Copyright Office: Sorry, but you probably can’t protect your AI-generated art; Fast Company, June 30, 2023

 JESUS DIAZ, Fast Company; Copyright Office: Sorry, but you probably can’t protect your AI-generated art

"Well, there’s nothing to see here, folks. You don’t need any of the generative AI tools in our weekly roundup because they will produce stuff you don’t really own. At least that’s what the United States Copyright Office (USCO) says. The federal agency doubled down on its AI doctrine during a recent webinar, labeling anything produced by AI as “unclaimable material.”

In other words, anything that comes out of an AI program can’t be protected under copyright law and will not be accepted even if it’s included in a work created by a human. So those extra trees and mountains you added to your landscape photo with Photoshop Firefly beta? They are not yours, sorry.”

Robert Kasunic of the USCO says, “The Office will refuse to register works entirely generated by AI. Human authorship is a precondition to copyrightability.” But it’s more complicated than that. As Petapixel reports, USCO will register your images if they are modified with AI, but you will have to declare which parts are made using AI, making them “unclaimable, essentially discounting them” from the copyright protection. Kasunic went on to say that USCO believes that using any AI to generate content is akin to giving instructions to a commissioned artist.

How will USCO enforce this policy in a world where generative AI work is practically undetectable? It’s a question that only has one obvious answer: LOL."

The Blue Wars: A Report from the Front; Harvard Law Record, 3/21/16

Carl Malamud, Harvard Law Record; The Blue Wars: A Report from the Front:

"The subject of this legal inquisition is a work you all know well: The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. A series of letters from Ropes & Gray LLP firmly asserted and repeatedly reminded me of the legal protections surrounding this work including trademark and copyright protections. THE BLUEBOOK A UNIFORM SYSTEM OF CITATION, Registration No. 3,886,986; THE BLUEBOOK, Registration No. 3,756,727; The Bluebook A Uniform System of Citation, 20th edition, Copyright Registration No. TX0008140199 (June 5, 2015).

The Blue Wars started in 2009 when Frank Bennett, a law professor at Nagoya University in Japan, was working on some open source software for legal citation. Professor Bennett wanted to build in a resolution mechanism for common abbreviations, for example mapping the court name “Temporary Emergency Court of Appeals” to the designated abbreviation (“Temp. Emer. Ct. App.”). The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation 234 tbl.T.1 (Columbia Law Review Ass’n et al. eds., 20th ed. 2015).

Professor Bennett applied to the Harv. L. Rev. Ass’n for permission to use the rudimentary Bluebook web site and grab the abbreviations. He was firmly rebuffed. Being an open source acolyte, Professor Bennett felt he was entitled to use those common and obvious abbreviations, so he wrote to his spiritual leader [Lawrence Lessig] for help...

These are the challenges in front of us all. What is at stake is not the future of a $36 book, it is the question of how we communicate the law so that we all understand each other; so that our system of justice can be transparent and clear; so that we all know what we’re talking about when we refer to a source. I hope we can do this together."

Crosswords and copyright; Washington Post, 3/15/16

David Post, Washington Post; Crosswords and copyright:

"What’s interesting, to me, in all this, aside from the light it sheds on puzzle construction, is that it illustrates how “plagiarism,” though it is often conflated with copyright infringement, actually covers very different territory and involves very different interests. A crossword’s “theme” is probably one element of the puzzle-creator’s work that is not protected by copyright; copyright law doesn’t protect “ideas,” only the expression of ideas, and a puzzle’s theme is, in my opinion, just such an unprotectable “idea,” free for the taking (as far as copyright law is concerned). But it’s precisely this kind of taking — theme theft — that gets the angriest response from those in the puzzle-writing business.

This has a direct parallel in academic writing. There, too, the plagiarism norms focus on a kind of borrowing that the law of copyright deems permissible: taking another’s ideas or expression without attribution. Nobody in the academic world will complain if you use their ideas or quote their work — in fact, that’s very much the whole point of the enterprise. But to do so without citation — that will get you into the hottest of hot water. [Just ask Doris Kearns Goodwin, or Stephen Ambrose or Joseph Ellis]. Yet copyright law gives an author no enforceable right to have his/her work properly attributed to him/her — a fact that surprised the hell out of many of my law prof colleagues when they first learned of it (insofar as proper attribution was really the only thing they cared about)."