Record III of Day Four of Our Visit to the United States
(By You Yunting) At the end of this past March, on the invitation of the US government, the author visited America with other Chinese legal experts with the goal of better understanding its IPR system. On the fourth day of the journey, the author visited the Copyright Office of the US Library of Congress (the “US Copyright Office”). The following is the brief record of the visit on that day.
Copyright regulations can be found in the U.S. Constitution as it was drafted in 1790. In 1800, the U.S. Congress set up its Library of Congress, and in 1870 the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress started assumed its responsibility as the highest authority in handling applications for copyright. In 2011, there were more than 700,000 copyright registrations in the U.S., and more than eighty-five percent were completed through electronic means. The responsibilities of the Copyright Office include the drafting of relevant laws and regulations, advising Congress on domestic and international copyright issues, aiding the Federal Government and the Department of Justice copyright issues, participating in international copyright conferences as acceded by foreign governments, and studies on copyright in general. In the U.S., copyright registration is not required by law, excluding books. According to the relevant laws and regulations, books published in the U.S. shall be submitted in duplicate to the Copyright Office for registration. However, the Office has no power of enforcement, quite unlike the Copyright Office in China, and all copyright disputes are handled by the FBI.
Domestic copyright issues within the purview of Copyright Office include: orphaned works, large scale digitization of books (we also discussed Google library, and the author expressed his support for the product, surprising the American Copyright Office representative), illegal streaming, library fair use, small claims solutions and the public broadcast right of sound productions.
The author and his colleague also inquired about the fees required for copyright registration, and we were told it costs $35 to file a copyright application with the Copyright Office. Further question from visitors pertained to scenarios where photo or graphics companies submit more than 100,000 pieces for registration; what would the fee be then? The answer was that the registration fee remains $35. However, the US representative also confessed that if expired works are among those contained in the application, it is difficult to discover based on the current conditions and availability of manpower in the Copyright Office. There are more than one hundred examiners in the Copyright Office, charged with the examination and review of applied works, and currently the examination of musical works comprises their main work. To that end, they are equipped with technology to determine whether the applied work is authored by someone other than the registration holder. Upon discovering questionable applications, such applications will be laid aside; we were informed that in fact many are laid aside due to questionable validity.
The question raised by the author is this: why does the U.S. have different regulations regarding the legality jailbreaking of iPads and iPhones? Previously, the author has written an essay on the issue, but what interests the writer more is the answer he received from the U.S. authorities.
Their answers, in summary, are this: iPad and iPhone jailbreaking do not actually concern copyright issues, but primarily involve controlling access to the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) embedded in the hardware of both devices. The principle followed in the U.S. is: any jailbreaking against the TPM in order to remove limits on modification as set by the manufacturer is considered a violation of the law, and a manufacturer has the right to sue a jailbreaker. Despite this general principle, the U.S. recognizes some rather substantial exceptions.
Coupled with the growing popularity and ubiquity of cell phones, cell phone manufacturers have opted to cooperate with large telecoms in the U.S. in order to restrict the use of cell phones to certain networks. This has resulted in widespread user dissatisfaction: why should anyone be able to decide what network our cell phones run on? Due to this general feeling, when the legislature deliberated the issue at the end of last year, they found iPad jailbreaking to be something different entirely form that of iPhone jailbreaking; to be more specific, users jailbreaking iPads were not doing so for the same reasons that iPhone users were. Therefore, they found that the jailbreaking of iPads to be within the legal right of the enduser.
In closing, the above record was taken by the author himself, and some of the content may be incomplete or inaccurate. We have decided to publish our notes in order to share them with our readers, and any opinions or corrections are warmly welcomed. Out of respect to the U.S. officials and authorities who were very generous and helpful in answering our questions, unless they agree prior, we will not publicize the names of any of the involved parties on the Internet; thank you for your understanding.
Lawyer Contacts
You Yunting：86-21-52134918 youyunting@debund.com/yytbest@gmail.com
Disclaimer of Bridge IP Law Commentary
Short Link: