copyright law
Copyright Office tells Congress: ‘Urgent need’ to outlaw AI-powered impersonation
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued the first part of a report on how AI may affect its domain, and its first recommendation out of the gate is: we need…
AI-generated content presents a second concern: What if AI bots infringe on third parties’ intellectual property rights?
As millions of people are playing with AI-powered image-generation tools like DALL-E and Midjourney, new works of art are generated by the billions. Many of them are curiosities, some of…
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Netflix’s lawsuit against the ‘Bridgerton Musical’ could change online fandom
Netflix filed a lawsuit this weekend against two TikTok stars in their early twenties, Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, alleging that their Grammy-winning “Unofficial Bridgerton Musical” project infringed on the copyright of Netflix‘s original series “Bridgerton.” Early last year, the songwriting duo started penning impressive ballads about the popular Netflix…
How should AI be considered in the context of copyright protection and authorship under U.K. law as it presently stands?
The U.K. is planning to tweak an existing law to allow text and data mining “for any purpose,” in a move that’s designed to boost artificial intelligence (AI) development across…
Google News is refreshing its desktop site with a new design that allows you to track global and local news on one screen. The redesign puts Your Briefing, Local news…
We are at the very beginnings of a long period of change in the interplay of technology and the law in terms of intellectual property, but it is equally clear…
In the latest bit of regulatory woe for Big Tech in Europe, Google is trying to settle a German antitrust investigation into its news licensing product by offering not to…
Google offers behavioral pledges on news payments in France to try to end costly antitrust litigation
In its latest move to placate European competition regulators, Google has offered a set of commitments to France’s antitrust watchdog — in the hopes of settling a costly (for it)…
Google fined $592M in France for breaching antitrust order to negotiate copyright fees for news snippets
France has hit Google with a fine of half a billion euros after finding major breaches in how it negotiated with publishers to remunerate them for reuse of their content…
When artists sell their digitally minted artwork as a non-fungible token, they usually aren’t selling the underlying copyright — but there are overlaps.
A university student is suing exam proctoring software maker Proctorio to “quash a campaign of harassment” against critics of the company, including an accusation that the company misused copyright laws…
GitHub has restored the code of a project that the RIAA demanded it take down last month after finding that the group’s DMCA complaint was meritless. YouTube-dl, a tool that…
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A court decision in favor of startup UpCodes may help shape open access to the law
For the past three years, UpCodes and its founders have been entangled in a copyright lawsuit filed by the International Code Council (ICC). Though both focus on the building industry (specifically, the codes architects and builders need to follow), the lawsuit deals with an issue that has wider ramifications: Is…
Social networks are in for a rude copyright awakening. A new European Union law called Article 17 essentially eradicates safe harbor and requires that they’ve made their “best effort” to…
Europe’s top court has set a new line for the policing of illegal speech online. The ruling has implications for how speech is regulated on online platforms — and is…
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How Kobalt is simplifying the killer complexities of the music industry
Backed by over $200 million in VC funding, Kobalt is changing the way the music industry does business and putting more money into musicians’ pockets in the process. In Part I of this series, I walked through the company’s founding story and its overall structure. There are two core theses…
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How a Swedish saxophonist built Kobalt, the world’s next music unicorn
You may not have heard of Kobalt before, but you probably engage with the music it oversees every day, if not almost every hour. Combining a technology platform to better track ownership rights and royalties of songs with a new approach to representing musicians in their careers, Kobalt has risen…
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Can the law be copyrighted?
UpCodes wants to fix one of the building industry’s biggest headaches by streamlining code compliance. But the Y Combinator-backed startup now faces a copyright lawsuit filed against it by the International Code Council, the nonprofit organization that develops the code used or adopted in building regulations by all 50 states.…
The European Parliament has voted to pass a controversial reform of online copyright rules that critics contend will result in big tech platforms pre-filtering user generated content uploads. The results…
Fortnite, copyright and the legal precedent that could still mean trouble for Epic Games
A new U.S. Supreme Court decision is pitting entertainers and video game developers against one another in a high-stakes battle royale.
Cory Doctorow doesn’t like censorship. He especially doesn’t like his own work being censored. Anyone who knows Doctorow knows his popular tech and culture blog, Boing Boing, and anyone who…
Back in May, as part of a settlement, Spotify agreed to pay more than $112 million to clean up some copyright problems. Even for a service with millions of users, that had…
Musicians are celebrating as the Music Modernization Act, an attempt to drag copyright and royalty rules into the 21st century, is signed into law after unanimous passage through Congress. The…
European Union lawmakers are facing a major vote on digital copyright reform proposals on Wednesday — a process that has set the Internet’s hair fully on fire. Here’s a run…
The Wikimedia Foundation has sounded a stark warning against a copyright reform proposal in Europe that’s due to be voted on by the European Parliament next week. (With the mild…
Hold your horses. Geoblocks for stuff like Netflix and Spotify are still not being vanquished in this round of EU Digital Single Market regulation chess…
It’s easy (and tempting) to get wrapped around the axle when it comes to the prospects for AI programs and their creation of original works. When works created by self-running…
Europe is considering changing its copyright law. At first blush, you might think that this couldn’t possibly affect the way you debate the news of the day online, upload family videos…
