L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66; The New York Times, March 26, 2025

 Jeré Longman, The New York Times; L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66

"L.J. Smith, an author of young adult novels best known for “The Vampire Diaries” series, which became a hit television drama, and for repossessing her characters by writing fan fiction after she was fired and replaced by a ghostwriter, died on March 8 in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 66...

Alloy Entertainment sought a young adult version of supernatural romance and signed Ms. Smith to write “The Vampire Diaries,” a series centered on a love triangle involving a popular high school girl named Elena Gilbert and a pair of vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore.

The first three books, written for HarperCollins, were published in 1991, and a fourth was released in 1992. But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters...

By 2007, sales of “The Vampire Diaries” had increased, and Ms. Smith was contracted to continue the series by writing a new trilogy for Alloy Entertainment, for which she was entitled to half the royalties.

In 2009, “The Vampire Diaries” were adapted into a dramatic television series that lasted for eight seasons on the CW Network. Popular among younger audiences, the show used various musical genres to explore topics like romance and morality and helped popularize a grunge and leather-jacket fashion look."

ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines; Axios, March 28, 2025

Ina Fried, Axios; ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines

"AI image generators aren't new, but the one OpenAI handed to ChatGPT's legions of users this week is more powerful and has fewer guardrails than its predecessors — opening up a range of uses that are both tantalizing and terrifying."

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Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward; NPR, March 27, 2025

Bobby Allyn, NPR ; Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward

"A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI's request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper's content without permission or payment.

In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case's main copyright infringement claims to go forward.

Stein did not immediately release an opinion but promised one would come "expeditiously."

The decision is a victory for the newspaper, which has joined forces with other publishers, including The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to challenge the way that OpenAI collected vast amounts of data from the web to train its popular artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT."

Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright; The Guardian, March 25, 2025

Ella Creamer , The Guardian; Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright

"Richard Osman has said that writers will “have a good go” at taking on Meta after it emerged that the company used a notorious database believed to contain pirated books to train artificial intelligence.

“Copyright law is not complicated at all,” the author of The Thursday Murder Club series wrote in a statement on X on Sunday evening. “If you want to use an author’s work you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission you’re breaking the law. It’s so simple.”

In January, it emerged that Mark Zuckerberg approved his company’s use of The Library Genesis dataset, a “shadow library” that originated in Russia and contains more than 7.5m books. In 2024 a New York federal court ordered LibGen’s anonymous operators to pay a group of publishers $30m (£24m) in damages for copyright infringement. Last week, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen. In response, authors and writers’ organisations have rallied against Meta’s use of copyrighted works."

Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case; Reuters, March 26, 2025

Blake Brittain , Reuters; Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case

"Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group and other music publishers to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers' request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic's conduct caused them "irreparable harm."

Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works; Variety, March 17, 2025

Todd Spangler , Variety; Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works

"More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies.

The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others — which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi — were submitting comments for the Trump administration’s U.S. AI Action Plan⁠. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders."

How to tell when AI models infringe copyright; The Washington Post, March 24, 2024

Editorial Board, The Washington Post; How to tell when AI models infringe copyright

"Fair use has been a big part of AI companies’ defense. No matter how well a plaintiff manages to argue that a given AI model infringes copyright, the AI maker can usually point to the doctrine of fair use, which requires consideration of multiple factors, including the purpose of the use (here, criticism, comment and research are favored) and the effect of the use on the marketplace. If, in using a copied work, an AI model adds “something new,” it is probably in the clear."

Should AI be treated the same way as people are when it comes to copyright law? ; The Hill, March 24, 2025

 NICHOLAS CREEL, The Hill ; Should AI be treated the same way as people are when it comes to copyright law? 

"The New York Times’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft highlights an uncomfortable contradiction in how we view creativity and learning. While the Times accuses these companies of copyright infringement for training AI on their content, this ignores a fundamental truth: AI systems learn exactly as humans do, by absorbing, synthesizing and transforming existing knowledge into something new."

DC Circuit rules AI-generated work ineligible for copyright; Courthouse News Service, March 18, 2025

MEGAN BUTLER, Courthouse News Service; DC Circuit rules AI-generated work ineligible for copyright

"In a landmark opinion over the copyrightability of works created by artificial intelligence, a D.C. Circuit panel ruled on Tuesday that human authorship is required for copyright protection.

As AI technology quickly advances and intertwines with human creations, the unanimous opinion lays down the first precedential marker over who or what is the author of work created solely by artificial intelligence under copyright law.

The case stems from Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who creates and works with artificial intelligence systems and created a generative artificial intelligence named the “Creativity Machine.”"

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use; Ars Technica, March 13, 2025

ASHLEY BELANGER  , Ars Technica; OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use

"OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity's creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren't substitutes for original works.

So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters' legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times."

The Copyright Office takes on the sticky issue of artificial intelligence; Federal News Network, March 11, 2025

 Tom Temin, Federal News Network; The Copyright Office takes on the sticky issue of artificial intelligence

"Artificial intelligence raises storms of questions in every domain it touches. Chief among them, copyright questions. Now the U.S. Copyright Office, a congressional agency, has completed the second of two studies of AI and copyrights. This one deals with whether you can copyright outputs created using AI. Emily Chapuis, the Copyright Office’s deputy general counsel, joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss...

Emily Chapuis: Yeah. That’s right. So we don’t recommend in the report that Congress take any action. And the reason for this is we think that copyright law is sufficiently flexible to deal with changes in technology. And that’s not just based on AI, but on the entire history of copyright law, has had to deal with these questions, whether it’s the development of the camera or the internet. The questions about copyright ability are always on a case-by-case basis. And the technology that’s used and how it’s used and what it’s used for are important elements of that. But the sort of defining legal principles aren’t different in this context than in those other ones.

Tom Temin: Right. So the human input idea then is kind of an eternal for copyright. How do you decide that? Is it a percentage of human input? Because the machine does a lot here. But you could say, ‘Well, the camera did a lot when it opened and closed the shutter and exposed silver halide. And then there was a machine process to produce that image. But it was the selection, the timing, the decisive moment.’ To quote Henri Cartier-Bresson, another French photographer. That’s really the issue here. The human input and not the machine input.

Emily Chapuis: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s hard to parse. I mean, we’ve had people ask, so what’s the percentage that has to be human created? And there’s not a clear answer to that, again, because it’s case by case. But also the question isn’t really amount as much as it is control. So who’s controlling the expression. And so one of the things that we try to explain is that even the same technology can be used in a variety of different ways. So you can use generative AI technology as a tool assistive to enhance the human expression or you can use it as a substitute for human expression. And so control is sort of the bottom line in terms of what we’re looking at to draw that distinction."

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder; The Register, March 11, 2025

Thomas Claburn , The Register; Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

"A judge has found Meta must answer a claim it allegedly removed so-called copyright management information from material used to train its AI models.

The Friday ruling by Judge Vince Chhabria concerned the case Kadrey et al vs Meta Platforms, filed in July 2023 in a San Francisco federal court as a proposed class action by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, who reckon the Instagram titan's use of their work to train its neural networks was illegal.

Their case burbled along until January 2025 when the plaintiffs made the explosive allegation that Meta knew it used copyrighted material for training, and that its AI models would therefore produce results that included copyright management information (CMI) – the fancy term for things like the creator of a copyrighted work, its license and terms of use, its date of creation, and so on, that accompany copyrighted material.

The miffed scribes alleged Meta therefore removed all of this copyright info from the works it used to train its models so users wouldn’t be made aware the results they saw stemmed from copyrighted stuff."

Hell is Clearing Permissions: Looking for Lifelines and Deliverance [5,000th post since this blog started in 2008]; IP, AI & OM, March 8, 2025

Kip Currier, IP, AI & OM; Hell is Clearing Permissions: Looking for Lifelines and Deliverance [5,000th post since this blog started in 2008]: 

Hell is Clearing Permissions: Looking for Lifelines and Deliverance

French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre famously opined "L'enfer, c'est les autres (Hell is other people). This post won't be weighing in on the nuances of that declaration by a character in his 1944 play Huit Clos (No Exit) -- although candidates who could easily qualify as diabolic "other people" may spring to mind for you too.

However, thinking about an array of challenging experiences I've had while working on clearing permissions for the use of images and textual material in my forthcoming textbook, Ethics, Information, and Technology, I thought of Sartre's grim observation, with a twist: Hell is clearing permissions.

I've been teaching a Copyright and Fair Use course since 2009, which expanded into an IP and Open Movements around 2015, so I'm neither new to copyright law and fair use issues nor unfamiliar with clearing permissions to use images. Graduate students in the course read Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression and Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi's Reclaiming Fair Use: How To Put Balance Back In Copyright, both of which deal with "permissions culture". I also have my students get familiar with permissions issues via a free comic book, Bound By Law?, composed by Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The "Bound By Law?" authors, Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins, chronicle real-life travails faced by creators lawfully trying to exercise fair use while creating new works and balancing licensing costs. One of my favorite examples in the book is the documentary film makers who happen to capture images from an episode of The Simpsons displayed on a TV set while filming what goes on in the backstage lives of stagehands working on The Wagner Ring Cycle opera.

Yet, despite fairly significant copyright and fair use knowledge, as well as frequently participating in copyright webinars and trainings, this is the first time I've worked on clearing permissions for a book of my own. The experiences have been eye-opening to say the least. Two insights and "needs" continue to jump out at me: 

• (1) the need for more responsive, user-friendly, and expedient ways to clear permissions, and 
• (2) the need for more accessible and readily understandable information sources to aid authors in the do's and don'ts of clearing permissions.

I do need to acknowledge the many contributions that copyright and fair use scholars Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, mentioned above, have made in bringing together collaborative groups that have created "Best Practices" primers for a number of areas, such as their 2012 Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries.

Much more can be done, though, to help newer authors and creators, as well as seasoned pros, to navigate hurdles and potential pitfalls of securing permission to use images. Information professionals -- librarians and other staff within libraries, archives, and museums, for example -- are well-equipped and positioned to use their unique skill sets to help creators to successfully maneuver through clearing permissions-related "obstacle courses".

In future posts, I'll share insights, lessons learned, and tips on mitigating "hellish" experiences and moving from uncertain "limbo" to more clarity on image permissions.

Prioritise artists over tech in AI copyright debate, MPs say; The Guardian, February 26, 2025

Rachel Hall, The Guardian; Prioritise artists over tech in AI copyright debate, MPs say

"Two cross-party committees of MPs have urged the government to prioritise ensuring that creators are fairly remunerated for their creative work over making it easy to train artificial intelligence models.

The MPs argued there needed to be more transparency around the vast amounts of data used to train generative AI models, and urged the government not to press ahead with plans to require creators to opt out of having their data used.

The government’s preferred solution to the tension between AI and copyright law is to allow AI companies to train the models on copyrighted work by giving them an exception for “text and data mining”, while giving creatives the opportunity to opt out through a “rights reservation” system.

The chair of the culture, media and sport committee, Caroline Dinenage, said there had been a “groundswell of concern from across the creative industries” in response to the proposals, which “illustrates the scale of the threat artists face from artificial intelligence pilfering the fruits of their hard-earned success without permission”.

She added that making creative works “fair game unless creators say so” was akin to “burglars being allowed into your house unless there’s a big sign on your front door expressly telling them that thievery isn’t allowed”."

An AI Maker Was Just Found Liable for Copyright Infringement. What Does This Portend for Content Creators and AI Makers?; The Federalist Society, February 25, 2025

  John Blanton Farmer , The Federalist Society; An AI Maker Was Just Found Liable for Copyright Infringement. What Does This Portend for Content Creators and AI Makers?

"In a case decided on February 11, the makers of generative AI (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, lost the first legal battle in the war over whether they commit copyright infringement by using the material of others as training data without permission. The case is called Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc.

If other courts follow this ruling, the cost of building and selling GenAI services will dramatically increase. Such businesses are already losing money.

The ruling could also empower content creators, such as writers, to deny the use of their material to train GenAIs or to demand license fees. Some creators might be unwilling to license use of their material for training AIs due to fear that GenAI will destroy demand for their work."

UK newspapers launch campaign against AI copyright plans; Independent, February 25, 2025

Martyn Landi, Independent; UK newspapers launch campaign against AI copyright plans

"Some of the UK’s biggest newspapers have used a coordinated campaign across their front pages to raise their concerns about AI’s impact on the creative industries.

Special wraps appeared on Tuesday’s editions of the Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Mirror, the Daily Star, The i, The Sun, and The Times – as well as a number of regional titles – criticising a Government consultation around possible exemptions being added to copyright law for training AI models.

The proposals would allow tech firms to use copyrighted material from creatives and publishers without having to pay or gain a licence, or reimbursing creatives for using their work."

Goncharov (1973), Internet Folklore, and Corporate Copyright; JETLaw (The Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law), January 25, 2025

Stacey M. Lantagne, JETLaw (The Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law); Goncharov (1973), Internet Folklore, and Corporate Copyright

"Goncharov (1973) is a meme, which is a term broadly used to refer to a species of viral internet creativity. Memes can be many different things, but Goncharov is an especially rich, complex, collaborative, and mutating one. It revolves around a movie that does not exist. Goncharov is a fictional Martin Scorsese film that the internet collectively pretends was produced in 1973. Over the course of a few feverish weeks in the fall of 2022, social media users, with no coordination and without knowledge of each other or the overall project, created a cast, storyline, soundtrack, reviews, fanfiction, and a promotional poster. And they did it all for free. Actually, they did it all for fun—a concept foreign to copyright law’s idea of what drives creativity.

This Article uses Goncharov to illustrate how copyright law doctrines have developed to support a narrow, corporate conception of copyright. Copyright law depends heavily on an understanding of creativity as an economic venture mediated by contractual relationships. Sprawling collaborative and unmonetized memes like the Goncharov meme sit uneasily in the system because they are likely uncopyrightable as a type of folklore. However, positioning a meme like Goncharov as the equivalent of public domain folklore leaves it vulnerable to financial exploitation. This Article uses the vehicle of Goncharov to ask whether such a result is what copyright law should support, or whether we should rethink how we treat the new traditional knowledge being developed daily by our creative culture. This Article argues that copyright law dangerously focuses attention on a very small slice of human creativity, leaving vast amounts of creativity devalued as undeserving of legal protection. This hierarchy paints a watered-down picture of creativity. Creativity, as can be seen just in the single example of the Goncharov meme, is so much more complex, multi-faceted, unpredictable, and interesting than current copyright law posits. As we prepare to grapple with machine-generated creativity that may challenge copyright assumptions, we should not forget the vast swaths of human creativity that also challenge those assumptions.

PDF Download Link"

Copyright 'sell-out' will silence British musicians, says BRIAN MAY; Daily Mail, February 23, 2025

Andy Behring , Daily Mail; Copyright 'sell-out' will silence British musicians, says BRIAN MAY

"No one will make music in Britain any more if Labour's AI copyright proposal succeeds, Sir Brian May warned last night as he backed the Daily Mail's campaign against it.

The Queen guitarist said he feared it may already be 'too late' because 'monstrously arrogant' Big Tech barons have already carried out an industrial-scale 'theft' of Britain's cultural genius.

He called on the Government to apply the brakes before the next chapter of Britain's rich cultural heritage – which includes Shakespeare, Chaucer, James Bond, The Beatles and Britpop – is nipped in the bud thanks to Sir Keir Starmer's copyright 'sell-out'...

Sir Brian said: 'My fear is that it's already too late – this theft has already been performed and is unstoppable, like so many incursions that the monstrously arrogant billionaire owners of Al and social media are making into our lives. The future is already forever changed."

Are Birkenstocks a Work of Art? A German Court Says No.; The New York Times, February 20, 2025

Jacob Gallagher, The New York Times; Are Birkenstocks a Work of Art? A German Court Says No.

"On Thursday, the federal court of justice in Karlsruhe, Germany, ruled that Birkenstocks were not “copyrighted works of applied art,” making it harder for the 251-year-old German shoemaker to combat the widespread sale of duplicates of its sandals across the internet. 

“For copyright protection to apply, there must be such a degree of design that the product displays some individuality,” the court wrote in its decision. Birkenstock’s sandals may be iconic enough for a “Barbie” movie cameo, but they do not display enough individuality for the German judiciary.

The case has been winding its way through the court system for years, as Birkenstock sought to copyright four of its orthopedic-rooted slip-ons: the Madrid, Arizona, Boston and Gizeh, which have inspired cheaper imitations."

Copyright battles loom over artists and AI; Financial Times, February 16, 2025

louise.lucas@ft.com, Financial Times ; Copyright battles loom over artists and AI

"Artists are the latest creative industry to gripe about the exploitative nature of artificial intelligence. More than 3,000 have written to protest against plans by Christie’s to auction art created using AI."