The decision by a U.S. court to continue deliberating the major lawsuit filed by several visual artists against Generative Artificial Intelligence platforms could call into question how these platforms can operate without...more
Since the release and popularization of platforms such as Midjourney and DALL-E, the past few years have seen a staggering proliferation of art made using text-to-image models—familiarly known as “AI art.” Tens of millions of...more
Visual artists sued Google last week, alleging that Google’s AI-powered image generator, Imagen, was trained on their copyrighted content without authorization. The proposed class action asserts claims of direct copyright...more
While we wait for further guidance on the registrability of the art output by generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, the U.S. Copyright Office is forging ahead with new decisions that address the issue. On Dec. 11,...more
On December 11, the Review Board of the U.S. Copyright Office affirmed the refusal to register yet another AI-generated work. The decision follows the Office’s refusal to register Dr. Stephen Thaler’s A Recent Entrance to...more
The answer seems to be yes — but only when ‘authorship’ of the work can be attributed to a human. In August 2023, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that an AI-generated work “absent any guiding human...more
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest topics in technology, with businesses studying how to utilize its benefits and at least some workers wondering if smarter and cheaper AI technologies will replace them. Here...more
On August 18, 2023, the US District Court for the District of Columbia (the Court) ruled in Thaler v. Register of Copyrights that an AI-generated work “absent any guiding human hand” is not protected by copyright, explaining...more
U.S. copyright law protects human-authored expression, not works generated purely by generative AI. When a human author uses generative AI tools to create their work, the scope of copyright protection extends to the...more
It has been nearly thirty years since the US Supreme Court has considered whether a creative work qualifies as a transformative use under the Copyright Act. The last time was in 1994, when the Court in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose...more
In 2018, the U.S. Copyright Office denied the registration of a 2-D work of art “A Recent Entrance into Paradise” generated by artificial intelligence (“AI”). The programmer behind the AI, Dr. Stephen Thaler, sued the...more
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) serve as agile mechanisms to verify an underlying asset's authenticity and/or ownership linked with it. For now, minting NFTs to commercialize digital artwork on blockchain domain names continues to...more
On March 28th, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, a case involving the core issues around copyright fair use. The case involves a series of Warhol drawings and silkscreen prints adapted...more
As the US Copyright Office notes, “Copyright exists from the moment the work is created.” More precisely, under the Copyright Act - A work is “created” when it is fixed in a copy or phonorecord for the first time;...more
Should copyright protection be given for AI-generated inventions? Stephen Thaler, the president and CEO of Imagination Engines, thinks so....more
Hyperbolic descriptions of the supposed importance of cases dealing with intellectual property rights are as numerous as they are unfounded, but that is not true when it comes to The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual...more
China, like the United States, is a party to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. As such, in general any literary or artistic work created in the US will also be protected in China....more
Question: What do the Oslo Picasso murals “The Seagull” and the “The Fishermen” and the Dutch De View Jaargetijden have in common? Answer: They both have been subject to recent high cost, high profile litigation that...more
G&M Realty (G&M), the owner of the famous New York City graffiti space known as 5Pointz, asked the Supreme Court to strike down as unconstitutional the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), a federal copyright law that provides...more
In a recent decision from the Second Circuit, Judges Parker, Chin, and Carney side-stepped a novel question: whether human skin can be the kind of "tangible medium of expression" required for copyright protection. Instead,...more
The fashion industry, and designers more generally, has received some welcome clarification of when clothing may attract protection under copyright law....more
Another copyright infringement lawsuit has been filed by an artist after a mural appeared in advertising, this time in a dispute involving a cannabis company. Diana Perez created a street mural titled “Besties” in the...more
In December 2018, CJEU Advocate General Szpunar took the view that the reuse of a sound sequence in a new song (referred to as sampling) without the author’s permission violates copyright law (case C-476/17 – Moses Pelham et...more
It isn’t all that often that copyright decisions get handed down by the federal district court in the great state of Idaho, so the recent decision in James Castle Collection v. Scholastic, Inc. caught our attention. The...more
The District Court of Milan referred questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union for a preliminary opinion on the interrelation of the EU’s Council Directive 93/98 on the duration of copyright protection and...more