Recently, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, in line with several decisions of the U.S. Copyright Office’s Review Board, found that human creativity is the sine qua non of copyrightability, refusing to register a work lacking human creative involvement or control. In this way, the U.S. jurisprudence embraces the distinction between…
Welcome to the third trimester of the 2023 round up of EU copyright law! In this edition, we update you on what has happened between July and September 2023 in EU copyright law. The autumn has started with full speed – the courts and the policy makes have been very active. This round up series…
The intersection of Artificial intelligence and Intellectual Property is complex. It involves several IP rights, some of which overlap in some cases: copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets/confidential information, and the right of publicity (and similar rights with different names). The situation has increased in complexity now that not only the input but also the output…
Summary In the case of Wright & Ors v BTC Core & Ors [2023] EWHC 222 the High Court was faced with a technical copyright question about whether literary copyright can subsist in the file format used for the Bitcoin System (the “Bitcoin File Format”). Justice Mellor concluded that copyright could not subsist in the…
My university, like so many others, is offering prompt engineering lessons to both students and faculty. The same is true at high schools around the world from what I can see. Cool professors have already modified their exams to ask students to write a prompt that could be submitted to a Large Language Model (LLM). …
Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at the Columbia Law School Jane C. Ginsburg recently visited London, where she delivered her lecture in memory of a well-known legal scholar – Professor William (Bill) Rodolph Cornish. Described as “an intellectual property pioneer and modern legal historian”, his untimely death in January 2022 was a blow…
Recently, the German photographer Boris Eldagsen won a prestigious Sony World Photography Awards competition. After the winner was announced, the photographer disclosed that the image he submitted to the photography competition was generated through the use of an AI system and refused to accept the award. This has provoked a public discussion on whether AI…
The implementation transposition of the Copyright Directive 2019/790 (DSMD) in the summer of 2021 represented probably the greatest reform in German copyright law since the German Copyright Act (UrhG) came into force. Germany’s implementation of Art. 17 DSMD was discussed in an earlier blog post by Julian Waiblinger and Jonathan Pukas. The other changes to…
The recent blog post by Matt Hervey provides an interesting summary by someone who clearly has a good understanding of the subject matter. It does seem a bit one-sided in making it sound (to me, anyway) like people, governments or courts who oppose copyright protection of AI-generated works are fighting a rear guard battle and…
Works generated through complex AI systems, such as machine learning and text-to-image generation models, have recently stirred up many discussions and even given rise to lawsuits (here and here). Voices emerged questioning whether current EU copyright laws should be amended in light of the many AI-generated works that have come about. One important question has…
