Publications
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04.25.2024Does Copyright Law Preempt Contractual Provisions Imposing AI-Related Usage Restrictions on Content?BlogsThe explosive growth of generative AI has been accompanied by a corresponding growth of contractual provisions addressing generative AI issues.
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March/April 2024Recent Rulings in AI Copyright Lawsuits Shed Some Light, but Leave Many QuestionsArticlesThe last several months have seen a flurry of activity in cases involving artificial intelligence (AI), including some of the first major rulings involving generative AI.
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02.29.2024Human Authorship Requirement Continues To Pose Difficulties for AI-Generated WorksArticles2023 was a breakout year for generative artificial intelligence, but it was a rough year for protecting the content generated using such technology. The U.S. Copyright Office issued several rulings last year on the question of when works generated using AI technology are protected under U.S. copyright law, and so far, applicants have not been able to convince the Copyright Office that the AI-generated components of their works are protectable.
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01.16.2023Great Cancellations: Kentucky’s New Subscription Law and FTC’s Expansion of the Negative Option RuleUpdatesThe latest additions to the patchwork of state and federal regulations with which businesses offering subscriptions must comply are a new Kentucky law governing subscriptions offered in that state and the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed amendments to its “Negative Option Rule.”
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12.14.2023Recent Rulings in AI Copyright Lawsuits Shed Some Light, but Leave Many QuestionsUpdatesThe last few months have seen a flurry of activity in cases involving artificial intelligence (AI), including some of the first major rulings involving generative AI.
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12.06.20237 Critical Copyright And AI Questions Courts Need To AddressArticlesJohn Delaney and Sean West authored an article for Law360 regarding the seven copyright and AI questions courts need to address.
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10.23.2023Known Unknowns: Key Unanswered Copyright Questions Raised by Generative AIBlogsThe generative AI revolution has arrived. Will copyright law snuff it out?
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Fall 2023Legal Landscape Related to AI-Generated Works Remains UncertainArticlesFrom artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can generate highly sophisticated art, music, and conversation to technology capable of recreating Elvis on the big screen, a recent explosion and maturing of generative AI technologies is disrupting all forms of content.
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06.27.2023Supreme Court Requires Stay Pending Appeal of Arbitration DenialUpdatesOn June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court held that federal district courts must stay all proceedings pending appellate review of an order denying a motion to compel arbitration.
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06.26.2023Notes From the Field: 2023 Annual Meeting of the Copyright Society of the USABlogsWe recently attended the Annual Meeting of the Copyright Society of the USA, a two-and-a-half day, in-person conference focused on emerging issues in copyright law (perhaps the country’s largest annual get-together of copyright nerds like us).
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06.01.2023Nice for What? AI Drake and Publicity Rights Limitations in Policing AI-Generated ContentBlogsA surprising, unannounced collaboration between Drake and The Weeknd—a song called “Heart on My Sleeve”—went viral on social media a few weeks ago.
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05.18.2023Buy Today, Gone Tomorrow: Is a “Buy” Button for Digital Content Deceptive?BlogsAs digital media continues to supplant physical media, e-commerce sites offering digital content have experienced unprecedented growth.
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04.20.2023First Lawsuits Arrive Addressing Generative AIUpdatesThis Update is the second in a three-part series on legal issues surrounding generative technologies. This second installment discusses the initial lawsuits filed involving these technologies and how these issues may be addressed by the courts for the first time.
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03.21.2023Copyright Office Stakes Out Position on Registration of AI-Generated WorksUpdatesThere have been two important developments in recent weeks regarding the U.S. Copyright Office’s position on registering works created by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. First, on February 21st, the Copyright Office issued its much-anticipated decision regarding the registration of a graphic novel by artist Kristina Kashtanova that included images generated using the AI tool Midjourney. Then, on March 15th, the Copyright Office issued a policy statement providing its first guidance on the subject of copyright registration for works generated by AI.
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10.13.2022New Jersey To Regulate Automatically Renewing Subscription ServicesUpdates
New Jersey has become the latest state to pass a law governing some types of automatically renewing subscriptions.
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02.03.20222022 Compliance Landscape for Recurring Subscription ProgramsUpdatesBusinesses that allow customers to sign up for automatically renewing subscriptions must comply with a patchwork of state and federal regulations.
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09.2020Combating Bias in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Used in Healthcare
White Papers
In this white paper, the authors discuss the legal concerns arising from the potential bias manifestations in ML algorithms used in the healthcare context under U.S. law. They briefly describe the legal landscape governing algorithmic bias in the United States and offer some emerging tools that build on existing recommended best practices, such as adversarial debiasing and the use of synthetic data for detecting, avoiding, and mitigating algorithmic bias -
08.31.2020How to Mitigate Algorithmic Bias in HealthcareArticlesArtificial intelligence (AI) has the promise to revolutionize healthcare with machine learning (ML) techniques to predict patient outcomes and personalize patient care, but use of AI carries legal risks, including algorithmic bias, that can affect outcomes and care.
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06.08.2020Challenge Mode: COVID-19’s Impact on the Video Game IndustryUpdatesCOVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the entertainment industry, creating massive disruptions across many industry sectors.
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04.20.2020Open Access, Open Source, and the Battle to Defeat COVID-19UpdatesNo legal development over the past decades has had a greater impact on the free flow of information and technology than the rise of the open access and open source movements.
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04.03.2020How Are the World’s Most Disruptive Technologies Faring in the Fight Against the World’s Most Disruptive Virus?UpdatesWith the current coronavirus outbreak causing unprecedented social and economic upheaval and suffering, we take a look at the leading disruptive IT-related technologies to see what impact— positive, negative, or none at all—these technologies are having in our efforts to combat the effects of the coronavirus and what role these technologies could play in identifying and mitigating future pandemics.
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03.24.2020Tips for Negotiating New Technology Agreements in the Time of COVID-19UpdatesIn the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many buyers and sellers of tech services and goods are in the process of (1) examining their existing tech agreements to determine whether the pandemic constitutes a force majeure event under the governing law of the agreement and excuses related failures or delays in performance, and (2) assessing how to negotiate new tech agreements within the uncertainty of the pandemic.
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12.23.2019‘Tis the Season for Gift CardsUpdatesIt’s hard to know what to give to everyone on your list this holiday season. For the 13th year in a row, the National Retail Federation found gift cards are the most popular item on holiday wish lists, requested by 59% of those surveyed.
Age of Disruption
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Does Copyright Law Preempt Contractual Provisions Imposing AI-Related Usage Restrictions on Content?
The explosive growth of generative AI has been accompanied by a corresponding growth of contractual provisions addressing generative AI issues. Website operators in particular are increasingly seeking to use their online terms of service to prohibit the use of content and information hosted on their sites to train AI systems. Disney, for example, recently updated its online Subscriber Agreement for its Disney+ service to clarify that content from the service may not be accessed, copied, or extracted “for the purposes of creating or developing any AI Tool.” Further, at least some generative AI tool providers are seeking to impose contractual... Continue Reading
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Human Authorship Requirement Continues To Pose Difficulties for AI-Generated Works
2023 was a breakout year for generative artificial intelligence (AI), but it was a rough year for protecting the content generated using such technology. The U.S. Copyright Office issued several rulings last year on the question of when works generated using AI technology are protected under U.S. copyright law, and so far, applicants have not been able to convince the Copyright Office that the AI-generated components of their works are protectable. As we previously discussed in February, the Copyright Office provided its first analysis on the question of whether AI-generated works contain sufficient human authorship to be copyrightable in its Kashtanova ruling. It narrowly... Continue Reading
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Recent Rulings in AI Copyright Lawsuits Shed Some Light, but Leave Many Questions
The last few months have seen a flurry of activity in cases involving artificial intelligence (AI), including some of the first major rulings involving generative AI. Andersen et al. v. Stability AI Ltd. As we have previously discussed, this case arose in January 2023, when a collective of artists filed a class action lawsuit involving three AI-powered image generation tools that produce images in response to text inputs: Stable Diffusion (developed by Stability AI), Midjourney (developed by Midjourney), and DreamUp (developed by DeviantArt). The plaintiffs asserted that the models powering these tools were trained using copyrighted images scraped from the internet... Continue Reading
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Known Unknowns: Key Unanswered Copyright Questions Raised by Generative AI
The generative AI revolution has arrived. Will copyright law snuff it out? Despite all the excitement surrounding generative AI tools, a cloud darkens the horizon. These tools need to be trained on massive amounts of ingested content and, according to press reports, this content is often scraped without authorization from third-party websites, raising significant copyright law issues. Indeed, a number of copyright infringement actions have already been filed against AI tool developers. In January, for example, three artists who claim their works were scraped from the Internet and used to train Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DreamUp filed a class action... Continue Reading