In October 2023, several music companies (Concord, ABKCO Music & Records, Universal Music) sued Anthropic AI in the US for alleged harm to their business interests because (a) its AI chatbot, Claude, was trained with unauthorized music lyrics data and (b) Claude’s outputs in response to user queries contained copies of (parts of) these lyrics…
Introduction Not long ago, artificial intelligence (“AI”) was a concept brought to life by human actors – whether through Scarlett Johansson’s voice in Her (2013) or as Alicia Vikander’s eerie humanoid presence in Ex Machina (2014). Today, the roles have reversed: it is AI that is creating on-screen performances that appear convincingly human. From de-aging…
I. Introduction Not long ago, artificial intelligence (“AI”) was a concept brought to life by human actors – whether through Scarlett Johansson’s voice in Her (2013) or as Alicia Vikander’s eerie humanoid presence in Ex Machina (2014). Today, the roles have reversed: it is AI that is creating on-screen performances that appear convincingly human. From…
Recently, there has been a lot of suggestions that the U.S. Copyright Office is registering “AI-generated works.” Nonetheless, these are not actually AI-generated works, nor are they breakthrough decisions. The U.S. Copyright Office has already registered hundreds of works related to AI-generated material – the key to obtaining registration is to specify AI-generated elements in…
On March 18, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the denial of Stephen Thaler’s application to register A Recent Entrance to Paradise, a purportedly machine-authored work, holding that the Copyright Act of 1976 “requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human…
The commercial teaching kit use the artist’s works in their entirety and encouraged the students to create their own art based on them. An art center that sold “art kits” for use by children made a fair use of six of an artist’s works that it included in full in its kits because it drew…
The government will have to pay the software developer only $150,000 for its infringement. The U.S. Navy will be required to pay just over $150,000 in damages for its installation of virtual reality software on nearly 500,000 computers without authorization, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. The court of appeals,…
Claims arise out of publication of textbooks in electronic format. Several textbook authors, purporting to represent a class, have stated a claim for breach of contract arising out of publisher McGraw Hill LLC’s unilateral decision to cease or reduce royalties for the authors’ textbooks sold in electronic form (“ebooks”), the United States Court of Appeals…
As we enter a new year, we would like to take this opportunity to pass on our best wishes for 2025 to all of our readers, as well as reflect on developments in copyright over the past year. Last year was another busy one in the copyright world, with an increasing focus on the relationship…
Allegations against Marvel and one of its top writers fail for the second time. Action-adventure characters from the Captain America and Spider-Man franchises were not unlawfully copied from the self-published comic book series of a relatively unknown author, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has held. The court, in affirming an Atlanta…
