Reuters v. ROSS: District Court First to Consider Whether Training Generative AI Model Is Fair Use
- A federal district court in Delaware has issued a summary judgment ruling in Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH et al v. ROSS Intelligence Inc. The decision addresses several important issues: (1) copyright preemption defenses against terms of use violations; (2) whether a plaintiff who has registered... ›
Copyright Office Denies Claim to Copyright in Generative AI Images
By: Joseph C. Gratz and Heather M. Whitney
The U.S. Copyright Office has denied an attempt to register copyright in images created using the Midjourney generative AI tool. The reasoning of its decision sharply limits the potential paths to receiving copyright in images created using generative AI tools, even where that output... ›Are Outputs of Ai Models Copyrightable?
By: Heather M. Whitney, Evangeline Phang, Tessa J. Schwartz and Aaron P. Rubin
Heather Whitney, Evangeline Phang, Tessa Schwartz, and Aaron Rubin authored an article for Law360 covering whether the outputs of generative artificial intelligence tools are copyrightable. Read the full article.... ›Social Links: Embedding social media posts can be considered copyright infringement…but is it?
By: Aaron P. Rubin, Julie O'Neill and Anthony M. Ramirez
Social Links is our ongoing series here at Socially Aware that rounds up current developments at the intersection of social media, policy, research, and the law. Embedding social media posts can be considered copyright infringement…but is it? A Manhattan federal judge ruled in August... ›Mitigating User Content Risk After EU Copyright Directive
By: Christiane Stuetzle
Partner Christiane Stuetzle, senior associate Patricia Ernst, and research assistant Susan Bischoff authored an article for Law360 covering how online content service providers must act to mitigate risks and avoid liability under the European Union’s Copyright Directive, created in an effort to strengthen the rights of... ›Social Links: Avoid becoming a social-media-scam victim; does stream-ripping site violate copyright law?
By: Julie O'Neill
Reports of social media scams that have caused users to lose money had tripled by the end of 2020’s second quarter, resulting in the loss of $117 million during the first two quarters of this year alone. Romance scams and supposed economic relief offers... ›EU Copyright Directive – Quo Vadis: First Steps Towards its German Implementation
By: Christiane Stuetzle and Patricia C. Ernst
SUMMARY On June 7, 2019, the highly controversial EU Copyright Directive (“Directive”) came into force, requiring EU Member States to transpose its provisions into national law by June 7, 2021. To recap, the most relevant provisions of the Directive require the implementation of the... ›New copyright registration option for bloggers; AT&T’s opinion on CDA §230; questions about YouTube’s anti-hate rules
By: Aaron P. Rubin
A federal district court judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., dismissed the complaint in a case filed by Genius , a platform that lets users share and annotate lyrics, holding that the plaintiff’s claims were preempted by copyright law. The suit alleged that Google had stolen... ›Webscraping a Publicly Available Database May Constitute Trade Secret Misappropriation
By: J. Alexander Lawrence
Is scraping data from a publicly available website trade secret misappropriation? Based on a new opinion from the Eleventh Circuit, It might be. In Compulife Software, Inc. v. Newman , Compulife Software , a life insurance quote database service alleged that one of its... ›S.D.N.Y.: Public Display of Embedded Instagram Photo Does Not Infringe Copyright
By: Aaron P. Rubin
A federal district court in New York held that a photographer failed to state a claim against digital-media website Mashable for copyright infringement of a photo that Mashable embedded on its website by using Instagram’s application programming interface (API). The decision turned on Instagram’s... ›