It was such a busy Summer that I never got a chance to write about the Supreme Court’s June decision in the cyberstalking case Counterman v. Colorado. The story caught my attention when legal scholar and president of Cyber Civil Rights Initiative Mary Anne Franks tweeted, “the Supreme Court has just decreed that stalking is free speech protected by the ...
As discussed in an earlier post, Valancourt Books, a small, on-demand publisher, filed suit against the Copyright Office and the Department of Justice and argued that the Office’s demand for physical copies of published books is unconstitutional. Valancourt alleged that the authority granted by §407 of the Copyright Act to demand the copies (or be fined) is a violation of ...
In my last post, I discussed some of the allegations that “machine learning” (ML) with the use of copyrighted works constitutes mass infringement. Citing the class action lawsuits Andersen and Tremblay, I predicted that if the courts do not find that ML unavoidably violates the reproduction right (§106(1)), copyright law may not offer much relief to the creators of the ...
Many creators feel very strongly that “training” AI models with unlicensed, copyrighted works is unjust—not least because generative AIs built on their creativities will put some creators out of business while enriching more tech moguls. It is both insult and injury to see one’s work used, without consideration, to underwrite the mechanism of one’s own obsolescence. But regardless of how ...
On May 18, the Supreme Court delivered opinions in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh, a pair of interrelated cases in which both plaintiffs sought to hold online platforms liable for hosting material meant to inspire acts of terrorism. Because the Court unanimously found in Taamneh that there was no basis in anti-terrorism law for liability (and therefore no ...
