On Monday last week, oral arguments were presented in cross-motions for summary judgment in Hachette et al. v. Internet Archive, and by end-of-business Friday, the court delivered its opinion thoroughly rejecting IA’s fair use defense. Although many of us watching this case felt a little whiplash Friday evening, the speed with which the court responded can perhaps be explained by ...
One would think this is obvious, particularly to a librarian, but perhaps not to Douglas Lord, President of the Connecticut Library Association (CLA). In a letter addressed to the state assembly advocating passage of H.B. 6829, Connecticut’s version of similar bills proposed (and shot down) in other states to address alleged unfairness in eBook licensing to libraries, Lord writes: It ...
In March 2020, the Supreme Court delivered its opinion in the case Allen v. Cooper. The outcome was not surprising because the Court affirmed precedent ruling from the late 1990s which held that the 11th Amendment bars suing a state or state actors for damages stemming from intellectual property infringement. Thus far, I’ve explored the murky waters of state sovereign ...
“Black history is American history.” There is more than one way to read (or use) that phrase. On its face, it affirms that no honest or thorough narrative about the United States can possibly exclude the Black story. But from there, one might say, as Morgan Freeman suggested in a 2005 interview with Mike Wallace, that to distinguish or compartmentalize ...
Plenty is being said about AI systems that generate visual works, written works, music, etc. And plenty more will be said, especially now that lawsuits have been filed against some of the AI-generated image companies. In this post, I want to address a misconception about authorship in copyright law that may be warping the AI conversation. As I understand the ...
