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 ...
As most copyright watchers already know, two lawsuits were filed at the start of the new year against AI visual works companies. In the U.S., a class-action was filed by visual artists against DeviantArt, Midjourney, and Stability AI; and in the UK, Getty Images is suing Stability AI. Both cases allege infringing use of large volumes of protected works fed ...
Remember all the noise coming from anti-copyright groups leading up to passage of the CASE Act? According to the EFF, Public Knowledge, Fight for the Future, the usual assortment of anti-copyright academics, and Senator Ron Wyden, the copyright small claim alternative would open the floodgates for abusive claims. They predicted CASE would be the ideal venue for “copyright trolls,” and ...
“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 ...
“This lawsuit is about Piracy, Greed, and Revenge” states Line 1 of the complaint filed yesterday in the North Carolina district court where documentary filmmaker Rick Allen is still seeking justice for the reckless, intentional, and frankly mean-spirited manner in which state officials infringed his copyright rights, deprived him of his lawful property interest in his motion picture and photographic ...
