On October 30, Judge Orrick of the Northern District of California largely granted the AI companies’ motions to dismiss the class-action complaints filed by Sarah Andersen, Karla Ortiz, and Kelly McKernan on behalf of all visual artists whose works have been used without permission for the purpose of “training” generative AI models. Several complaints were dismissed with leave to amend, ...

Below are the responses I submitted to selected questions in the U.S. Copyright Office Notice of Inquiry and request for comments on artificial intelligence. 8.1. In light of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions in Google v. Oracle America and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, how should the “purpose and character” of the use of copyrighted works to train an AI ...

It was no surprise that the mugshot was immediately copied onto tees, hats, coffee mugs, etc. and sold to Americans who see either a martyr or a traitor in the same image. It was also no surprise that Team Trump produced merch of its own to sell for campaign (a.k.a. criminal defense) fundraising purposes. But these and other uses of ...

Just as it is folly to anthropomorphize computers and robots, it is also unhelpful to discuss the implications of generative AI in copyright law by analogizing machines to authors.[1] In 2019, I explored the idea that “machine learning” could be analogous to human reading if the human happens to have an eidetic memory. But this was a thought exercise, and ...

T’is the week for year-in-review and/or looking-ahead articles. In that spirit, I recommend posts by Devlin Hartline, Hugh Stephens, and Aaron Moss. And here’s my list with commentary for your consideration: AWF v. Goldsmith Everyone in copyright world will be waiting, like Ralphie expecting his decoder ring, for the decision in this case. The highly anticipated question is whether the ...

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