The federal government recently sought input on what should be included in a federal “AI Action Plan,” and the responses of two companies drew a series of stark headlines: “OpenAI and Google ask for a government exemption to train their AI models on copyrighted material,” “OpenAI and Google ask the government to let them train AI on content they don’t…

Statutory Damages: Copyright law provides plaintiffs that register their copyrights prior to an alleged infringement with statutory damages, meaning they can recover damages from infringers regardless of whether the rightsholders have suffered any actual injury. Statutory damages currently range between $750 and $30,000 for each work infringed and up to $150,000 in cases involving willful infringement. Statutory damages are unpredictable,…

The money and attention swirling around artificial intelligence has attracted a pitch almost as old as copyright itself: in the midst of uncertainty, precarity, and technological change, an individual author can leverage their copyrights to stop change, to cash in, or both. Among the folks dining out on this idea is Ed Newton-Rex, UK-based propagator of the “Statement on AI…

The first big artificial intelligence fair use legal opinion is out,[1] and it was a surprising loss for AI developer ROSS Intelligence,[2] whose AI training was found to infringe copyrights held by Thomson Reuters,[3] owner of legal publisher Westlaw. Attorneys and others who care about fair use and emerging technology have watched this case closely as a possible harbinger of…

What if you woke up one day to discover that a website you use almost every day seemingly no longer exists? Instead, when you enter the website’s URL, you see a splash page informing you that the site has been blocked in the U.S. pursuant to a federal court order. Or maybe you just get a 404 error. Unfortunately, if…

The forces of rent-seeking and monopoly notched a victory earlier this month when a district court in Delaware ruled that an AI-powered legal search engine trained on questions based on factual restatements of public domain legal opinions was somehow a threat to human creativity. As the first case to apply fair use to a self-described artificial intelligence tool, the opinion…

Understanding our nation’s copyright law is important, but also complex. The below glossary of key copyright terms is a resource to help promote informed discussions about copyright policy.  The US Copyright Office: Housed within the Library of Congress, the US Copyright Office (USCO) is the United States government body that creates and maintains records of copyright registrations and other transactions, provides deposit…

Notice and Takedown: Housed within section 512(c) of the Copyright Act, Notice and Takedown is a process in which a copyright holder can report allegedly infringing content posted by a user online to the relevant online service provider (OSP), who then removes it upon review. The alleged infringer has an opportunity to issue a “counter-notice” certifying that their use is…

Last week, the US Copyright Office published the second report in its series on artificial intelligence and copyright. As James Grimmelmann told The Washington Post, “If you make art with the help of AI, it’s copyrightable. If you ask AI to make art for you, it’s not.” The Office also concluded that “the case has not been made” for a…