Ball, W. David and Oberman, Michelle, The Case Against Commercial Casebooks (October 18, 2022). Journal of Legal Education, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4251921 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4251921 “Open-source, online casebooks are a free alternative to the for-profit commercial casebooks that dominate the legal academy. They offer a host of benefits for students and professors alike. Online casebooks are… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Copyright
Law Professor Makes Digital Copyright Book Open for All
Internet Archive Blogs: “After spending years researching the history of U.S. copyright law, Jessica Litman says she wants to make it easy for others to find her work. The law professor’s book, Digital Copyright, first published in 2001 by Prometheus Books, is available free online (read now). After it went out of print in 2015,… Continue Reading
Who owns history? How remarkable historical footage is hidden and monetised
Aeon Video: “High-quality video is an invaluable way of transporting viewers to the past and helping to put the world in context. From the late 19th century to today, cameras have been there to capture some of history’s most important moments, from pivotal battles, to civil rights marches, and even moonwalks. However, as A History… Continue Reading
AI Now 2023 Landscape Report
AI Now Institute – Confronting Tech Power Report [103 pages PDF]: “This report highlights a set of approaches that, in concert, will collectively enable us to confront tech power. Some of these are bold policy reforms that underscore the need for bright-line rules and structural curbs. Others identify popular policy responses that, because they fail… Continue Reading
The Ruling That Threatens the Future of Libraries
The Atlantic – Knowledge is too precious to be abandoned to the whims of the profit motive. “By collecting and digitizing such a huge collection of works and lending them out online, the Internet Archive is making an incredible social contribution. The way the nonprofit manages that archive, however, has earned the wrath of book… Continue Reading
How We Think About Copyright and AI Art
EFF: “Artists are understandably concerned about the possibility that automatic image generators like Stable Diffusion will undercut the market for their work. We live in a society that does not support people who are automated out of a job, and being a visual artist is an already precarious career. In this context, it’s natural to… Continue Reading
How unbelievably realistic fake images could take over the internet
Vox: “..In just a few short years, AI-generated images have come a long way. In a more innocent time (2015) Google released “DeepDream,” which used Google’s artificial neural network programs — that is, artificial intelligence that’s been trained to learn in a way that mimics a human brain’s neural networks — to recognize patterns in… Continue Reading
Book Publishers Won’t Stop Until Libraries Are Dead
TechDirt: “Earlier this week there was finally a hearing in the case brought by the big book publishers to kill off libraries. That, of course, is not how the publishers describe the lawsuit, but it’s absolutely what the lawsuit is about. We’ll get to some of the details in a moment, but we’ve joked in… Continue Reading
The AI Copyright Fight: A Guide How copyright’s past may shape AI’s future
Ever / Helen Jiang: “Whenever a client wants to skirt the edges of copyright law, the usual response of copyright lawyers is: “Do you really want to find out?” That is…do you actually want to learn how much you’d owe in damages from copyright infringement? I heard this a lot from lawyers when I ran… Continue Reading
Internet Archive
Internet Archives Blog: “Today’s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve. This decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only… Continue Reading
Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?
The New Yorker – According to the lawyer behind a new class-action suit, every image that a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.” By Kyle Chayka – “…Last month, McKernan joined a class-action lawsuit with two other artists, Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz, filed by the attorneys Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, against… Continue Reading
Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence
A Rule by the Copyright Office, Library of Congress on 03/16/2023 – “The Copyright Office (the “Office”) is the Federal agency tasked with administering the copyright registration system, as well as advising Congress, other agencies, and the Federal judiciary on copyright and related matters. Because the Office has overseen copyright registration since its origins in… Continue Reading
