Allegations against Marvel and one of its top writers fail for the second time. Action-adventure characters from the Captain America and Spider-Man franchises were not unlawfully copied from the self-published comic book series of a relatively unknown author, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has held. The court, in affirming an Atlanta…
Code as a literary work Following lengthy discussion in the 1970s and 1980s, by 1991 in the EU and 1994 at the WTO level, the legal status of computer programs was a settled matter: software was to be treated under copyright as a literary work. Source code and object code are protected by copyright. As…
The Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with Kluwer Law International, publisher of the Information Law Series, has launched an online archive of older book volumes published in the series. The Information Law Series, which was established in 1991, is the world’s first and foremost academic book series in…
The district court erred in taking the statute of limitations into account in determining who was the prevailing party. A defendant in a copyright infringement action is not the prevailing party for purposes of the attorney fee statute where the plaintiff has voluntarily dismissed its case without prejudice—even if that plaintiff would be barred by…
Generative AI (GenAI) is promising to revolutionise higher education. Whether it concerns legal scholars using ChatGPT to write their essays, computer science majors relying on GitHub Copilot to generate programming code, or art students turning to Midjourney to create visual artistry: the relevant AI tools to assist with educational assignments are readily available online. The…
Case arises out of dispute over the estate of noted evangelical minister Dr. Lester Sumrall. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago has affirmed the dismissal of claims for copyright ownership brought by a trust asserting the rights of a son of the late evangelical pastor Dr. Lester Sumrall, finding those claims were barred…
The testimony was properly excluded—and without it, the software company could not prevail on its copyright claims. A Detroit federal court correctly found that a software designer moved too late to introduce expert testimony supporting the copyrightability of its source code, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has held. The court, in…
The forthcoming article “Creation and Generation Copyright Standards” to be published in NYU JIPEL 2024 (see pre-publication version here) analyses and critiques the different standards for copyright eligibility between expressive works and generative products in the U.S. and China. This blog post focuses on a balanced solution for the emerging problems on the input and…
In the middle of 2022, three significant AI text-to-image generators were made available to the public: Dall-E 2 (April 2022), Midjourney (July 2022), and Stability Diffusion (August 2022). In addition to raising questions about ownership of outputs, infringement in training, and the future of copyright as a policy tool to encourage creativity, economists are in…
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…
