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Category Archives: Copyright

Former Gun Company Executive Explains Roots of America’s Gun Violence Epidemic

ProPublica: “From the movie theater to the shopping mall, inside a church and a synagogue, through the grocery aisle and into the classroom, gun violence has invaded every corner of American life. It is a social epidemic no vaccine can stem, a crisis with no apparent end. Visual evidence of the carnage spills with numbing frequency onto TV shows and floods the internet. Each new shooting brings the lists of loved ones lost, the galleries of their smiling photos and the videos of the police response. And each mass shooting brings another surge of national outrage.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, guns became the leading killer of children in 2020, overtaking car crashes, drug overdoses and disease for the first time in the nation’s history. Yet as the one-year anniversary of the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, passes, nagging questions loom. Why haven’t lawmakers acted with forceful correctives? What will it take to regain a sense of safety? When will change happen? And how, exactly, did America end up here? Ryan Busse, former executive at Kimber America, a major gun manufacturer, recently shared his thoughts on these questions with ProPublica. He was vice president of sales at Kimber America from 1995 to 2020 but broke with the industry and has become a gun safety advocate. He testified about mass shootings and irresponsible marketing last July in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and authored the book “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America.” In June 2021, he became a senior adviser for Giffords, a gun violence prevention group led by Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman gravely injured in 2011 during a mass shooting. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity…”

Stop the Presses? Newspapers in the Digital Age

CRS Report – Stop the Presses? Newspapers in the, Digital Age, Updated May 24, 2023: “During the past 20 years, more than 200 local daily newspapers have either reduced thei rpublication frequency or ceased publishing altogether. Among those that survived, many employa fraction of the journalists that they did at the turn of the 21st… Continue Reading

Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law

CRS Legal Sidebar, Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law, Updated May 11, 2023: “Recent innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) are raising new questions about how copyright law principles such as authorship, infringement, and fair use will apply to content created or used by AI. So-called “generative AI” computer programs—such as Open AI’s DALL-E 2 and… Continue Reading

Generative AI meets copyright law

“On April 26, Pamela Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, delivered the final of four Distinguished Lectures on the Status and Future of AI, co-hosted by CITRIS Research Exchange and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Group (BAIR). Samuelson’s talk explores a particularly controversial topic in the legal community: whether the… Continue Reading

‘Too greedy’: mass walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

The Guardian: “Entire board resigns over actions of academic publisher whose profit margins outstrip even Google and Amazon More than 40 leading scientists have resigned en masse from the editorial board of a top science journal in protest at what they describe as the “greed” of publishing giant Elsevier. The entire academic board of the… Continue Reading

Copyright Safety for Generative AI

Sag, Matthew, Copyright Safety for Generative AI (May 4, 2023). Forthcoming in the Houston Law Review, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4438593 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4438593 “Generative AI based on large language models such as ChatGPT, DALL·E-2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, JukeBox, and MusicLM can produce text, images, and music that are indistinguishable from human-authored works. The training data for… Continue Reading

Global policymakers don’t understand AI enough to regulate it.

The Print: “Tech companies must step up now When software is built to prioritise speed over safety, its creators delay dealing with possible negative consequences. On 11 April 2023, China released a comprehensive draft of measures to regulate Generative Artificial Intelligence, which can automatically turn basic user inputs into creative outputs like texts, images or videos. AI has dominated… Continue Reading

He wrote a book on a rare subject. Then a ChatGPT replica appeared on Amazon.

Washington Post: “From recipes to product reviews to how-to books, artificial intelligence text generators are quietly authoring more and more of the internet. Chris Cowell, a Portland-based software developer, spent more than a year writing a technical how-to book. Three weeks before it was released, another book on the same topic, with the same title,… Continue Reading

AI Is About to Make Social Media (Much) More Toxic

The Atlantic – We must prepare now. By Jonathan Haidt and Eric Schmidt “We joined together to write this essay because we each came, by different routes, to share grave concerns about the effects of AI-empowered social media on American society. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who has written about the ways in which… Continue Reading

The Scholarly Fingerprinting Industry

Jefferson Pooley. The Scholarly Fingerprinting Industry Amerikastudien/American Studies 68, no. 1 (2023): 18–21. https://doi.org/10.33675/AMST/2023/1/41. 18 Amst 68.1 (2023): 5-26 “Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Wiley, and SAGE: Many researchers know that the five giant firms publish most of the world’s scholarship. Fifty years of acquisitions and journal launches have yielded a stunningly profitable oligopoly,… Continue Reading

The Case Against Commercial Casebooks

Ball, W. David and Oberman, Michelle, The Case Against Commercial Casebooks (October 18, 2022). Journal of Legal Education, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4251921 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4251921 “Open-source, online casebooks are a free alternative to the for-profit commercial casebooks that dominate the legal academy. They offer a host of benefits for students and professors alike. Online casebooks are… Continue Reading