Sonos allegations that Google devices infringe the five Sonos multiroom audio patents (see 2002060070). There were no immediate indications Google in the new action would pursue a Section 337 complaint against Sonos, and Google spokesperson Castaneda sidestepped the question. The ITC combatants exited May at “an impasse regarding critical aspects of a protocol for remotely reviewing source code,” they told Chief Administrative Law Judge Charles Bullock in a progress report (login required). Sonos and Google agreed Tuesday to “table that dispute” as they try to organize an “in-person review” of the source code, they said. If COVID-19 makes the in-person review “impractical,” the companies may bring the stalemate before Bullock “for resolution,” they said. Sonos contends Google uses technologies stolen through various collaborations between the companies the past six years. Google counters it developed the technologies on its own and that they’re not the technologies described in the five Sonos patents.

U.S.-China technology competition and Trump administration restrictions on Huawei likely dashed prospects of a phase two trade deal, China experts said. Robert Dohner, of Atlantic Council and former Treasury Department official, called the deal “dead,” adding the U.S. approach to protecting technology damaged future negotiations. “I think the technology policies, particularly the pursuit of Huawei, have made it impossible now to go back and negotiate with China on technology policy or domestic industrial policy,” Dohner told a council webinar Tuesday. Leland Miller, a Chinese economy expert with the Atlantic Council, said the administration needs to reassess how it wants to approach Huawei and needs to better follow through on threats. Companies are trying to determine what they can “get away with,” said Dexter Roberts, also of the council. “All the restrictions in the world are going to be very, very hard to implement as long as Huawei is providing fast, cheap chips and cheap telecom gear that countries around the world want.” The White House declined to comment Thursday. The office of U.S. Trade Representative didn't comment.

The Internet Archive will close its National Emergency Library Tuesday rather than June 30 due to a lawsuit from publishers (see 2006010026), IA said Wednesday. The lawsuit is broader than the NEL, IA said. It “stands in contrast to some academic publishers who initially expressed concerns about the NEL, but ultimately decided to work with us to provide access to people cut off from their physical schools and libraries,” founder Brewster Kahle wrote. “We hope that similar cooperation is possible here, and the publishers call off their costly assault.” The NEL “was an enormously important program that acted as a short-term band-aid to alleviate real, documented needs during a time of national crisis, providing access to books when library collections were inaccessible,” Public Knowledge Policy Counsel Meredith Rose said. The Association of American Publishers didn’t comment.

Facebook filed a lawsuit in Virginia against 12 fraudulent domain names registered by India-based proxy service Compsys Domain Solutions, it said Monday. The domains, such as facebook-verify-inc.com and videocall-whatsapp.com, were allegedly used to deceive people by impersonating Facebook apps. Facebook said that to protect users from phishing, credential theft and other methods of online fraud, it regularly scans the internet for domain names and apps that infringe its trademarks. Compsys doesn't appear to have a website and couldn't be reached.

U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady of Alexandria, Virginia, allowed recalculation of the number of musical works cable ISP Cox Communications is being sued over, without changing the formula for arriving at total copyright infringement damages due plaintiff record companies and music publishers. That's in an opinion Wednesday (in Pacer, docket 18-cv-00950) in which the court partially granted and partially denied Cox motions for post-verdict relief on the $1 billion jury award against it and in which it sought a new trial (see 2002250024). There's nothing to suggest the jury's per-work award is improper and thus no basis for a new trial, O'Grady said. But he ordered that the number of songs be recalculated so each song with multiple copyrights be combined instead of damages being awarded for each copyright the song has. Cox outside counsel didn't comment.

The Copyright Office is accepting comments through Aug. 3 on a study on how “copyright owners are experiencing infringement by states without adequate remedies under state law.” The CO announced this in Wednesday's Federal Register. The Senate Intellectual Property Subcommittee requested it after the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Cooper in March states are immune to copyright infringement liability.

Internet Archive should be blocked from scanning and sharing millions of literary works, the Association of American Publishers said Monday in a lawsuit at U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. AAP accused IA of sharing “some 1.3 million bootleg scans of print books” through public-facing online libraries. Plaintiffs are Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House. The lawsuit “condemns the fact that IA solicits and collects truckloads of in-copyright books in order to copy and make them available without permission,” AAP said, arguing there are no exceptions for this activity under fair use, the first sale doctrine or in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. IA founder Brewster Kahle called the lawsuit “disappointing.” IA “acquires books and lends them, as libraries have always done,” which supports the publishing industry, he emailed. “Publishers suing libraries for lending books, in this case, protected digitized versions, and while schools and libraries are closed, is not in anyone's interest.” For too long, "IA has brazenly scanned and distributed published works while refusing to abide by the traditional contours of copyright law,” Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid said. Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer wrote in support of IA, saying controlled digital lending is fair use under copyright law: "The National Emergency Library, which expands on CDL, is justified under the circumstances of the pandemic, when so many print books paid for by the public are inaccessible." He urged Congress to support legislation "clarifying the right of libraries to make print books available to patrons electronically, and to serve their constituencies during times of emergency.”