GEMA v Suno: Another landmark AI copyright case from Germany
While a lot of the attention in the AI and copyright space has gone to the hundreds of ongoing cases in the US, courts around the world have been tackling the question of copyright infringement...
View ArticleFahrenheit 451 or Rainbows End? AI, books, and copyright law
One of my favourite science fiction novels is ‘Rainbows End‘ by Vernor Vinge. The year is 2025 (yes, seriously), and the world is a mixture of the familiar and the bizarre. Advances in medicine allow...
View ArticleOpenAI wins first battle in ongoing Indian copyright lawsuit
A fascinating ruling from the High Court of Delhi in India regarding the very high-profile case of ANI Media v OpenAI (decision here). Asian News International (ANI) is one of India’s largest news...
View ArticleAndroids do dream of electric sheep, so where next for copyright?
For years I was not really interested in the subject of AI consciousness, it was one of those subjects that I equated with unreasonableness at the extremes of the debate, but in which I did not have...
View ArticleCopyright implications of super-intelligence
I haven’t really written about machine consciousness, super-intelligence, or artificial general intelligence (AGI) before; I never felt the need, and some of the questions on AI consciousness are...
View ArticleDisney and Universal sue Midjourney for copyright infringement
In a spectacular development in the AI wars, Disney and several studios have sued the AI image-generating company Midjourney for copyright infringement (complaint here). To say that this has generated...
View ArticleThe Style Returns: Some notes on ChatGPT and Studio Ghibli
If you were online between March 25 and March 26, your timeline may have been flooded with a barrage of AI-generated images, a large number of which would have been existing photographs recreated using...
View ArticleCopyright for Dummies
This is the third post in a series about the Copyright Wars (previous posts here and here), which I’ve written given the growing interest regarding copyright prompted by the rise of generative AI. This...
View ArticleA short history of the Copyright Wars
In a previous post we provided the background of what some call the Copyright Wars, delineating the sides and the parties. While legal conflicts about copyright have been raging since its inception,...
View ArticleA short guide to the Copyright Wars
My social timeline has been abuzz with the latest copyright decision regarding the Internet Archive, which lost its appeal in the copyright lawsuit from Hachette. In the words of a colleague, this is a...
View ArticleThe EU AI Act and copyright
The European Parliament has approved the AI Act (voted version here), setting in motion its publication in the official journal in the next few months (given further edits). While full implementation...
View ArticleChinese court declares that AI-generated image has copyright
The copyright law world has been abuzz last week with news that a court in the People’s Republic of China decided that a work generated with Stable Diffusion had copyright, and therefore the author...
View ArticleFrench lawmakers propose new copyright law about generative AI
On September 12, several French lawmakers from the Assemblée nationale presented a law proposal to the Presidency which has the objective of reform some norms in existing copyright law (text of the...
View ArticleCan Bill Willingham release ‘Fables’ into the public domain?
Fables is a popular comic book series written by Bill Willingham that follows characters from fairy tales who have formed a clandestine community in New York. Willingham is the sole writer of the...
View ArticleCopilot: The next stage in the AI copyright wars?
The copyright wars are back, and this time the conflict is all about artificial intelligence. While most of the public has been paying attention to what is going on with AI art tools such as DALL-E,...
View ArticleDo Bored Apes have a copyright problem?
I’ve been catching up with the ongoing case of Yuga Labs v Ryder Ripps. This case involves conceptual artist Ryder Ripps, and Yuga Labs, the makers of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection,...
View ArticleCopyright infringement in artificial intelligence art
As AI creative tools are becoming widespread, the question of copyright of AI creations has also taken centre-stage. But while copyright nerds obsess over the authorship question, the issue that is...
View ArticleAugust Sander’s photographic archive in NFT copyright dispute
You wait months for an NFT case, and then two drop in the matter of days. First an English court confirmed that tokens are property (more on that when I get my hands on the decision), and now there is...
View ArticleWhoever controls the DAO, controls the book: The strange tale of Jodorowsky’s...
Please gather around, and listen to this cautionary tale of schadenfreude and greed. This is not a tale for the faint of heart; it involves a cabal of crypto-enthusiasts involved in a decentralised...
View ArticleFeels Good Man! Pepe, copyright, and NFTs
In 2005 artist Matt Furie created four cartoon characters for a cartoon called Boy’s Club: Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe. You’d be forgiven if you were not familiar with the first three, but if...
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