Yesterday, New York federal judge Sidney Stein ruled that Richard Prince, one of the most famous appropriation artists in the world, infringed the copyright rights of photographers Donald Graham and Eric McNatt by using their works in the controversial “New Portraits” series. Prince and his co-defendant, gallery owner Lawrence Gagosian, are ordered to pay Graham and McNatt five times the ...

By now, many people who pay attention to artists’ rights have read the David Segal New York Times story published on January 13 about the amateur folk duo Bad Dog discovering their songs on major streaming platforms, but with different titles and attributed to a different creator. In what should be a surprise to nobody, it is easy to game ...

The acronym stands for No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas and Unauthorized Duplication. Introduced as a discussion draft by Rep. Maria Salazar et al., the No AI FRAUD Act would create a novel form of intellectual property in direct response to the use of AI to “clone” a likeness. With parallels to right of publicity (ROP) law, combined with a copyright-like, ...

Lately, we’ve seen several headlines and comments from tech giants say that AI ventures simply cannot succeed if they are forced to contend with the copyrights in the billions of works they have scraped for the purpose of machine learning (ML). When these headlines are paired with the rampant assertions that ML is inherently fair use—a subject addressed in last ...

Last week, writer and broadcaster Andrew Keen invited me to his podcast Keen On to talk (of course) about artificial intelligence. When we got to the subject of the New York Times lawsuit against Open AI and Microsoft, I noted that 1) it is arguably the strongest copyright case presented to date against an AI developer; 2) that it would ...

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