Friday’s Endnotes – 03/29/24

Looking Forward: The U.S. Copyright Office’s AI Initiative in 2024 — In a blog posted this week, the Copyright Office highlights the next steps in its policy study on copyright and AI. The Office plans to issue its report in several separate sections, with the first section focusing on digital replicas appearing later this spring.

Citing Warhol, 10th Circuit Reverses Tiger King Fair Use Ruling — “Sepi sued Netflix for copyright infringement, contending that the clips were used without his permission. The federal trial court held that Sepi did not own the copyrights in seven of the videos, because they were works for hire (Sepi shot the clips for Joe Exotic TV). Although Sepi owned the copyright in the eighth clip—a video of Exotic’s husband’s funeral—the trial court found that Netflix’s use of that clip was fair use. On appeal, the Tenth Circuit reversed the trial court’s fair use ruling.”

Publishers Secure Widespread Support in Landmark Copyright Battle With Internet Archive — Ernesto Van der Sar of Torrentfreak reports, “Major book publishers continue their legal crusade against Internet Archive’s scan-and-lend library, hoping to shut it down for good. IA’s appeal previously received support from authors and copyright scholars. The publishers, however, have some heavyweight backers too. New amicus briefs are signed by former U.S. politicians, former judges, and legal scholars. Industry groups such as the MPA and RIAA also rally behind the publishers.”

Brands add AI restrictions to agency contracts—behind the growing trend — “Brands don’t want to mistakenly put out work that carries the imprimatur of another brand’s creative, Wrubel said. Brands also don’t want agency partners using AI in ways that could jeopardize their own intellectual property. For instance, if a brand’s customer information were fed into an AI system, that data could train a model that a competitor might use.”

Generative AI could leave users holding the bag for copyright violations — “Researchers and journalists have raised the possibility that through selective prompting strategies, people can end up creating text, images or video that violates copyright law. Typically, generative AI tools output an image, text or video but do not provide any warning about potential infringement. This raises the question of how to ensure that users of generative AI tools do not unknowingly end up infringing copyright protection.”