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Category Archives: Copyright

More Than Just Mickey: Chaplin, Peter Pan, ‘Western Front’ Enter Public Domain

Rolling Stone “Winnie the Pooh’s Tigger, films by Buster Keaton, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and — yes — the Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie are now fair use as of Jan. 1, Public Domain Day 2024. Jan. 1, isn’t just New Year’s Day — it’s also Public Domain Day, where thousands of cinematic treasures, literary classics,… Continue Reading

Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Use of Copyrighted Work

The New York Times [read free]: “The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the… Continue Reading

Free and liberated ebooks carefully produced for the true book lover

“Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost. Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project… Continue Reading

Legal Implications in the Brave New AI World: Copyright Infringement and Training Sets

“Keeping up with the many legal implications in our post-ChatGPT world is increasingly challenging. Stories abound with legal suits filed against OpenAI, Meta, and others for training AI models with copyrighted content. In this lunch and learn discussion October 23, 2023 [YouTube with accompanying full transcript], Mark Gross, President of Data Conversion Laboratory, and his… Continue Reading

Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos

ars technica: Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos: “On Wednesday, Meta released a free standalone AI image-generator website, “Imagine with Meta AI,” based on its Emu image-synthesis model. Meta used 1.1 billion publicly visible Facebook and Instagram images to train the AI model, which can render a… Continue Reading

Plagiarism doesn’t need AI to thrive online

Vox – A YouTuber’s deep dive on plagiarism tries to make viewers care when creators steal content: “Copying has always been a part of internet culture. Sometimes it’s ethical, sometimes not. It’s almost always incentivized: Once social media began reshaping online life, copying became a go-to tactic for getting views. When copying crosses an ethical… Continue Reading

Over One Million Card Catalog Records Digitized in Copyright Public Records System Pilot

Library of Congress Blogs – Copyright: “This summer, the Copyright Office reached a new milestone in our modernization efforts: surpassing one million card catalog records digitized with searchable metadata and added to the Office’s Copyright Public Records System (CPRS) pilot. As the number of card catalog entries in CPRS continues to grow, now is a… Continue Reading

AI and Law: The Next Generation

Lee, Katherine and Cooper, A. Feder and Grimmelmann, James and Grimmelmann, James and Daphne Ippolito, Daphne Ippolito, AI and Law: The Next Generation (July 6, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4580739 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4580739  – “We are in a moment of seemingly nonstop excitement (and seemingly nonstop lawsuits) about the future of AI-assisted content creation, and the… Continue Reading

AI Legal Protections May Not Save You From Getting Sued

Bloomberg – Microsoft, Adobe and OpenAI are all pledging to defend their customers against intellectual property lawsuits, but that guarantee doesn’t apply to everyone. “AI companies are pledging to defend their customers against intellectual property lawsuits. Those indemnities are narrower than the announcements suggest. But first: The fine print Last Monday, twelve minutes into his… Continue Reading

News/Media Alliance Study Finds Pervasive Unauthorized Use of Publisher Content to Power Generative AI Technologies

“On October 31, 2023 the News/Media Alliance published a White Paper and a technical analysis and submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on the use of publisher content to power generative artificial intelligence technologies (GAI). Together, the three publications document the pervasive, unauthorized use of publisher content by GAI developers, the impact this may… Continue Reading