The case recently brought against OpenAI by the New York Times is the latest in a series of legal actions involving AI in the United States, and mirrored in other countries –notably, the UK. In order to train their technologies, should AI companies be allowed to use works under copyright protection without consent? The lawsuits…
I Wonder … What if our “belief” in something turns into our “faith” in it? For the last few months, I have been wondering if our belief in “fair dealing” (or broadly, “limitations and exceptions”) has silently slipped into our “faith” in it – a faith that demands complete surrender to it while blinding us…
Copyright protection in machine-generated works is not a new issue for law makers. The traditional concept of human authorship was first challenged with the emergence of photography and this has continued every time a new technology comes about. In the U.S., the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884) extended copyright…
Introduction: Generative AI regulatory framework There is a huge debate around Generative AI and the need to regulate such disrupting technology (see here and here). Very different approach has been adopted in the European Union, which is going to introduce by the end of 2023 a EU AI Act (here), in the UK, which is…
US Supreme Court’s Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.. v. Goldsmith et al sheds light on different perspectives of copyright law in common law and civil law countries. This brief post dives into this duality, as exampled by American and Brazilian law. Lynn Goldsmith, an esteemed American photographer, captured a significant moment in…
In March 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the Second Circuit’s ruling that Andy Warhol’s series of colorful prints and drawings of Prince were not transformative fair uses of Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph (for a previous comment on this case, see here). Vanity Fair magazine had commissioned Warhol’s artwork in 1984 to accompany an article…
TLDR Generative AI is one of the hot topics in copyright law today. In the EU, a crucial legal issue is whether using in-copyright works to train generative AI models is copyright infringement or falls under existing text and data mining (TDM) exceptions in the Copyright in Digital Single Market (CDSM) Directive. In particular,…
Introduction In November 2022, almost 18 months after the transposition deadline, Law 4996/2022 (Of. Gov. Gaz. A 218/24.11.2022) implemented into the Greek legal order Directives (EU) 790/2019 (hereinafter DSMD) and 789/2019 (as well as Directive 2006/115 on the public lending right, but this is another (lengthy) story…). In doing so, it amended Law 2121/1993, the…
This post is based in part on an amicus brief filed by the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic on behalf of Authors Alliance and ComicMix before the United States Supreme Court in Jack Daniels v. VIP Products. Ordinarily, authors who write parodies look to copyright limitations and exceptions to protect their rights. In the United States, the…
As generative machine learning (ML) systems become more mainstream, the discussion about copyright and ML input is back in the spotlight. At the heart of this discussion is the question of whether authors, creators, and other rightholders need to give permission before their works can be used as input for generative ML systems that produce…
