Recently, there has been a lot of suggestions that the U.S. Copyright Office is registering “AI-generated works.” Nonetheless, these are not actually AI-generated works, nor are they breakthrough decisions. The U.S. Copyright Office has already registered hundreds of works related to AI-generated material – the key to obtaining registration is to specify AI-generated elements in…
Once the dust has settled after a difficult lawmaking process, commentators may succumb to the temptation of simply accepting and rubberstamping whatever result has been achieved. After all, much time and effort has been spent on developing the newly adopted rules. The legislator has spoken. It makes perfect sense to explore the full potential of…
Slightly overdue, but here comes the first roundup of 2025. The EU courts have issued just one judgment in this trimester, but to make up for it, there have been several interesting policy initiatives. As a reminder, in this post we update you on developments in EU copyright law between January and March 2025 —…
Introduction Discussions about copyright have once again returned to the political agenda in Brazil. Various national – and international – regulatory initiatives seek to address the accumulating challenges. Until recently, no significant legislative progress had been made since the enactment of the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet (Marco Civil da Internet) and the…
On March 18, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the denial of Stephen Thaler’s application to register A Recent Entrance to Paradise, a purportedly machine-authored work, holding that the Copyright Act of 1976 “requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human…
Last year we reported on the European AI Office facilitating the drawing-up of the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (the “Code”). The first draft of the Code was published on 14 November 2024. Our article on the first draft of the Code can be found here. This blog post is to report on the updates…
In March 2025 the New Zealand Supreme Court confirmed that copyright is relationship property, to be divided accordingly when a qualifying relationship ends. This decision has significant implications for copyright practice in New Zealand, and jurisdictions with similar regulatory frameworks for IP and family property (like the United Kingdom). Background As recounted by Lyall…
In a decision of 20 February 2025 the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) denied copyright protection as a work of applied art for two sandal designs. The ruling clarifies the scope of protection under German and EU law for works of applied art. According to the BGH, works of applied art enjoy protection if they…
The debate on the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI models is evolving, shifting its focus from whether compensation is due to creators, to determining the structure and specifics of a remuneration system. The discussion seems to be focused on a number of remuneration schemes, three of which deserve special attention. First, an…
The commercial teaching kit use the artist’s works in their entirety and encouraged the students to create their own art based on them. An art center that sold “art kits” for use by children made a fair use of six of an artist’s works that it included in full in its kits because it drew…
