Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’; The Guardian, January 9, 2025

Dan Milmo, The Guardian; Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’

"However, Musk also warned that AI models’ habit of generating “hallucinations” – a term for inaccurate or nonsensical output – was a danger for the synthetic data process.

He said in the livestreamed interview with Mark Penn, the chair of the advertising group Stagwell, that hallucinations had made the process of using artificial material “challenging” because “how do you know if it … hallucinated the answer or it’s a real answer”.

Andrew Duncan, the director of foundational AI at the UK’s Alan Turing Institute, said Musk’s comment tallied with a recent academic paper estimating that publicly available data for AI models could run out as soon as 2026. He added that over-reliance on synthetic data risked “model collapse”, a term referring to the outputs of models deteriorating in quality...

High-quality data, and control over it, is one of the legal battlegrounds in the AI boom. OpenAI admitted last year it would be impossible to create tools such as ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, while the creative industries and publishers are demanding compensation for use of their output in the model training process."

Nosferatu (1922) Dracula Copyright Infringement Story Explained; Screen Rant, January 8, 2025

By Shaurya Thapa & Fellipe Silva Santos, Screen Rant; 

Nosferatu (1922) Dracula Copyright Infringement Story Explained

"Copyright was a big thing even back in 1922 when Nosferatu came out."

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error; The Register, January 7, 2025

Thomas Claburn , The Register; 

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

"The errant copyright takedown of a popular video explaining Bitcoin, from Grant Sanderson's smash-hit YouTube channel 3Blue1Brown, has been reversed, with human error blamed.

The brand protection company responsible for the unwarranted takedown, ChainPatrol.io, also acknowledged that the legal demand was a mistake, and has been in communication with Sanderson about its efforts to return the video to YouTube. Sanderson – who has 6.8 million subscribers on YouTube, and whose in-depth videos mainly on mathematics and science have been viewed more than 600 million times – raised the alarm in a social media post on Monday.

He said he had just learned that YouTube had removed a 2017-era video he had made and applied a copyright strike – three of which will get an account terminated – despite the fact that he had only used his own content in his video."

The Internet Archive is in danger; WBUR, January 7, 2025

 

Claire Donnelly 

Meghna Chakrabarti, WBUR; 

The Internet Archive is in danger

"More than 900 billion webpages are preserved on The Wayback Machine, a history of humanity online. Now, copyright lawsuits could wipe it out.

Guests

Brewster Kahle, founder and director of the Internet Archive. Digital librarian and computer engineer.

James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. Studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power."

HOW SHERLOCK HOLMES BROKE COPYRIGHT LAW; The Atlantic, January 7, 2025

Alec Nevala-Lee , The Atlantic; HOW SHERLOCK HOLMES BROKE COPYRIGHT LAW

"The estate based its argument on a distinction between “flat” and “round” fictional characters first proposed by E. M. Forster in his 1927 book, Aspects of the Novel, a concept frequently invoked in high-school literature classes but never previously tested in court.

In its legal filings, the estate drew a contrast between “flat” characters without depth—such as Superman and Amos and Andy—and “round” characters such as Holmes, who were capable of complexity and change. Doyle, it said, continued to develop Holmes to the very end, gradually transforming him from a reasoning machine into an empathetic figure who displays affection for women, dogs, and even his long-suffering partner. And it soon became clear that this argument would have enormous implications for copyright holders, who would be motivated to retain control over their characters by changing them incrementally for as long as possible."

CSotD: Telnaes is only unemployed, not gone; The Daily Cartoonist, January 4, 2025

 MIKE PETERSON, The Daily Cartoonist; CSotD: Telnaes is only unemployed, not gone

"We try to avoid duplication and stepping on each other’s toes around here, and by now you’ve likely seen DD Degg’s coverage of Ann Telnaes’ resignation from the Washington Post. And if you haven’t seen his coverage here, you’ve almost certainly seen some coverage because it is all over the Internet, with regret and praise coming from around the globe. As of seven this morning, her Substack announcement had 5,307 likes and had been shared 910 times...

Seeing these pieces on the importance of political cartooning and press freedom, it’s easy to recognize how inconsistent it would have been for her to accept the squelching of her voice by the Post’s current management.

Telnaes will no longer be on the pages of the Washington Post, but perhaps going out into the wider world will make her voice heard by a more diverse audience, particularly if the Post continues to cater to the new administration while hemorrhaging both talent and readership.

She’ll need support on her Substack, by which I mean subscriptions, not just applause, and if you haven’t been supporting small and local media outlets, this is an excellent place to start. 

The cartoon her editor refused to run, which was the final straw that induced her to walk away from a prestigious and well-paying job, offers the very reasonable suggestion that the billionaires who control major media are selling out to the administration, not just with obedience but in several cases with substantial financial contributions.

And here’s something else they’d just as soon not hear anyone say: It seems that major media may be working to gain influence with the wrong people, that they’re making friends with oligarchs but losing touch with their actual customers...

Samizdat is a term that defined underground writings — mimeographed or photocopied — that circulated in the Soviet Union as it began to totter and crash. In our country, in these times, we’re seeing the growth of Substacks and other small-scale publishing by people who, like Ann Telnaes, want to say what they think needs to be said, without being filtered and both-sidesed and required to be “fair and balanced” by management that is more interested in marketing than in journalism.

Supporting small publishers and individual writers matters. The big boys will get along with or without you, but the voices we need to hear need backing."

At the Intersection of A.I. and Spirituality; The New York Times, January 3, 2025

 Eli Tan, The New York Times; At the Intersection of A.I. and Spirituality

"For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s. Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.’s potential — and fears of it — to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.

Religious leaders have used A.I. to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously.

But the ethical questions around using generative A.I. for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using A.I. for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, other uses for the technology, like sermon writing, are seen by some as a step too far."

We're using AI for stupid and unnecessary reasons. What if we just stopped? | Opinion; Detroit Free Press, January 6, 2025

Nancy Kaffer, Detroit Free Press; We're using AI for stupid and unnecessary reasons. What if we just stopped? | Opinion

"We're jumping feet first into unreliable, unproven tech with devastating environmental costs and a dense thicket of ethical problems.

It's a bad idea. And — because I enjoy shouting into the void — we really ought to stop."

OpenAI holds off on promise to creators, fails to protect intellectual property; The American Bazaar, January 3, 2025

 Vishnu Kamal, The American Bazaar; OpenAI holds off on promise to creators, fails to protect intellectual property

"OpenAI may yet again be in hot water as it seems that the tech giant may be reneging on its earlier assurances. Reportedly, in May, OpenAI said it was developing a tool to let creators specify how they want their works to be included in—or excluded from—its AI training data. But seven months later, this feature has yet to see the light of day.

Called Media Manager, the tool would “identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and video,” OpenAI said at the time, to reflect creators’ preferences “across multiple sources.” It was intended to stave off some of the company’s fiercest critics, and potentially shield OpenAI from IP-related legal challenges...

OpenAI has faced various legal challenges related to its AI technologies and operations. One major issue involves the privacy and data usage of its language models, which are trained on large datasets that may include publicly available or copyrighted material. This raises concerns over privacy violations and intellectual property rights, especially regarding whether the data used for training was obtained with proper consent.

Additionally, there are questions about the ownership of content generated by OpenAI’s models. If an AI produces a work based on copyrighted data, it is tricky to determine who owns the rights—whether it’s OpenAI, the user who prompted the AI, or the creators of the original data.

Another concern is the liability for harmful content produced by AI. If an AI generates misleading or defamatory information, legal responsibility could fall on OpenAI."

Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump; Associated Press (AP) via Washington Post, January 4, 2025

 Todd Richmond | AP via Washington Post; Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump

[Kip Currier: Note that this story posted at 8:08 PM EST January 4, 2025 on the Washington Post website is written by an Associated Press (AP) reporter, not a Washington Post reporter. I have not yet located an article or OpEd piece written by a Washington Post staff person that addresses the Ann Telnaes editorial cartoon controversy, other than the Substack article by Ann Telnaes explaining her resignation.

• When and how will the Washington Post cover this story, and even more importantly, the implications for free presses, access to information, free expression, and democracy?
• Where are the Washington Post OpEd pieces about these issues by internal commentators like Eugene Robinson, Jennifer Rubin, Eric Wemple, etc.?
• Will there be no coverage by the newspaper itself that killed Ann Telnaes' draft cartoon?

The Washington Post's tagline "Democracy Dies in Darkness" is fast becoming an ironic commentary on its own ethical lapses in timely and fulsome reporting, transparency, accountability, and journalistic integrity.]

[Excerpt]

"A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.

Ann Telnaes posted a message Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations."

A Pulitzer winner quits 'Washington Post' after a cartoon on Bezos is killed; NPR, January 4, 2025

David Folkenflik, NPR; A Pulitzer winner quits 'Washington Post' after a cartoon on Bezos is killed

[Kip Currier: Every day, U.S. oligarchs like Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong feel more emboldened to cravenly censor criticism of themselves and impede freedom of expression and access to information.

Thank you, Ann Telnaes, for speaking truth to power with your satirical artistry and standing up for the importance of free and independent presses with your principled resignation decision. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist underscored in explaining her resignation, "Democracy can't function without a free press".

The evidence is now even more clear than one year or a decade ago: Consolidation of ownership of print journalism and broadcast media by a few billionaires and corporate conglomerates chills the ability to dissent and provide access to diverse perspectives. 

The diagnosis and ramifications are also clear: Having a handful of oligarchs control America's newspapers is antithetical to well-informed citizenries and healthy democracies. (See here for a prescient 2017 article by veteran journalist and free speech/free press advocate Bill Moyers.)

Potential remedies? It's absolutely imperative that free speech-supporting Americans develop and nurture alternative ways to promote access to information and freedom of expression, as is increasingly being done on Substack accounts (see examples here, and here, and here) and via podcasts.

In the longer term, collaborative trusts (see here, for example) that can purchase newspapers and share ownership among more than one individual offer some potential ways to challenge oligarch newspaper monopolies.]

[Excerpt]

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Washington Post has resigned after its editorial page editor rejected a cartoon she created to mock media and tech titans abasing themselves before President-elect Donald Trump.

Among the corporate chiefs depicted by Ann Telnaes was Amazon founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos. The episode follows Bezos' decision in October to block publication of a planned endorsement of Vice President Harris over Trump in the waning days of last year's presidential elections.

The inspiration for Telnaes' latest proposed cartoon was the trek by top tech chief executives including Bezos to Trump's Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, as well as the seven-figure contributions several promised to make toward his inauguration. She submitted a sketch before Christmas. It was never published."

Wicked and the Importance of the Public Domain; Reason, January 1, 2025

JOE LANCASTER , Reason; Wicked and the Importance of the Public Domain

"But at the moment there is perhaps no better testament to the importance of the public domain than Wicked."

Florida Sports Blog Hit With Copyright Case; Law360, January 3, 2025

 Andrew Karen, Law360; Florida Sports Blog Hit With Copyright Case

"A Boca Raton, Florida-based sports blog is facing a copyright case from a New York photographer after including an image in a post about the history of the Sports Illustrated brand..."

U.S. Copyright Office to Begin Issuing Further AI Guidance in January 2025; The National Law Review, January 2, 2025

 John Hines of The Sedona Conference  , The National Law Review; U.S. Copyright Office to Begin Issuing Further AI Guidance in January 2025

"Parts 2 and 3, which have not yet been released, will be of heightened interest to content creators and to individuals and businesses involved in developing and deploying AI technologies. Ultimate regulatory and legislative determinations could materially recalibrate the scope of ownership and protection afforded to works of authorship, and the stakes are extremely high...

Part 2 of the report, which the Copyright Office expects to publish “after the New Year Holiday,” will address the copyrightability of AI-generated works, and more specifically, how the nature and degree of such use affects copyrightability and registrability. Current law is clear that to be copyrightable, a work must be created by a human. E.g., Thaler v. Perlmutter, 678 F.Supp. 140 (D.DC 2023), on appeal. However assistive tools are used in virtually all creation, from pencils to cameras to photo-editing software programs. In the context of registrability, the Copyright Office offered the following distinction in its March 2023 guidance: “[W]hether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” In Part 2, the Copyright Office will have an additional opportunity to explore these and related issues – this time with the advantage of the many comments offered through the Notice of Inquiry process.

Part 3 of the report, which the Copyright Office anticipates releasing “in the first quarter of 2025,” will focus on issues associated with training data. AI models, depending on their size and scope, may train on millions of documents—many of which are copyrighted or copyrightable— acquired from the Internet or through acquisition of various robust databases. Users of “trained” AI technologies will typically input written prompts to generate written content or images, depending on the model (Sora is now available to generate video). The output is essentially a prediction based on a correlation of values in the model (extracted from the training data) and values that are derived from the user prompts.

Numerous lawsuits, perhaps most notably the case that The New York Times filed against Microsoft and OpenAI, have alleged that the use of data to train AI models constitutes copyright infringement. In many cases there may be little question of copying in the course of uploading data to train the models. Among a variety of issues, a core common issue will be whether the use of the data for training purposes is fair use. Content creators, of course, point to the fact that they have built their livelihoods and/or businesses around their creations and that they should be compensated for what is a violation of their exclusive rights."

POPEYE, ‘THE SKELETON DANCE,’ AND ‘SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN’ ENTER THE PUBLIC DOMAIN; Rolling Stone, January 1, 2025

DANIEL KREPS, Rolling Stone ; POPEYE, ‘THE SKELETON DANCE,’ AND ‘SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN’ ENTER THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

"The first iteration of Popeye the Sailor, literary classics by Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, and songs like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” are among the copyrighted works that will enter the public domain on Jan. 1.

 

As the calendar turns on New Year’s Day, thousands of copyrighted works across literature, film, and music from 1929 become open to fair use. This year’s slate also includes the French comic icon Tintin, Disney’s still-iconic The Skeleton Dance short (38 million views on YouTube!), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front (the original German text became public domain last year).

Jennifer Jenkins, the director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, documents each year’s Public Domain Day highlights on the center’s website.

 

“For copyrighted culture, the public domain arrives only after a long wait,” Jenkins wrote of the 2025 entrants. “Works from 1929 were first set to go into the public domain after a 56-year term in 1985, but a term extension pushed that date to 2005. They were then supposed to go into the public domain in 2005 after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit another 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over.” (For sound recordings, the copyright term is 100 years.) 

Public Domain Day in 2024 was highlighted by the arrival of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, as the first iteration of those characters — as featured in the 1928 short Steamboat Willie — became free to use."

Column: A Faulkner classic and Popeye enter the public domain while copyright only gets more confusing; Los Angeles Times, December 31, 2024

Michael Hiltzik , Los Angeles Times; Column: A Faulkner classic and Popeye enter the public domain while copyright only gets more confusing

"The annual flow of copyrighted works into the public domain underscores how the progressive lengthening of copyright protection is counter to the public interest—indeed, to the interests of creative artists. The initial U.S. copyright act, passed in 1790, provided for a term of 28 years including a 14-year renewal. In 1909, that was extended to 56 years including a 28-year renewal.

In 1976, the term was changed to the creator’s life plus 50 years. In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, which is known as the Sonny Bono Act after its chief promoter on Capitol Hill. That law extended the basic term to life plus 70 years; works for hire (in which a third party owns the rights to a creative work), pseudonymous and anonymous works were protected for 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.

Along the way, Congress extended copyright protection from written works to movies, recordings, performances and ultimately to almost all works, both published and unpublished.

Once a work enters the public domain, Jenkins observes, “community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history.”"

AI Developments at the U.S. Copyright Office in 2024; IP Watchdog, December 30, 2024

 BARRY WERBIN , IP Watchdog; AI Developments at the U.S. Copyright Office in 2024

"“The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.” Such is the conundrum facing the U.S Copyright Office in this era of rapidly expanding generative artificial intelligence technology. Human creativity has been the cornerstone of copyright protection for original works of authorship ever since the U.S. Constitution recognized copyright as a fundamental right to be protected for limited times. But the tenet that originality exists only when a human is primarily responsible for creating works of authorship is currently in flux and subject to extensive debate. Nowhere is this tension more visible than within the Copyright Office itself, which has been grappling with the core issue of what defines human creation when sophisticated technology like generative AI plays a significant role in creating works of authorship under the direction of a human creator."

Anthropic Agrees to Enforce Copyright Guardrails on New AI Tools; Bloomberg Law, December 30, 2024

 Annelise Levy, Bloomberg Law; Anthropic Agrees to Enforce Copyright Guardrails on New AI Tools

"Anthropic PBC must apply guardrails to prevent its future AI tools from producing infringing copyrighted content, according to a Monday agreement reached with music publishers suing the company for infringing protected song lyrics. 

Eight music publishers—including Universal Music Corp. and Concord Music Group—and Anthropic filed a stipulation partly resolving the publishers’ preliminary injunction motion in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The publishers’ request that Anthropic refrain from using unauthorized copies of lyrics to train future AI models remains pending."

Happy Public Domain Day! Popeye, ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ‘The Sound and the Fury’ and Thousands of Other Captivating Creations Are Finally Free for Everyone to Use; Smithsonian Magazine, December 30, 2024

Ellen Wexler, Smithsonian Magazine ; Happy Public Domain Day! Popeye, ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ‘The Sound and the Fury’ and Thousands of Other Captivating Creations Are Finally Free for Everyone to Use

"On January 1, 2025, Popeye—along with thousands of other copyrighted creations—will enter the public domain in the United States.

Every year, Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, publishes an exhaustive analysis of some of the most important works entering the public domain. This year, the list includes copyrighted titles from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924.

Works enter the public domain when their copyrights expire, typically 95 years after publication. At that point, they become free for anyone to adapt or build upon without permission—with a few caveats. Copyrights to audio recordings, meanwhile, expire 100 years after they were first put to wax...

As Jenkins points out, many of the celebrated classics entering the public domain this year were themselves built atop other public domain works. Disney featured more than a dozen copyright-free songs in its 1929 Mickey cartoons. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which enters public domain on January 1, gets its name from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “[Life] is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” Faulkner, Jenkins writes, is an “author of a timeless work that took from the public domain and now gives back to it.”"

Key IP Issues for the Next President and Congress to Tackle: AI and Patent Subject Matter Eligibility; IP Watchdog, December 29, 2024

RYAN J. MALLOY, IP Watchdog; Key IP Issues for the Next President and Congress to Tackle: AI and Patent Subject Matter Eligibility

"The debates surrounding the 2024 election focused on “hot button” issues like abortion, immigration, and transgender rights. But several important IP issues also loom over the next administration and Congress. These issues include AI-generated deepfakes, the use of copyrighted works for AI training, the patentability of AI-assisted inventions, and patent subject matter eligibility more generally. We might see President Trump and the 119th Congress tackle some or all of these issues in the next term."

Celebrate the grand opening of Kentucky’s newest Patent and Trademark Resource Center; United States Patent and Trademark Center (USPTO), December 19, 2024

United States Patent and Trademark Center (USPTO); Celebrate the grand opening of Kentucky’s newest Patent and Trademark Resource Center

"Kentucky innovators, join us in person on Tuesday, January 7, from 3-6 p.m. ET for the grand opening of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC) at the University of Louisville’s Kornhauser Health Sciences Library.  

Celebrate this addition to the innovation community with remarks from USPTO and university leadership and an official ribbon cutting. You’ll learn about the vital role of intellectual property (IP) in Kentucky and the numerous resources available to help innovators protect their IP.  

After the program concludes, join your fellow creators for an informal networking session at the Louisville Thoroughbred Society from 6:30-8 p.m. ET."

Top Trademark Cases in 2024 and What to Watch in 2025; IP Watchdog, December 23, 2024

DYAN FINGUERRA-DUCHARME & MALLORY CHANDLER, IP Watchdog; Top Trademark Cases in 2024 and What to Watch in 2025

"This year was an eventful one for trademark law—from reiterating the importance of “association” under the Lanham Act, to dispelling the notion that foreign conduct can create liability, to re-working the protection of expressive works after Jack Daniel’s. Below outlines a few of the important trademark decisions from 2024 and cases we are watching in 2025." 

Trademark Tussle: When Elves Land on the Naughty List; Holland & Knight IP/Decode Blog, December 23, 2024

Holland & Knight IP/Decode Blog ; Trademark Tussle: When Elves Land on the Naughty List

"CCA and B LLC, the company behind the "Elf on the Shelf" book, merchandise and the joy (or angst) of children everywhere, has found itself in a legal kerfuffle with Elena Jenkins (aka Elena Popova). The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, accuses Ms. Jenkins of willfully infringing CCA and B's ELF ON THE SHELF® trademarks and the copyrighted images of those mischievous elves without permission. On its wish list, CCA and B is asking for an injunction, monetary damages and destruction of all of Ms. Jenkins' rogue elves."

Copyright on the Calendar: Top Cases of 2024 and What to Watch in 2025; IP Watchdog, December 20, 2024

YAN SUN & JEFFREY HAJDIN & JOHANNA SCHMITT , IP Watchdog; Copyright on the Calendar: Top Cases of 2024 and What to Watch in 2025

"Copyright law provided an arena for some of the most interesting legal battles in 2024. We review some highlights from 2024 below, as well as some cases to watch in 2025."

We Stood Up for Access to the Law and Congress Listened: 2024 in Review; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), December 25, 2024

KATHARINE TRENDACOSTA , Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); We Stood Up for Access to the Law and Congress Listened: 2024 in Review

"Because you wrote in, because experts sent letters explaining the problems, enough members of Congress recognized that Pro Codes is not uncontroversial. It is not a small deal to allow industry giants to own parts of the law."

A Farewell to Copyright: International Public Domain Day 2025; Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives, December 23, 2024

Eden I., Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives; A Farewell to Copyright: International Public Domain Day 2025

"On January 1, 2025, any work published with a copyright notice in the United States in 1929 enters the public domain. Many notable works have been entering the public domain after a 20-year pause beginning in 1999. In recent years, works like The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Disney’s Steamboat Willie have famously entered the public domain. 

What is public domain, and why is it important? Public domain simply means that a work is no longer subject to copyright and is available to the public as a whole. The work is free to be copied in its entirety, reused, adapted, or distributed. The public domain is like a sandbox of works the public can use to play and create. ...

Here in Special Collections and Archives, we are concerned with the copyright surrounding both published and unpublished works. Unpublished works in which the creator died before 1955 will be in the public domain at the beginning of 2025. For unpublished works created by a company, the copyright does not expire until 120 years after the work was created. For many of these unpublished works though, the copyright was transferred to Special Collections and Archives when the physical collection was donated."

Pittsburgh-based medical drama 'The Pitt' comes to Max soon. Here's what you need to know; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 23, 2024

 SAMUEL LONG, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Pittsburgh-based medical drama 'The Pitt' comes to Max soon. Here's what you need to know

"Is this just another ‘ER’?

Before production of “The Pitt,” there was talk in 2020 about reviving the hugely popular “ER,” which ended in 2009, Noah Wyle said in an interview with Steve Kmetko on his Still Here Hollywood podcast. Wyle and “ER” executive producer John Wells recruited a few writers from the 1994 drama to bring the reboot to life, but issues between he and the estate of Michael Crichton, “ER’s” creator, put a halt to the idea, according to Deadline. 

Instead, Wells started working on “The Pitt.” But issues with the medical drama’s resemblance to “ER” still arose. 

A lawsuit filed in August by Michael Crichton’s widow, Sherri Crichton, named Warner Bros Television, Wells, Wyle, Gemmill (“The Pitt’s” showrunner), among others. The suit alleges that, after those named walked away from the “ER” reboot, the concept was instead turned into “The Pitt.” 

Deadline described the similarities between “ER” and “The Pitt” as “striking.”

Warner Bros. Television responded to the lawsuit with a motion to dismiss, stating: “’The Pitt’ is a completely different show from ‘ER.’ Plaintiff cannot use Mr. Crichton’s ‘ER’ contract as a speech-stifling weapon to prevent Defendants from ever making a show about emergency medicine.”

Warner Bros. Fires Back at Crichton Estate Over Claim ‘The Pitt’ Is an ‘ER’ Reboot: It’s a ‘Completely Different Show’; Variety, November 5, 2024

Gene Madders , Variety; Warner Bros. Fires Back at Crichton Estate Over Claim ‘The Pitt’ Is an ‘ER’ Reboot: It’s a ‘Completely Different Show’

"Warner Bros. is seeking to throw out a lawsuit filed by the estate of Michael Crichton, which argued that the forthcoming Max series “The Pitt” is an unauthorized reboot of “ER.”"

AI's assault on our intellectual property must be stopped; Financial Times, December 21, 2024

Kate Mosse, Financial Times; AI's assault on our intellectual property must be stopped

"Imagine my dismay, therefore, to discover that those 15 years of dreaming, researching, planning, writing, rewriting, editing, visiting libraries and archives, translating Occitan texts, hunting down original 13th-century documents, becoming an expert in Catharsis, apparently counts for nothing. Labyrinth is just one of several of my novels that have been scraped by Meta's large language model. This has been done without my consent, without remuneration, without even notification. This is theft...

AI companies present creators as being against change. We are  not. Every artist I know is already engaging with AI in one way or another. But a distinction needs to be made between AI that can be used in brilliant ways -- for example, medical diagnosis -- and the foundations of AI models, where companies are essentially stealing creatives' work for their own profit. We should not forget that the AI companies rely on creators to build their models. Without strong copyright law that ensures creators can earn a living, AI companies will lack the high-quality material that is essential for their future growth."

Overcoming AI’s Nagging Trust And Ethics Issues; Forbes, December 28, 2024

 Joe McKendrick, Forbes ; Overcoming AI’s Nagging Trust And Ethics Issues

"Trust and ethics in AI is what is making business leaders nervous. For example, at least 72% of executives responding to a recent surveyfrom the IBM Institute for Business Value say they “are willing to forgo generative AI benefits due to ethical concerns.” In addition, more than half (56%) indicate they are delaying major investments in generative AI until there is clarity on AI standards and regulations...

"Today, guardrails are a growing area of practice for the AI community given the stochastic nature of these models,” said Ross. “Guardrails can be employed for virtually any area of decisioning, from examining bias to preventing the leakage of sensitive data."...

The situation is not likely to change soon, Jeremy Rambarran, professor at Touro University Graduate School, pointed out. “Although the output that's being generated may be unique, depending on how the output is being presented, there's always a chance that part of the results may not be entirely accurate. This will eventually change down the road as algorithms are enhanced and could eventually be updated in an automated manner.”...

How can AI be best directed to be ethical and trustworthy? Compliance requirements, of course, will be a major driver of AI trust in the future, said Rambarran. “We need to ensure that AI-driven processes comply with ethical guidelines, legal regulations, and industry standards. Humans should be aware of the ethical implications of AI decisions and be ready to intervene when ethical concerns arise.”

Eat’n Park sends another cease-and-desist over Smiley Cookie branding; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 27, 2024

STEPHANA OCNEANU , Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Eat’n Park sends another cease-and-desist over Smiley Cookie branding

"Eat’n Park is set on protecting its iconic Smiley Cookies brand this holiday season.

Alleging trademark infringement, the Homestead-based restaurant chain has sent a cease and desist letter to McArthur’s Bakery in St. Louis for producing a similar smiling cookie business...

EPR Holdings, Inc., tied to the Eat’n Park Restaurants, registered the “Smiley” word trademark in 2007. The accompanying smiley face design used on its cookies and pancakes was registered two years prior. Eat’n Park has sold (and given away) the cookie since the mid 1980s.

“We are not seeking to profit from an agreement with McArthur’s Bakery or to stop their good work; we simply want to do what’s required by the law to uphold our trademarks,” a spokesperson for Eat’n Park told the Post-Gazette in an email...

Should the bakery continue to ignore communication from Eat’n Park, the situation may be taken to court, as has occurred in the past."

SDNY Order Renews Possibility of Digital Millenium Copyright Act as Legal Recourse for News Organizations in the Age of AI; The National Law Review, December 23, 2024

Dan Jasnow of ArentFox Schiff LLP  -  AI Law Blog, The National Law Review; SDNY Order Renews Possibility of Digital Millenium Copyright Act as Legal Recourse for News Organizations in the Age of AI 

"Key Takeaway: The Intercept’s Case Against OpenAI Will Clarify the Future of DMCA Protection Against AI Developers

Until now, other DMCA claims against AI developers have largely failed — most of these cases have not proceeded past the motion-to-dismiss stage — but the order allowing The Intercept’s claim to proceed renews the possibility that the DMCA may be a viable claim against AI developers. For rights holders, 1202(b) provides distinct causes of action against AI developers with different evidentiary requirements than traditional copyright infringement claims. For developers, 1202(b) is another legal risk to be managed, particularly in the wake of the order in The Intercept case."

While the Court Fights Over AI and Copyright Continue, Congress and States Focus On Digital Replicas: 2024 in Review; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), December 27, 2024

CORYNNE MCSHERRY, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ; While the Court Fights Over AI and Copyright Continue, Congress and States Focus On Digital Replicas: 2024 in Review

"These state laws are a done deal, so we’ll just have to see how they play out. At the federal level, however, we still have a chance to steer policymakers in the right direction.  

We get it–everyone should be able to prevent unfair and deceptive commercial exploitation of their personas. But expanded property rights are not the way to do it. If Congress really wants to protect performers and ordinary people from deceptive or exploitative uses of their images and voice, it should take a precise, careful and practical approach that avoids potential collateral damage to free expression, competition, and innovation."