Category Archives: Copyrights

The Perils of Secondary Liability for Copyright Infringement

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The Perils of Secondary Liability for Copyright InfringementVicarious and contributory liability are terms well-known to every tort lawyer and law student.  They should also be familiar to business owners and managers.

The legal theories of vicarious and contributory liability are well-established in copyright law and are employed to impose liability for another’s direct infringement where a third party, such as a distributor or landlord, contributed to the infringement by encouraging or providing the means to infringe, or where the party had the means to stop the infringement and benefited financially from it.

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US Supreme Court Opens Door for Once-barred Copyright Claims

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US Supreme Court Opens Door for Once-barred Copyright ClaimsEarlier this month the U.S. Supreme Court answered the question of when a copyright plaintiff must file an infringement claim or be barred from suing by statute of limitations. The case was Warner Chappell v. Nealy Music, Inc.

The controversy arose because the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal were in disagreement whether limitations under 17 U.S.C. Section 507(b) required that suit be filed within three years of the infringing event or whether a plaintiff could sue when it discovered, or should have discovered, the infringement even though beyond the three-year limit for suit. Continue reading →

A Company’s Website and Copyright Issues

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It happens way too often. A website owner or employee innocently downloads to their website a photograph or some other work to illustrate or explain some aspect of the owner’s business. Or, its use may be intended to draw more viewers to the website.

The work may be a news photo, an illustration or an article. Use may be as innocent as finding and downloading a photo of the city’s skyline just to emphasize the business is local. One picture, they say, is worth a thousand words.

Then a letter arrives, demanding that a work must be immediately taken down from the website. The letter further demands that the user pay compensation to the owner of the work for unauthorized use, claiming that use on the website is copyright infringement. The compensation demanded may be in low five figures per work infringed, sometimes more. Continue reading →

U.S. Copyright Law Protects Only Human Works

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By Guest Contributor Victoria E. Thornton

You may have seen online images that were created using artificial intelligence (AI) and wondered whether copyright law protects the artist’s efforts. In most instances, apparently not. A recent landmark decision by the United States Copyright Office holds that copyright protects only human-made works.

The Copyright Office’s February 21, 2023, published decision explains why artificially made works are not protected. “Zarya of the Dawn” is a comic book authored by Kristina Kashtanova and illustrated using Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program. See U.S. Copyright Office Correspondence to Kristina Kashtanova (Feb. 21, 2023). Though the Office granted limited registration as to the text of the work as well as the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the work’s written and visual elements, it declined to protect the artificially generated illustrations. Id. at 1.

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Why AI Developers Are Being Sued

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There is no clarity of result available to artificial intelligence litigants who tread in the Land of Oz.

Plaintiffs are filing suits against AI developers at a quick pace; their grounds are that AI really creates nothing new but merely reads and copies billions of other peoples’ protected works from the Internet. Using these works, and in reaction to a user’s commands, AI combines elements of existing works into something else, whether art or prose.

The new work may be a derivative of an old, copied work for which the developer needs a license to use the old work. Many authors think so, and have joined together to sue, although for now their suits raise more questions than there are answers.

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Listen Up: Trademark and Copyright Law with Kaitlin Corey

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Intellectual property lawyer Kaitlin Corey was interviewed on the “Conversations with Rich Bennett” podcast on June 21. You can listen here:  https://harfordcountyliving.buzzsprout.com/849097/13076409-trademark-and-copyright-law-with-kaitlin-corey

Kaitlin is a partner at Goodell DeVries where she handles a wide range of intellectual property matters. Contact her at kcorey@gdldlaw.com.

 

Fair Use and the Fourth Estate

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April must be copyright month. Those who follow copyright, photography and the free press will have their interests piqued by the Southern District of New York’s holding of fair use as a defense to infringement involving the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Fox News and a freelance photographer who, on January 6, was at the Capitol and filmed the activities.

In particular, she videoed Kelly Meggs participating in a stack formation ascending the Capitol’s stairs. The Department of Justice charged Meggs and attached to its complaint a copy of a still from the photographer’s video.

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All Sorts of Issues with Artificial Intelligence

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“AI is the next revolution … there is no going back.”

— M. Werneck, executive vice president, The Kraft Heinz Company.

Not all revolutions benefit humanity. Tech luminaries Elon Musk and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio recently warned we might be circling the drain. They, and others, have called for a six-month moratorium on training artificial intelligence systems more powerful than Microsoft’s GPT-4. They caution AI can be dangerous to society in ways not understood.

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