On Monday, beloved actor James Earl Jones passed away at age 93, but in 2022, he signed an agreement with LucasFilms to allow the voice of Darth Vader to live on through Gen AI replication. Jones’s permission to replicate his voice is a bittersweet prelude to today’s news from Capitol Hill, where the House of Representatives introduced its own No ...
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 ...
As the Super Bowl approached and passed, it seemed that one faction of Americans was accusing Taylor Swift of practicing witchcraft on the NFL while another was slagging her for the carbon output of her private jet—reportedly about 8,300 tonnes of CO2e in 2022. And although it is fair to expect owners of private aircraft to fly responsibly, I must ...
Lately, we’ve seen several headlines and comments from tech giants say that AI ventures simply cannot succeed if they are forced to contend with the copyrights in the billions of works they have scraped for the purpose of machine learning (ML). When these headlines are paired with the rampant assertions that ML is inherently fair use—a subject addressed in last ...
After the Supreme Court’s decision in AWF v. Goldsmith restored what many of us view as common sense to the fair use doctrine of transformativeness, the flurry of litigation against AI developers will test the same principle in a different light. As discussed on this blog and elsewhere, caselaw has produced two frameworks for considering whether the “purpose and character” of ...
