The International Trade Administration has initiated an antidumping duty administrative review of wooden bedroom furniture from China (A-570-890) for the period January 1, 2010 - December 31, 2010, under which all subject entities are required to submit either a separate rate status certification or application by April 29, 2011 or receive the China-wide entity rate of 216.01%.
The International Trade Commission has instituted a section 337 patent-based investigation1 of certain set-top boxes, and hardware and software components thereof pursuant to a complaint.
The International Trade Commission has instituted a section 337 patent-based investigation1 of certain liquid crystal display devices, products containing same, and methods for using the same pursuant to a complaint.
The International Trade Administration has initiated administrative reviews of the antidumping and countervailing duty orders below, for certain specified companies listed in the initiation notice.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service has issued a proposed rule to apply the continuous inspection requirements of the Federal Meat Inspection Act (FMIA)1 to imported and domestic catfish and catfish products. FSIS states that this proposed rule would, among other things, require imported catfish to be (i) inspected under a foreign system that is equivalent to that of the U.S. and (i) from establishments that the foreign inspection authority has certified as complying with U.S. requirements.
Broker Power is providing readers with some of the top stories for February 14-18, 2011 in case they were missed last week.
Appellate filings in the P2P infringement case against Joel Tenenbaum are winding down, with the defense arguing in a reply brief that his Boston jury was left “rudderless” by a judge’s instructions. Harvard professor Charles Nesson, the controversial lawyer for grad student Tenenbaum, told the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston that the original $675,000 verdict resulted from U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner’s failure to impart “judicial wisdom” to the jury in how it should assess damages under the Copyright Act. Gertner later reduced damages to $67,500, but Tenenbaum’s team said he deserved a new trial (WID July 13 p3). Judges can’t rely on “mere repetition of the statutory language in their instructions to juries,” Nesson said. Befitting the professor’s idiosyncratic style, the filing includes a graph showing the RIAA’s share of copyright litigation in the years when it was filing new P2P infringement lawsuits. Copyright suits reached nearly 6,000 in 2005, the second full year of the RIAA campaign and double the average from the previous 10 years, Nesson said. Only two cases have fully gone through trial, and though the RIAA stopped filing new suits, its campaign spurred new bursts of infringement suits from plaintiffs such as the Copyright Enforcement Group and U.S. Copyright Group against downloaders, website operators and bloggers, the filing said. “The combination of an escalating number of similar lawsuits and a dearth of on-point caselaw means that this Court’s decision could potentially shape the interactions between consumers and media content providers for years to come.” Section 504 of the Copyright Act, dealing with infringement and remedies, was never meant to apply to “noncommercial” consumers, as opposed to commercial bootleggers, Nesson said. The statutory penalties available under Section 504 don’t give the RIAA “carte blanche to levy windfall judgments without proving any harm whatsoever,” he said. Gertner’s $67,500 award is still “embarrassingly out of proportion” to the damage caused by sharing 30 songs, Nesson said. The RIAA’s emphasis on the “gigantic scale” of file-sharing actually argues against a large award against Tenenbaum specifically: The trade group’s own expert witness once estimated a U.S. audience of 40 million file-sharers, meaning each was responsible for about $250 of the recording industry’s $10 billion annual decline. Tenenbaum was “not any kind of filesharing ringleader or illicit software provider,” Nesson said.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted an updated version of its spreadsheet of ACE ESAR A2.2 (Initial Entry Types) programming issues.
Internet-related provisions of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement remain troublesome despite improvements, digital rights activists and others told the U.S. Trade Representative last week. Among the most contentious are those about circumvention of technical protection measures, criminal penalties for copyright infringement and liability of online service providers. The USTR had posted more than 150 comments on the final ACTA draft Friday, but many were duplications and most seemed the product of a write-in campaign opposing the agreement.
Despite improvements to law and enforcement in some areas, China, Russia and other mainstays of the U.S. Trade Representative’s list of intellectual property-infringing hotspots deserve to remain in their place, IP owners told USTR for its Special 301 review. Comments were due late Tuesday, though foreign governments have until Feb. 22 to file. Domain name disputes and illicit pay-TV streaming drew attention from some commenters. Canada remained a top concern as well for failing to pass a copyright reform bill or ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization’s so-called Internet treaties, concluded in 1997.