Kluwer Copyright Blog

Untested in court but, at least in the EU, could be protected as a "database" https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2024/01/18/are-ai-models-weights… Also "Stable Diffusion" is a registered trademark so there's a possible infringement there too.

You jest, but countries and cultures have claimed rights on cultural heritage before for people long dead: https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/04/06/the-puzzled-tie-of-co…

My reading of the relevant laws would actually lead me to believe that this is not a problem, as long as those reproductions are not returned and the eights holder did not opt out. But courts might decide differently. Regarding the copyright of returned material here is a good discussion: https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/05/09/generative-ai-copyrig…

This seems to be rather US-centric. Here's the EU version: https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2021/02/17/tdm-exceptions-and-tr… Singapore version: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2021/singapore/coming-up-in-singa… Other countries have already made copyright exceptions for AI training.

I'm surprised this doesn't mention the European Court of Justice's decision that The Pirate Bay does directly infringe copyright. I'm paraphrasing the decision but there's a detailed writeup here: http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2017/06/30/cjeu-decision-ziggo-pi…

Managed to find a good legal take on the proposed bill: http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2018/06/18/julia-reda-discusses-c…

At least CJEU has ruled that austrian company running uk-hosted website is liable for damages due to copyright infringements occuring in france [1]. http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2015/02/11/cjeu-mere-accessibilit…

Depends on the jurisdiction obviously (seems in this case Sweden/EU), but I don't think the author could blanket ban it like that, as research organisations and cultural heritage institutions have exceptions for example. I think news organizations and archivists have exceptions too, but less sure about that. Besides, I think for it to actually have any effect, it would have to be in a machine-readable format, I'm not sure placing a notice like that in the middle of a HTML document is good enough. > Art. 4(3) applies only on condition that right holders have not expressly reserved their rights “in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online”. According to Recital 18, “it should only be considered appropriate to reserve those rights by the use of machine-readable means, including metadata and terms and conditions of a website or a service. […] In other cases, it can be appropriate to reserve the rights by other means, such as contractual agreements or a unilateral declaration.” In other words, Art. 4 right holders may effectively prohibit text and data mining for commercial uses by adding robot.txt type metadata to their content online. https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2019/07/24/the-new-copyright-dir… But maybe the author already have the same notice in a machine readable and of course I'm not a lawyer or anything, so this is just…

Gary Marcus is all excited about this but rightly or wrongly openAI have always claimed[1] that training is fair use. In other words, they believe that if something is "publicly available" it is also "publicly available for training". There's nothing special (as far as I can see) about what they did or didn't do for SORA in this respect. Mira Murati knows that this is a controversial viewpoint which is why she's dodging the question. To stretch that out into a whole substack is just the sort of thing Gary Marcus does. Everyone knows that openAI (and other big AI training company) train on scraped data and copyright works. They claim fair use. Whether or not what they do/have done is fair use is the pivotal question in a whole raft of lawsuits. There's nothing new here as far as I can tell. [1] eg in the NYT case https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2024/02/29/is-generative-ai-fair…

This article leaves out the relevant facts. [1] See, http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2022/05/09/andy-warhol-foundation… After Prince's death, Vanity Fair Magazine purchased an image rights license to run the Warhol painting on it's cover. The original photograph was, at the time, also available for license. Goldsmith argued that Warhol's work was commercially competing with their original photograph. Note that the context was not space on gallery walls but the cover of a magazine, and there was not a question of whether the cover of magazine constitutes fair use...I mean the Warhol foundation would almost certainly have sued if Vanity Fair had used the Warhol image without a license. To put it another way, the case is not about Fair Use directly, but about competing image rights. I mean, since nobody is going to confuse a magazine cover with an original Warhol, for the Warhol Foundation's fair use claim to stand, then Vanity Fair's cover would be sufficiently transformative to constitute fair use. Not that there'd be anything wrong with that. Warhol's been dead 25 years. Seems like enough time for the works to be in the public domain, to me. YMMV. [1]: The Atlantic seems to have given up on journalism in recent years...Jobs bought it in 2017.

Copyright law specifies that a photograph or a scanned copy becomes an original work of art if there's a discernible original creative element present. Copyright law doesn't define that creative element though. It's entirely subjective. And for good reason because copyright laws are intended to be universally applicable. Another legal principle is the principle of equality when applying a legal framework. A lot of discussion ends up halting in struggles over equal treatment. This can be avoided in the context of digitization of historical objects though. When a photographer is contracted or employed, part of the procurement process or the employment contract could include a waiver of photographer copyright. However, this is a policy choice, not a requirement. On 26 March 2019, the European Parliament adopted the Copyright in the Digital Market directive. Among all the upheaval about internet freedom, it also contains legal changes that make it more clear for member states on how to deal with cultural heritage in the public domain: https://pro.europeana.eu/post/copyright-reform-passed-by-european-parl… Now, Article 14 sounds like it's banning the practice of acquiring revenue through copies of public domain works. However... it's - again - far more complicated: http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2019/06/27/the-new-copyright-dire… Ultimately, the hard part about copyright law is that…