No right to payment for educator who allegedly shared the idea with Wozniak. Tech entrepreneur and personal computing pioneer Steve Wozniak will not have to compensate a business school professor who allegedly gave him the idea for an online tech university, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held. The court, in…
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…
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,…
Another court of appeals concludes that the statute of limitations doctrine was not overturned by a Supreme Court laches decision. The Supreme Court did not upend the longstanding discovery rule applicable to Copyright Act cases by merely mentioning in passing that a copyright claim accrues “when an infringing act occurs,” the U.S. Court of Appeals…
The limitation might have failed in an earlier period, but more recent precedents were more forgiving. Parties to a photo image license were free to contract for a two-year statute of limitations under California law, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held. The court, in an unpublished opinion, also affirmed a…
A series of recent amendments to copyright law, including in the EU Copyright and the Digital Single Market Directive (Art. 3 and 4) and in Singapore’s new Copyright Act (Art. 243, 244), seek to protect the ability of text and data mining researchers to use copyrighted content in their work. “Text and data mining” (“TDM”)…
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…
Because such relief was not specified in the Act, a demand for such relief required service of an amended complaint upon a defaulting defendant. A plaintiff who prevailed in a copyright infringement lawsuit against a defaulting defendant was required to serve an amended complaint upon that defendant if the amended complaint newly sought to hold…
