Friday’s Endnotes – 12/08/23

Sandra Day O’Connor’s Copyright Legacy — The Copyright Alliance’s Rachel Kim takes a look at three major copyright decisions penned by Justice O’Connor, who passed away December 1: Harper & Row Publishers v. Nation Enterprises, Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Co., and Stewart v. Abend.

Parliamentary head calls for digital copyright law for web payments — “Turkish parliament’s digital media commission head has advocated for the immediate implementation of digital copyright law in a bid to secure fair compensation for media outlets in Türkiye.” This follows on successful laws in places like Canada, Australia, and Europe.

AAP Calls Big Tech’s AI Arguments ‘Nonsense’ — “In a second round of comments submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office this week, the Association of American Publishers insists that copyright law protects authors, publishers, and creators from the unauthorized appropriation of their works by AI developers and slammed assertions by the tech industry that fair use permits developers to use copyrighted works to train their systems without permission or compensation.”

SCOTUS ruling could impact spats over Mariah’s ‘Christmas,’ Tupac tune — “The U.S. Supreme Court will decide in coming months how damages should be calculated when copyright infringement that happened long ago is only recently discovered, and its decision could impact high-profile disputes involving popular music.”

Generative AI could face its biggest legal tests in 2024 — “AI has been eating the world this year, with the launch of GPT-4, DALL·E 3, Bing Chat, Gemini, and dozens of other AI models and tools capable of generating text and images from a simple written prompt. To train these models, AI developers have relied on millions of texts and images created by real people—and some of them aren’t very happy that their work has been used without their permission. With the launches came the lawsuits. And next year, the first of them will likely go to trial.”