The generative AI revolution has arrived. Will copyright law snuff it out?

Despite all the excitement surrounding generative AI tools, a cloud darkens the horizon. These tools need to be trained on massive amounts of ingested content and, according to press reports, this content is often scraped without authorization from third-party websites, raising significant copyright law issues.Continue Reading Known Unknowns: Key Unanswered Copyright Questions Raised by Generative AI

We recently attended the Annual Meeting of the Copyright Society of the USA, a two-and-a-half day, in-person conference focused on emerging issues in copyright law (perhaps the country’s largest annual get-together of copyright nerds like us). Here are our Notes from the Field on what was being discussed during—and after—the sessions that we attended.Continue Reading Notes From the Field: 2023 Annual Meeting of the Copyright Society of the USA

A surprising, unannounced collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd—a song called “Heart on My Sleeve”—went viral on social media a few weeks ago. It generated millions of streams across music and social media platforms, but it wasn’t Drake and The Weeknd singing on the track; rather, it was an AI-generated simulation…

As digital media continues to supplant physical media, e-commerce sites offering digital content have experienced unprecedented growth. These sites offer consumers access to video games, music, movies, e-books, and many other types of digital media at the click of a button. Although purchasing digital media—as opposed to physical media—has become commonplace for consumers, a recent case, McTyere et al v. Apple, Inc., suggests that consumers’ understanding of terms like “sell,” “buy,” and “purchase” have not fully caught up to our new digital reality. When a consumer buys a book in a physical bookstore, they own indefinitely the physical copy of the book that they purchased. However, when consumers click a “Buy” button on an e-book platform, they almost always receive a license to a copy of the e-book, a license that typically can be terminated by the e-book platform or the book’s publisher under certain circumstances. McTyere has highlighted this important legal distinction between buying physical and digital media and raises the question of whether it is deceptive to describe the licensing of rights to digital media using the same terminology as has traditionally been used to describe the sale of books, CDs, DVDs, and other physical goods.Continue Reading Buy Today, Gone Tomorrow: Is a “Buy” Button for Digital Content Deceptive?

In early February, following a six-day trial, a jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found in favor of Hermès in its claims of trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and cybersquatting against artist Mason Rothschild, the creator of the “MetaBirkins” non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Even with the…

The U.S. Copyright Office has again refused to recognize an artificial intelligence as the author of a work for copyright purposes.

This renewed rejection follows Steven Thaler’s request for the Copyright Office to reconsider its earlier refusals to recognize an AI algorithm, dubbed the “Creativity Machine,” as the author of a visual work entitled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, reproduced here:

Continue Reading AI Can Create a Painting but It Can’t Register a Copyright in the Painting