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…
Recent appellate decisions in the United States have recognized expanded grounds for personal jurisdiction in cases of internet-based copyright infringements; divided on the extent to which the three-year statute of limitations limits damage recoveries; and increased the occasions for motions to dismiss on the ground of fair use. Also, in a rebuff to claims of…
Although the company’s description of each individual skill may not have been copyrightable, its selection and arrangement of those skills merited protection. A federal district court properly found that a table of workplace skills developed for use in a career-readiness assessment program was protectable under the Copyright Act because it reflected creativity in the selection…
The photographer’s mere showing of removal of embedded copyright management information (CMI) in hotel photographs is insufficient to meet the scienter requirement. The federal appeals court in Atlanta, Georgia has refused to reinstate a case brought by a photographer claiming a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against a hotel intermediary that provided…
The court of appeals reverses the district court for the second time in a case that has been pending since 2014. A Vietnamese company that makes accessible within the United States a website and a downloadable app that enable the exchange of unlicensed music files can be sued in a California federal court, the U.S….
The digital codes were created for functional purposes and were put together under purely mechanical rules. The digital codes sent by a pyrotechnics control system were not entitled to protection under the Copyright Act because they were no more than “an inevitable system dictated by the logic” of the setup, the U.S. Court of Appeals…
Three dissenters would have dismissed the case as improvidently granted because the petitioner appeared to address different issues in its brief from its petition for review. An inaccuracy in a copyright registration application that results from a mistake—whether of fact or of law; that is, lack of factual or legal knowledge of the inaccuracy on…
A defamation claim, too, was precluded by the Communications Decency Act. A federal district court in Boston correctly found that the manager of a neighborhood forum could not expose himself to defamation and copyright infringement claims by merely migrating the forum from one web platform to another, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First…
