The U.S. Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments in Mahmoud et al. v. Taylor—a case brought by three families petitioning, on First Amendment Free Exercise grounds, to have their young children opt out of class time involving age-appropriate books that depict homosexual characters. The families—one Muslim, the other two Catholic—are not seeking to ban the books or to amend ...
Politico reported yesterday that the astroturf organization called Chamber of Progress stated that because Trump’s tariffs will be a “gut punch” to Silicon Valley stock prices, California legislators should decline to aggravate matters by passing a law that would require transparency among AI developers using copyrighted works in model training. Granted, the tone was more circumspect, but that’s what the ...
Twelve years ago, when I first engaged in copyright advocacy, I was surprised to discover how many critics argued that copyright rights conflict with the speech right. Initially, I thought this had to be a fringe, internet thing—a vibe cooked up in the adolescent blogosphere that no legal scholar or expert took seriously. It would seem obviously contradictory to believe ...
Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams could almost be one of Christopher Buckley’s Beltway satires. Like Thank You for Smoking or The White House Mess, the first-person protagonist takes the reader on a journey from dream job to absurd nightmare—each chapter an ironic critique of the powerful characters depicted. Except Wynn-Williams is real, and so are the truly awful people and ...
The purpose of cultivating works of authorship is to shed light on human experience, and the foundational purpose of the fair use doctrine in copyright law is to shed light on works of authorship. From its 18th century, English roots to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in AWF v. Goldsmith, the primary rationale for fair use is to permit ...
