In 2018, when Mattel introduced the Frida Kahlo doll as part of its “Inspiring Women” collection in the Barbie portfolio, some consumers saw a strong feminist statement, but many observers familiar with Kahlo’s life and work saw a commercial exploitation the artist would have hated. Indeed, Kahlo was a sharp critic of American capitalism and the kind of bourgeois sensibility ...
Dr. Rebecca Grant, Vice President of Lexington Institute, alleges in a recent post that copyright owners—specifically the bogeyman of “Hollywood”—form an obstacle to national security in the effort to win the AI cold war with China. Out of respect for her credentials as a security expert, I shall assume that all of Dr. Grant’s specific references to the role of ...
Courts can’t stick their heads in the sand to an obvious way that a new technology might severely harm the incentive to create, just because the issue has not come up before. Indeed, it seems likely that market dilution will often cause plaintiffs to decisively win the fourth factor—and thus win the fair use question overall—in cases like this. – ...
Headlines flood the feeds announcing that a California District Court sided with AI developer Anthropic, finding that LLM training with unlicensed works is fair use. While the headlines are true, I wouldn’t read the conclusions as gospel just yet. In the big picture, we are going to see a variety of fair use opinions in the more than 40 copyright ...
When I was a kid in the 1970s and my father was a principal in an ad agency, they had the Ameritone paint account, and I remember him explaining that they were not allowed to show paint and food together in a commercial lest a child viewer be confused into thinking that paint might be edible. By contrast, a social ...