Friday’s Endnotes – 08/02/24

Copyright Office Releases Part 1 of Artificial Intelligence Report, Recommends Federal Digital Replica Law — The first part of the U.S. Copyright Office’s eagerly anticipated report on copyright issues and AI dropped this week, covering the use of AI audio and visual tools to realistically but falsely depict real images. In the report, the Office recommends legislation that would provide federal protection against unauthorized digital replicas.

July 2024 Roundup of Copyright News — The Copyright Alliance’s Rachel Kim brings you up to date on a wealth of developments related to copyright over the past month that you may have missed while travelling or trying to beat the heat.

European AI Act Training Disclosures Expose US Copyright Risks — “Beginning in August 2025, the new act will require companies providing ‘general-purpose AI models’ in the EU to make public a ‘sufficiently detailed’ summary disclosing the content used to train the AI. There’s currently no equivalent federal requirement in the US, though California lawmakers are considering calling for similar disclosure. Those EU summaries could provide fodder for authors and other creatives trying to show that AI firms are using their works without permission.”

Suno and Udio slam label lawsuits… but the RIAA hits back — From the RIAA statement: ““After months of evading and misleading, defendants have finally admitted their massive unlicensed copying of artists’ recordings. It’s a major concession of facts they spent months trying to hide and acknowledged only when forced by a lawsuit. Their industrial scale infringement does not qualify as ‘fair use’. There’s nothing fair about stealing an artist’s life’s work, extracting its core value, and repackaging it to compete directly with the originals, as the Supreme Court just held in its landmark Warhol Foundation case.”

11th Cir.: Finding of no copyright infringement reversed amid failure to consider arrangement of computer code — “In determining whether legal copying occurred, the courts in Florida use a three-step test: (1) an abstraction to break down the infringed program into its constituent parts, (2) a filtering to sift out non-protectible material, and (3) a comparison of the protected material with the infringing material to determine if infringement had occurred. The appellate court ruled that the district court largely got the question right. It used the correct test, and it largely analyzed Compulife’s computer program correctly. The district court, however, made one crucial error: when abstracting the constituent parts in the first of the three steps, the district court failed to consider the arrangement of the source code as one of the constituent parts.”