Features
Mason Lawlor
A recent AI copyright ruling out of federal court could have a sprawling impact on how companies, both big and small, use the technology responsibly.
Features
Catherine Nyarady
&
Crystal Parker
The Second Circuit’s decision may have significant downstream implications for other digital lending services, making it more difficult to operate absent licensing agreements with copyright holders of the various works they seek to distribute. With Internet Archive deciding against petitioning the Supreme Court, we may well see similar litigation pop up in other jurisdictions outside the Second Circuit until the issue is more widely settled.
Features
Steve Salkin
More than 1,000 artists are credited on a “silent” record released on February 25 in protest over changes that the UK government is considering to its copyright law, changes which critics say will make it easier for AI models to use copyrighted material without securing a license.
Columns & Departments
Jeff Ginsberg
&
George Soussou
Federal Circuit: PTAB Jurisdiction Exists Over Expired PatentsFederal Circuit: No Estoppel on Unadjudicated Claims
Features
Michelle Morgante
Music publishers have reached a partial agreement with Anthropic that requires the Amazon-backed artificial intelligence company to implement “guardrails” around its use of copyrighted song lyrics to train its flagship product, Claude.
Columns & Departments
Stan Soocher
A roundup of recent cases in entertainment-related copyrights.
Features
Catherine Nyarady
&
Crystal Parker
In February 2024, the Fourth Circuit addressed a jury’s 2020 damages award of $1 billion finding Cox secondarily liable for its subscribers’ copyright infringement through illegal copying of copyrighted songs. Both Cox and Sony filed petitions for certiorari.
Columns & Departments
Entertainment Law & Finance Staff
CLE sponsored by the Copyright Society of the South, Nashville, TN, Dec. 12, 2024.
Features
Stan Soocher
Most of the federal circuit courts that have addressed what qualifies either as a "compilation" or as a single creative work apply an "independent economic value" analysis that looks at the market worth of the single creation as of the time when an infringement occurs. But in a recent ruling of first impression, the Fifth Circuit rejected the "independent economic value" test in determining which individual sound recordings are eligible for their own statutory awards and which are part of compilation.
Features
Emily Bullis
Copyright law has long struggled to keep pace with advances in technology, and the debate around the copyrightability of AI-assisted works is no exception. At issue is the human authorship requirement: the principle that a work must have a human author to be eligible for copyright protection. While the Copyright Office has previously cited this "bedrock requirement of copyright" to reject registrations, recent decisions have focused on the role of human authorship in the context of AI.
