The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that among the 2023 recipients of the EFF Award (formerly the Pioneer Award), it will honor Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan this September. The Russian-based Sci-Hub is an enterprise-scale pirate site specifically built to host scientific papers about which the EFF states: Through Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in ...

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 ...

Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) released a new report yesterday with the eye-popping statistic that 72% of Americans who subscribe to pirate media sites experience incidences of credit card fraud compared to 18% prevalence of credit card fraud among those who do not subscribe to pirate sites. These data are based on a survey of 2,030 Americans, of which 1 in ...

In Justice Kagan’s blistering dissent in AWF v. Goldsmith, she stated the following: If Warhol had used Goldsmith’s photo to comment on or critique Goldsmith’s photo, he might have availed himself of that factor’s benefit (though why anyone would be interested in that work is mysterious). [Emphasis added] Kagan’s sweeping view that she could not imagine why there would be ...

Although the most straightforward cases of fair use thus involve a secondary work that comments on the original in some fashion, in Cariou v. Prince, we rejected the proposition that a secondary work must comment on the original in order to qualify as fair use.   – 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Warhol v. Goldsmith – The following is ...

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