Posts Tagged: "copyright"

The U.S. Copyright Office today issued its final rule adopting exemptions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) that control access to copyrighted works. The Office engages in such rulemaking every three years. This is the ninth triennial Section 1201 rulemaking since passage of the DMCA in 1998. Notably, the Office denied a request to add “an exemption for the purpose of conducting ‘trustworthiness’ research on AI systems.”

On October 21, Los Angeles-based film production company Alcon Entertainment filed a lawsuit in the Central District of California alleging copyright infringement and false endorsement against automaker Tesla, its CEO Elon Musk and media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery. The suit claims that these parties are responsible for the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) generated image of Tesla’s Cybercab using iconic imagery from Alcon’s 2017 theatrical release Blade Runner 2049. Alcon alleges that the image was displayed during a presentation given by Musk at a Cybercab launch event recently staged at Warner Bros. Burbank studios despite Alcon’s refusal to license film photography for Tesla’s event.

Cox Communications is the latest to file a brief in the battle between it and Sony Music Entertainment over whether an internet service provider (ISP) should be liable for infringement by its subscribers. According to Cox’s brief in opposition to Sony’s petition for certiorari, “[p]etitioners want to make a terrible situation even worse.” Music publishers including Sony, Arista Records, Warner Music and Universal Music Group filed copyright claims against Cox in July 2018, alleging that Cox was liable for the infringement of 10,017 musical works that were illegally distributed by the ISP’s subscribers. A 2020 jury verdict found that Cox liable for both vicarious and contributory infringement, leading to a $1 billion damages verdict against Cox after damages were increased for the jury’s willfulness finding.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on Tuesday, October 15, ruled that a district court applied the wrong test for assessing personal jurisdiction in a case involving alleged counterfeit dolls being sold on Amazon. The U.S. District Court for the District of Utah denied a motion for default judgment filed by Utah-based Bountiful Baby, a maker of kits for creating “reborn dolls,” against two Chinese companies— Adolly US (AUS) and Reborn Doll Gallery (RDG)—that it claimed were selling counterfeit versions of the dolls on Amazon.com.

In a landmark judgment with far reaching ramifications, a German court recently held that the copying of images by Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) – a nonprofit organization that provides datasets, tools and models to liberate machine learning research – did not infringe copyright law. The Kneschke v. LAION case, heard by the Hamburg Regional Court, centered on LAION’s automatic downloading of images, including a copyrighted work by photographer Robert Kneschke, for AI training purposes. In 2021, LAION, based in Hamburg, automatically downloaded images from the internet, including Kneschke’s photo from Bigstock, to create a dataset (LAION 5B) containing image-text pairs for training AI. Kneschke claimed LAION infringed his copyright by copying his image without permission to create a dataset that linked images with descriptive text. LAION had downloaded the photo from a licensed website to check if it matched the description using its software.

On day two of IPWatchdog LIVE 2024, IPW Founder and CEO Gene Quinn sat down with Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to discuss the question on everyone’s mind across nearly every sector and sphere of IP practice—from registration to enforcement and beyond, how will AI change the game? Perlmutter is the first Copyright Office Register to attend IPWatchdog LIVE. She told attendees about her journey from a career as a professional singer into government, which she was introduced to by former Register Marybeth Peters in the 1990s.

Jason Allen, the author of the two-dimensional digital artwork, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” which was rejected by the U.S. Copyright Office last year, has filed a request for declaratory judgment with the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado asking the court to find that his work is eligible for copyright registration. The Review Board of the U.S. Copyright Office published a final decision denying registration of Allen’s work in September 2023. The work was created using the generative artificial intelligence (GAI) system, Midjourney.

Last week, amicus briefs were filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by music publishers and Internet service providers (ISPs) seeking to support competing petitions for writ of certiorari challenging different aspects of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s ruling on secondary liability in the billion-dollar copyright infringement case between Sony Music Entertainment and Cox Communications. If the Supreme Court grants either or both of the petitions, it could result in the Court’s greatest foray into indirect liability in the digital copyright infringement context since its 2005 ruling in MGM Studios v. Grokster.

On the heels of the Senate introduction of a companion bill in late July, U.S. Representatives María Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Madeleine Dean (D-PA), Nathaniel Moran (R-TX), Joe Morelle (D-NY), Rob Wittman (R-VA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) today introduced the ‘‘Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2024’’ in the House of Representatives. The bill would create a federal IP right to an individual’s voice and likeness. It joins several key patent bills that are also moving forward on the path toward becoming law.

Yesterday, the U.S. Copyright Office published a report titled The Geography of Copyright Registrations, which provides detailed insights into the geographic distribution of various kinds of copyright filings originating across the United States. While copyright filings are understandably more heavily concentrated in population centers, analysis of per capita copyright filings show the impact that even a single active registrant can have on regional copyright filing activities.

In the latest of a slew of lawsuits by musicians against the Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, the White Stripes band members on Monday filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging “flagrant misappropriation” of their popular song, Seven Nation Army. Last month, White Stripes lead singer and guitarist Jack White threatened to sue the campaign over a video posted to at least Instagram and X by a staff member showing Trump boarding a plane for Michigan and Wisconsin campaign events. “Oh….Don’t even think about using my music you fascists,” said White’s post. “Law suit coming from my lawyers about this (to add to your 5 thousand others.)”

On August 29, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina issued an order addressing several motions in Allen v. Cooper, a case that mirrors the back-and-forth nature of an epic maritime battle—this time, between a government and an individual. The case began with an alleged copyright infringement, but has blossomed into a larger suit, alleging multiple constitutional violations.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit today affirmed a district court judgment that granted a group of book publishers’ motion for summary judgment that  the Internet Archive (IA) infringed their copyright in 127 books via IA’s “Free Digital Library.” As predicted by author Devlin Hartline in a February article for IPWatchdog, the Second Circuit agreed with the publishers—Hachette Book Group, Inc; Harper Collins Publishers LLC; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; and Penguin Random House LLC— that it is not a fair use for IA to scan copyright-protected print books and distribute them for free without permission from the publishers or authors.  

According to media reports, Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled from the bench Tuesday that the estate of Isaac Hayes is entitled to a preliminary injunction to stop the Donald J. Trump campaign from using Hayes’ song, “Hold On, I’m Coming” during campaign events. The family of singer-songwriter Hayes, who died in 2008, and Isaac Hayes Enterprises, became the latest in a growing list of artists who have threatened to sue Trump when it published a letter last month claiming unauthorized use of the song at Trump’s rallies.

Jockeying for position among the leading generative AI large language models (LLMs) has amplified their differences. Training models and code access are the source of some of the biggest disagreements. Should code for generative and other forms of AI be open or proprietary, protected under copyright, trade secret or even patent? There is a lot riding financially on the outcome, and there are good arguments for and against.