On November 27, 2023, the Beijing Internet Court (BIC) ruled in an infringement lawsuit (Li v. Liu) that an AI-generated image is copyrightable and that a person who prompted the AI-generated image is entitled to the right of authorship under Chinese Copyright Law (see our bilingual version, and the later-released official translation). Plaintiff generated an…
The two US class actions against Meta We have previously analysed US class actions against Open AI (here) and Google (here) for unauthorized use of copyright works in the training of generative AI tools, respectively ChatGPT, Google Bard and Gemini. To further develop this excursus on the US case law, in this post we…
As we enter a new year, we would like to take this opportunity to pass on our best wishes for 2024 to all of our readers, as well as reflect on developments in copyright over the past year. Last year was another busy one in the copyright world, with ongoing European copyright reform, a number…
In his classic work, ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’, Josef Schumpeter referred to the ‘waves of creative destruction’ to describe how monopoly rents incentivise entrepreneurs to take risk and innovate. The monopoly rent that the entrepreneur derives from his innovation is short-lived, as another wave of creative destruction soon replaces this wave, and gives way to…
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…
The posting of the privately-developed standards constitutes fair use—at least when done for non-profit purposes. A public interest organization that made available to the public a collection of technical standards incorporated by reference in federal regulations engaged in a fair use of those standards and therefore did not infringe on the exclusive rights of the…
Part 1 of this post introduced the challenges for copyright associated with generative IP and the legislative developments in this field. This part 2 explores the idea of introducing a statutory license for machine learning purposes for generative AI as a compromise solution to secure a vibrant environment for AI development while preserving the central…
Introduction Generative AI is disrupting the creative process(es) of intellectual works on an unparalleled scale. More and more AI systems offer services that push users’ production capacity for new literary and artistic works beyond unforeseen barriers. Algorithmic tools are gradually colonizing every creative sector, from being able to generate text (i.e., ChatGPT, Smodin), to perform…
The US class action against Google Bard (J.L. v. Alphabet Inc, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-03440) In a recent post we analysed a class action filed in the US against Open AI for unauthorized use of copyright works for training of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT (here) (“Generative…
In June 2023 the U.S. Copyright Office celebrated the one-year anniversary of operations of the Copyright Claims Board (“CCB”), a novel new small claims court housed within the agency with a budget request for $2.2 million in ongoing yearly costs. Though not entirely unique (e.g., the UK’s IP Enterprise court has been described as filling…
