Friday’s Endnotes – 10/04/24

Warhol‘s lessons for the publishing industry — The Columbia Journal of Law & Arts published this week an article based on remarks I gave during the 2023 Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and Arts Symposium. It focuses on three key areas that the Warhol Court touched on in its decision—transformativeness, commerciality, and market harm—to see what questions were answered and what questions were left for another day.

EU copyright law roundup – third trimester of 2024 — A roundup from the Kluwer Copyright Blog on notable copyright law developments in the EU from July through September of 2024, including CJEU decisions, Advocate General opinions, and important policy developments.

OpenAI Faces Early Appeal in First AI Copyright Suit From Coders — “OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp.‘s GitHub will head to the country’s largest federal appeals court to resolve their first copyright lawsuit from open-source programmers who claim the companies’ AI coding tool Copilot violates a decades-old digital copyright law. Judge Jon S. Tigar granted the programmers’ request for a mid-case turn to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which must determine whether OpenAI’s copying of open-source code to train its AI model without proper attribution to the programmers could be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

Copyright Office Spanish Language Program Broadens Access to Copyright Information — “A key initiative under the Copyright for All strategic goal is the expansion of the Office’s Spanish language program. Forty-two million people in the United States speak Spanish at home. To broaden access to the copyright system, the Office has made a range of materials accessible to the Spanish-speaking community. Over the past two years, the Copyright Office has released more than forty translated resources for Spanish speakers, accessible through the Copyright in Spanish home page.”

Termination right is not extinguished in bankruptcy — “The right to terminate a written transfer agreement under the Copyright Act was not extinguished by a bankruptcy proceeding, the federal court for Miami has held… This band at the center of this dispute is 2 Live Crew, a hip-hop group from Miami that was commercially successfully in the 1980s and 1990s… Campbell went into bankruptcy proceedings in 1995, along with the band’s record label Luke Records… The events leading to this dispute began when Campbell, along with the heirs of the now-late Ross and Wong Won, served a notice of termination on Lil’ Joe Records… Lil’ Joe sued Campbell, as well as the heirs of Ross and Wong Won, seeking declaratory judgment as to the validity of the termination notice.”