Politico reported yesterday that the astroturf organization called Chamber of Progress stated that because Trump’s tariffs will be a “gut punch” to Silicon Valley stock prices, California legislators should decline to aggravate matters by passing a law that would require transparency among AI developers using copyrighted works in model training. Granted, the tone was more circumspect, but that’s what the ...
The purpose of cultivating works of authorship is to shed light on human experience, and the foundational purpose of the fair use doctrine in copyright law is to shed light on works of authorship. From its 18th century, English roots to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in AWF v. Goldsmith, the primary rationale for fair use is to permit ...
Last week’s firing of the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, along with his deputies, is one more reason to conclude that the United States is not led by serious people. As the administration waves off the implications of Signalgate and then fires Four-Star General Timothy D. Haugh et al. on the reported basis that Laura ...
In a decision that is unsurprising but important, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that “authors,” as defined in U.S. Copyright Act, are human beings and not machines that can autonomously generate works. I say unsurprising because nothing in history or statute should have led the court to any other conclusion, and indeed the opinion can be summed up ...
Many copyright scholars refer to England’s Statute of Anne (1710) as the “first authors’ copyright law,” but I quarrel with that summary. In that year, and for many decades to follow, English “rights” for authors were too intertwined with the Crown’s authority to sanction publication of works for us to think of the Statute of Anne as affirming copyright rights ...
