Friday’s Endnotes – 03/24/23

Internet Archive faces skeptical judge in publishers’ copyright lawsuit — “But it ‘elides the issue to say that this case is about the ability of a library to lend a book that it owns,’ Koeltl said. ‘Does the library have the right to lend a book that it owns? Of course! That’s not the issue in the case.’ Koeltl said earlier landmark decisions on fair use imply that copying and distributing entire books to the public would not be protected by the doctrine. ‘You avoid the question of whether the library has the right to reproduce the book that it otherwise has the right to possess, which is really at the heart of the case,’ Koeltl told Gratz. ‘The publisher has a copyright right to control reproduction.'”

When Copyright Law Limits Your Testamentary Freedom: Statutory Heirs Hate This One Trick . . . — “[N]o matter how or when you terminate, one thing is clear: under the Copyright Act, an author’s statutory heirs (heirs defined by statute — namely spouse, child, or grandchild) inherit the termination right — whether the author wanted them to or not. That’s right. You can meticulously draft an estate plan and even disinherit your family, but that will not circumvent their inalienable right to terminate a copyright grant made inter vivos (meaning, during one’s lifetime).”

Copyrights Are Murky for Laws Referring to Outside Safety Codes — “NFPA, along with the American Society for Testing and Materials and the American Society for Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, filed suit against Public Resource in D.C. federal court in 2013 over more than 250 different regulatory standards they’d developed that were incorporated into law.” The case is now back in front of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals for the second time.

Can you copyright a rhythm? Inside the reggaeton lawsuit that could shake the pop world — “With the release of their song Fish Market in 1989, the Jamaican duo Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and Wycliffe ‘Steely’ Johnson inadvertently changed the course of pop music. The track featured the first known example of what would come to be known as a ‘dembow’ rhythm – the percussive, slightly syncopated four-to-the-floor beat that travelled from reggae to become the signature beat of reggaeton, today the world-conquering sound of Latin American pop.”

Adobe built its Firefly AI art generator to avoid bias and copyright issues — “Copyright is a particularly thorny issue for generative AIs. StabilityAI, the makers of Stable Diffusion, is currently being sued by a collection of artists and the stock image service Getty Photos for using their photos to train Stable Diffusion without licensing them. The example images where Stable Diffusion creates a blurry Getty-like logo are particularly damning. Adobe has sidestepped these kinds of copyright problems by training Firefly on hundreds of millions of Adobe Stock images, as well as openly licensed and public domain content. It protects creators from any potential copyright problems, especially if they intend to use generated content for commercial purposes.”