Friday’s Endnotes – 04/26/24

The Economics of Creativity: A Q&A with the Copyright Office’s Chief Economist — “In 2022, the U.S. Copyright Office welcomed Dr. Brent Lutes to serve as the Office’s first chief economist. Office staff recently sat down with Dr. Lutes and discussed the intersection of economics and copyright as well as some forthcoming economic research the Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) is producing.”

The 5 Best Uses of the Copyright Claims Board — “Overall, the CCB has done very well for itself. It’s largely met its goal of providing a faster, easier and less expensive path to resolving copyright disputes. It also hasn’t become the haven for ‘copyright trolls’ that many feared. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for every type of dispute. Even cases that can be filed at the CCB may not be best served by it. To that end, here are five scenarios in which the CCB has repeatedly proven useful for both sides of a copyright infringement case.”

Registering Generative AI Works for Copyright Under the Rule of Doubt — “The Copyright Office is currently involved with the question of how to handle applications to register works which are partially or fully made using generative AI. A study is currently ongoing on numerous areas of AI and copyright, and over 10,000 comments have been submitted. However, aside from a isolated blog post, so far as I can tell none of them mention the “Rule of Doubt” as a way to handle these registrations…”

Ex-Amazon exec claims she was asked to ignore copyright law in race to AI — “According to Ghaderi’s account in the complaint, she returned to work after giving birth in January 2023, inheriting a large language model project. Part of her role was flagging violations of Amazon’s internal copyright policies and escalating these concerns to the in-house legal team. In March 2023, the filing claims, her team director, Andrey Styskin, challenged Ghaderi to understand why Amazon was not meeting its goals on Alexa search quality… According to the complaint, Styskin rejected Ghaderi’s concerns, allegedly telling her to ignore copyright policies to improve the results. Referring to rival AI companies, the filing alleges he said: ‘Everyone else is doing it.'”