I met Bill Westwood last year when he contacted me to very kindly ask if I would like to speak to the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI) about copyright and artificial intelligence. I was aware of medical illustration as a specialized field but didn’t know much about it until I drove up to Albany to visit Westwood at his studio. ...
Thus ends the 12th Annual Fair Use Week, and after the Warhol decision, it must be asked whether the parties who invented this holy week of the copyleft intend to continue the farce much longer. As a refresher, the fair use doctrine has been part of the U.S. Copyright Act since 1976 and a subject of judge-made law since at ...
When Internet Archive lost resoundingly in the Hachette (book publishers) case, the court rejected its cockamamie legal theory called controlled digital lending (CDL). Then, when a group of record labels (UMG et al.) filed suit against IA for infringing reproduction, distribution, and performance of sound recordings, I wrote at the time that there’s no way IA has an unfounded theory ...
Last Friday, a Los Angeles jury returned a verdict that celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D did not infringe the copyright rights of photographer Jeff Sedlik when she made a tattoo that (it must be said) is strikingly similar to Sedlik’s portrait of Miles Davis. Sedlik filed a copyright infringement suit in response to Kat Von D reproducing an unlicensed ...
Yesterday, New York federal judge Sidney Stein ruled that Richard Prince, one of the most famous appropriation artists in the world, infringed the copyright rights of photographers Donald Graham and Eric McNatt by using their works in the controversial “New Portraits” series. Prince and his co-defendant, gallery owner Lawrence Gagosian, are ordered to pay Graham and McNatt five times the ...
