The first copyright case decided at the U.S. Supreme Court was Wheaton v. Peters in 1834. There were six justices at the time, including the oft-quoted Joseph Story, and in a 4-2 decision, the Court made what I believe was a textual and, therefore, doctrinal error. The allegedly infringed works at issue were published reports of the Court, and there ...
The First Amendment protects the right to read books but not the right to break into a bookstore for the purpose of reading—not even if the goal is to quote a passage from a book in a manner that would be fair use under copyright law. The hypothetical, lawful use of the book’s contents to produce protected expression does not ...
As mentioned in my last post about the record labels’ lawsuits against GAI companies Suno and Udio, I will generally focus on the latter case. Both cases are almost identical, but because UMG et al. v. Ucharted Labs Inc. is at the SDNY (in the Second Circuit), those proceedings may be followed by other courts with considerably less copyright law ...
On July 11, Senators Cantwell, Blackburn, and Heinrich introduced a bill called the Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfake (COPIED) Media Act. One of many AI related bills in Congress, the heart of COPIED is transparency in artificial intelligence through implementation of content provenance information (CPI). COPIED requires development of industry standards to create “machine-readable information documenting ...
In February 2023, I argued that using copyrighted works for the purpose of training generative artificial intelligence (GAI) products is not fair use. My view in that post was, and remains, that because the purpose of copyright law is to promote authorship, and authorship is human as a matter of doctrine, then a purpose which replaces authorship is facially antithetical ...
