#copyright-law

#copyright-law

Lensa, the AI-powered app that promises users the ability to morph photos into stylized art has hit the internet by storm.Though not a new app, its latest "Magic Avatars" feature has gone viral, with users on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, sharing the hashtag #Lensa to show off their creations.

A popular fantasy fiction series went viral this week after Twitter and Reddit posts showed the copyright page which tries to ban people from sharing the book with anyone, telling them to buy more copies instead, a clause that one expert said would be laughed out of court.Zodiac Academy: The Awakening was self-published by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti in 2019 and has since garnered more than 28,000 ratings on Amazon and is the bestseller under the category Werewolves and Shifters Suspense.

"Twitter's incentive not to act expeditiously is clear.Twitter wants to maximize the benefit it receives from the infringing content on its platform before the tweet is deleted."- Music publishers' complaint
On June 14, a series of 17 music publishers, members of the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), filed a lawsuit in the Middle District of Tennessee against the social media platform, Twitter.

"Baumgarten said that Damle's 'blanket assertion that input for generative AI 'is fair use' may well be simply wrong.'"In response to last week's hearing of the House of Representatives' Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on copyright law, former Copyright Office General Counsel, Jon Baumgarten, submitted a letter this week to the Subcommittee expressing his concerns with the testimony of one of the witnesses, Sy Damle of Latham & Watkins, who also formerly served as U.S. Copyright Office General Counsel.

It's always good to start off the year with an overview of trademark and copyright cases to watch.This year, we have a couple of cases that we've previously discussed on our podcast The Briefing, when they were on appeal with the circuit courts, but now the Supreme Court will bring finality to the issues.

In a startling interruption of Twitter's placid and uneventful operation, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) has brought a lawsuit against the social media platform, claiming Twitter has failed to pay for music placed on its platform.The action seeks $250-million in damages.Twitter's predicted top-line revenue for 2023 is $2B-$5B.

One of the most flagrant issues in the quickly emerging field of artificial intelligence is how AI collides with copyright.This multifaceted issue is being taken up by the U.S. Congress.Today, the Judiciary Committee is presenting "Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property: Part 1 - Interoperability of AI and Copyright Law.

For years, Andy Warhol and Richard Prince have been known as two of the art world's most famous copiers, boundary-pushing appropriators whose use of other people's images in their work has been scrutinized in court cases as the blurry line of copyright law is continually redrawn.Last week, the Supreme Court resolved a major copyright dispute involving a Warhol that many experts thought would have a spillover effect on other cases, including a pair involving Prince that are currently playing themselves out in federal court in New York.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the late Andy Warhol infringed on a photographer's copyright when he created a series of silk screens based on a photograph of the late singer Prince.The ruling was 7-2.The court rejected arguments made by a lawyer of the Andy Warhol Foundation (the artist died in 1987) that his work was sufficiently transformative so as not to trigger copyright concerns.

On Thursday, May 11 at 19:30 GMT: Popular AI image generators are able to produce seemingly endless amounts of stunning visual art in just a matter of seconds.So where does the technology leave professional artists?Earlier this year, a group of artists and illustrators filed a class action lawsuit that claims the generative AI tools Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp violate US copyright law by repurposing artists' work found on the open web.

Media mogul Barry Diller warned on Wednesday that artificial intelligence (AI) could be as destructive to news publishers as free online news was in the early aughts.Speaking at the Sir Harry Evans Global Summit in Investigative Journalism, Diller, who co-founded Fox Broadcasting Company and is now chairman of publishing giant IAC, said he was teaming up with News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson and German publisher Axel Springer to protect news publishers from the threat of AI.

The tension between the opportunities presented by new technology and the need for artists to be able to control the use of their own works and derive revenue from them is all too familiar.Inevitably, cases and/or legislation will draw an artificial line between what is fair and what is not.The last few months have seen a number of court cases filed around the use of artwork images by tech companies in order to "train" their artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Books line the shelves at the Rice University Library in April 2022 in Houston.Brandon Bell/Getty Images A federal judge has ruled in favor of a group of book publishers who sued the nonprofit Internet Archive for scanning and lending digital copies of copyrighted books in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

RICHARD A. BROOKS via Getty Images
Any images that are produced by giving a text prompt to current generative AI models, such as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, cannot be copyrighted in the US.That's according to the US Copyright Office (USCO), which has equated such prompts to a buyer giving directions to a commissioned artist.

A lawsuit claiming an Atlanta artist's use of a famous photograph of the late US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg violated copyright law was thrown out by a federal judge this week.Creative Photographers is a commercial photography agency that represents artists like Ruvén Afanador, who photographed Ginsburg in 2009 for The New York Times Magazine.

(Image credit: Frida Kahlo Museum / Visoot Uthairam via Getty Images / Future)
NFTs have been controversial for several reasons, and cases of people burning paintings to try to increase their worth as NFTs isn't helping.There have been several headline-grabbing examples, including that of Martin Mobarak.

This year I decided that I want to share my most important learnings about engineering, teams and quite frankly personal mental health.My hope is that those who want to learn from me find it useful.I consider myself a functional and pragmatic pessimist.I tend to err on the side of anticipating the worst outcome most of the time.

The US Copyright Office will consider an AI-generated work copyrightable if a human can prove they put a meaningful amount of creative effort into the final content, according to a policy published on Thursday.AI software capable of automatically generating images or text from an input prompt or instruction has made it easier for people to churn out content.

A glitch in the record-keeping software being piloted by the US Copyright Office (USCO) accidentally revoked the copyright registration of an AI-generated graphic novel.The application to copyright Zarya Of The Dawn, a comic book containing images created by the text-to-image tool Midjourney, was filed by Kris Kashtanova early last year.

A trio of artists have launched a lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney, creators of AI art generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and artist portfolio platform DeviantArt, which recently created its own AI art generator, DreamUp.The artists - Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz - allege that these organizations have infringed the rights of "millions of artists" by training their AI tools on five billion images scraped from the web "with­out the con­sent of the orig­i­nal artists."

We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy.Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

Mask Work Infringement In analogizing semiconductor chips to traditional areas of copyright law, the legislative history notes that, just as a plagiarist who copies only one chapter of a book may be held liable for infringement, a person may be liable for copying a part of a mask work if it is a qualitatively important portion that results in substantial similarity.

In Brief The squishy brains behind OpenAI's artificial ones are predicting developments like the ChatGPT system will see money flooding in - with a forecast of earning around $1 billion by 2024.According to an investors' briefing document seen by Reuters the machine-learning biz expects to break $200 million in revenues next year and bust through the billion mark 12 months later.

IP Goes Pop! is back with its second annual Spooktacular!In this episode, things get much spookier as we pit the top four Halloween Monsters against each other.Listen in for a breakdown of these famous characters and archetypes.Play along as your co-hosts, Volpe Koenig Shareholders, Michael Snyder and Joseph Gushue rank Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein's Monster, Werewolves, and Mummies.