Friday’s Endnotes – 06/07/24

Publishing Companies Say Google is Liable for Promoting Pirated Textbooks — “According to the complaint, the publishers have been sending Google notices of infringement for years, but Google’s response has been ‘a circus of failures.’ Rather than removing the ads for the infringing works, Google ‘has continued to do business with known pirates,’ said the complaint, and ‘even threatened to stop reviewing all of the Publishers’ notices for up to six months simply because the Publishers appropriately re-submitted notices for infringing works that Google previously failed to act upon.'”

Who Framed Mickey Mouse? — Copyright scholar Zvi Rosen deconstructs the dominant narrative that the Disney company was the main force behind the 1998 U.S. copyright term extension act. As Rosen writes, “This piece explores how we tell stories about the law, the uses of donation and lobbying data in public discourse, and given how Disney’s involvement in the 1998 term extension has become internet lore and a political hot topic again recently, discuss how and why it matters.”

Shutterstock Made $104 Million Licensing Assets to AI Devs Last Year — Additional evidence of a thriving and functioning market for licensing copyrighted works for training AI models, a market which benefits both copyright owners and AI developers and drives innovation.

Can you become a lawyer by listening to Taylor Swift? — “While Taylor Swift was on her record-breaking Eras Tour, one Swiftie was using the star’s music in a bid to pass her law degree. Regan Caie, a law student at the University of Glasgow, wrote her fourth-year dissertation about Swift’s re-recorded albums and copyright law. The music star has re-recorded and re-released four of her first six albums over a copyright dispute with producer and artist manager Scooter Braun. Regan, 21, said her dissertation combined her love of Swift’s music with her ambition to eventually specialise in copyright and intellectual property law.”

BREIN Pulled 610 Pirate Sites and Services Offline Last Year — “Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has just posted its latest annual report. The group shut down 610 illegal sites and services, ranging from proxies and streaming portals, to IPTV services and Facebook groups. BREIN also signed 41 settlement agreements and helped to completely remove hundreds of domains from Google search results following blocking orders.”