Friday’s Endnotes – 06/16/23

Ninth Circuit Holds that Registration of a Single Photography Database Supports Award of Statutory Damages for Each Individual Photo in the Database — “Because ‘photographers can create hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of photographs per day,’ the Ninth Circuit reasoned that allowing them simply to register a single database will protect the financial interests of the photographers and keep the Copyright Office from facing a deluge of copyright applications from prolific photographers. Thus, going forward, content owners can protect countless photographic works through a single registration and still enforce their rights with the threat of statutory damages.”

Google licenses content from news publishers under the EU Copyright Directive — In a blog post discussing the remarkable success of the EU Copyright Directive’s press publisher right, Google reports, “As of today, we have agreements in place covering over 1,500 publications across 15 countries.” A US bill aimed at addressing the same issue by allowing news publishers to collectively negotiate with online platforms advanced out of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee yesterday.

Twitter sued for $250 million by music publishers over ‘massive’ copyright infringement — “The National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) is suing Twitter on behalf of 17 music publishers representing the biggest artists in the business. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Tennessee, claims the company ‘fuels its business with countless infringing copies of musical compositions, violating Publishers’ and others’ exclusive rights under copyright law.'”

GitHub accused of varying Copilot output to avoid copyright allegations — “This assertion appeared on Thursday in the amended complaint against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI over Copilot’s documented penchant for reproducing developers’ publicly posted, open source licensed code. The lawsuit, initially filed last November on behalf of four unidentified (“J. Doe”) plaintiffs, claims that Copilot – a code suggestion tool built from OpenAI’s Codex model and commercialized by Microsoft’s GitHub – was trained on publicly posted code in a way that violates copyright law and software licensing requirements and that it presents other people’s code as its own.”

A Judge Ruled Against an Artist Who Claimed Maurizio Cattelan Copied His Duct-Taped Banana, Deciding the Two Works Are Apples and Oranges — ” In his decision, Judge Scola outlined various features that distinguished the two works. Most notably, Banana and Orange has a green background and a border of masking tape and the banana was placed at only a slight angle from horizontal. By contrast, Cattelan’s Comedian has no specified background, no border and a much stronger angle.”