A young rapper who alleged that a chart-topping stage performer purloined his beat track could not prevail on his copyright infringement claim because he had registered only a copyright in the sound recording of the beat and not in the underlying composition, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has held. But the court, in affirming the district court’s grant of summary judgment against the young rapper, also agreed that he was not required to pay attorney fees in the case.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected copyright protection for a car that was a centerpiece for several popular movies based on an “essentially standardless three-part test that contradicts an on-point decision of [the Supreme] Court and is at odds with the test applied by three other Circuit Courts,” a new petition for certiorari asserts. The petition, which asks the Court to resolve a putative circuit split over the standard for protecting a fictional character, also takes the court of appeals to task for imposing a requirement that a character possess “anthropomorphic” qualities in order to gain protection under the law.
“The Copyright Office has ambiguously deemed humanity as the sine qua non of copyright [even though] this Court has explained the only sine qua non is originality,” a prominent AI inventor has told the Supreme Court. The inventor’s petition for certiorari, which will surely earn points for legal creativity even if it does not lead to a hearing before the nation’s top court, argues that the human authorship requirement was invented by the Copyright Office and that property owners are entitled to “property made by their property.”
The Supreme Court should decide whether a consumer of a popular children’s toy has the legal standing to oppose the registration of a trademark in those goods, a new petition for certiorari asserts. The petition, filed on behalf of a law professor and longtime afficionado of the toy in question, points to a split among the federal courts of appeals over whether and how the principles of Article III standing in federal court should be applied to administrative agency proceedings.
Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and three other writers will not be deposed in ongoing class-action litigation against OpenAI, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in the latest of a flurry of discovery rulings in a series of now-consolidated actions against the generative artificial intelligence company, found that the mere fact that the five writers were once named plaintiffs in other lawsuits against OpenAI, without more, could support their being dragged back into the case.
The company that owns and operates a popular AI chatbox allegedly gathered enough information on its users’ habits to make it responsible for those users’ infringement of copyrighted music lyrics, the federal court for San Jose, California has ruled. The court, in denying the AI service’s motion to dismiss a copyright infringement complaint by the owners of those lyrics, also found that the complaint adequately alleged that the company removed protected copyright management information with the intention to enable or conceal future acts of infringement.
Chinese e-commerce merchant Temu will be permitted to moved forward with copyright and trademark infringement claims against its longtime rival Shein, the federal court for the District of Columbia has held. But the court, in partially denying Shein’s motion to dismiss the complaint, found that Temu had not adequately pleaded trade secret misappropriation and antitrust claims against its e-commerce rival
A Puerto Rican musician and composer could not proceed with a lawsuit against a music publisher it accused of improperly diverting music streaming remedies because he did not state a claim for copyright infringement and Congress had not created any other federal right of action to pursue such claims, the federal court for Puerto Rico has held. The court, in dismissing the claim, nonetheless made clear that the aggrieved copyright holder could pursue an action in the nature of unjust enrichment in a local court in the island commonwealth.
The author and streaming service behind the dystopian survival thriller “Squid Game” will get an early exit from accusations that they pirated the work of a Bollywood screenwriter, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in dismissing the complaint on the pleadings, found that the Indian-born claimant did not have standing to bring the lawsuit and that the two works were “dramatically and drastically different from one another.”
A jury could not reasonably find that X’s terms of service freely permitted users to embed the posts of other users on their own feeds, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in granting summary judgment to a videographer who documented a number of noteworthy news events in the year 2021 through 2023, also found that the unlicensed re-embedding of videos posted to X threatened market harm to the entire licensing market for the work and not merely harm to the market for X embeds.
The organization that collects digital streaming royalties on behalf of music publishers and songwriters sufficiently alleged that Spotify cheated it out of revenues by artificially inflating the value of the audiobooks component of a bundled offering that combined audiobook listening and music streaming, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in giving the music collective leave to file an amended complaint with its allegations against Spotify, also rejected the digital streaming company’s argument, based on a new Supreme Court precedent, that the court should have stood by its earlier dismissal of the complaint with prejudice.
A federal judge in San Francisco has given his preliminary approval to a $1.5 billion settlement over the pirated use of books to train the large language model powering a popular AI “chatbox” service, according to public reports and a brief docket order filed by the court. The settlement, described by the parties as “the largest copyright settlement in the world,” comes shortly after the parties filed a joint response to 34 detailed questions that the court had posed in response to settlement agreement originally submitted—and widely reported on—earlier this month.
A generative artificial company that creates digital music files in response to user prompts has been hacking into YouTube and downloading music without a license in order to better train its models, a new filing by major record labels asserts. The filing, which comes in the form of a motion for leave to file an amended complaint in the federal court in Boston, adds a new claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to an already pending copyright infringement lawsuit against the AI company.
Two software developers who emulated the characters and settings of a popular video game in their own competing version could be held liable for a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even though they did not directly hack into the servers where the original software code was hosted, the federal court for San Diego has held. The court, in granting a preliminary injunction on behalf of the copyright holder for the original game, found that the two coders likely circumvented technical measures, in violation of the DMCA, by altering files to redirect users to their own servers and thereby bypass the login verification URL’s of the original game-maker.
A trial attorney who successfully defended a claim that he purloined a jury consultant’s study and replicated it while defending one of the alleged perpetrators of the events of January 6, 2021, would not be entitled to attorney fees under the Copyright Act because the copyright owner nonetheless prevailed on other aspects of her claim and won a jury award of damages, the federal court for Washington, D.C. has held. But the court, in rejecting the demand for fees, nonetheless reduce the amount that the attorney would have to pay in damages.
A company that creates template language for use by home inspectors failed to state a claim for copyright infringement against one of its competitors because the competitor merely hosted sample reports created and uploaded by its users and because the complaint failed to identify with specificity just which user-generated reports, if any, unlawfully reproduced the template language at issue, the federal court for Colorado has held. The court, in granting a motion to dismiss on the pleadings, also found that the copyright owner failed to allege with sufficient sufficiency claims for false advertising claims under the Lanham Act and violation of Colorado consumer protection law.
A trial attorney who successfully defended a claim that he purloined a jury consultant’s study and replicated it while defending one of the alleged perpetrators of the events of January 6, 2021, would not be entitled to attorney fees under the Copyright Act because the copyright owner nonetheless prevailed on other aspects of her claim and won a jury award of damages, the federal court for Washington, D.C. has held. But the court, in rejecting the demand for fees, nonetheless reduce the amount that the attorney would have to pay in damages.
A company that creates template language for use by home inspectors failed to state a claim for copyright infringement against one of its competitors because the competitor merely hosted sample reports created and uploaded by its users and because the complaint failed to identify with specificity just which user-generated reports, if any, unlawfully reproduced the template language at issue, the federal court for Colorado has held. The court, in granting a motion to dismiss on the pleadings, also found that the copyright owner failed to allege with sufficient sufficiency claims for false advertising claims under the Lanham Act and violation of Colorado consumer protection law.
A videographer who claimed that Reuters news service purloined his footage of record-breaking winter storms in Buffalo would not be entitled to recover damages in the form of lost licensing fees because he was “looking for a windfall” without the evidence to support his damage estimate, the federal court for Manhattan has held. But the court, while narrowing the videographer’s claim of actual damages, held that he could still pursue a claim for statutory damages based on the media company’s allegedly willful infringement.
A late-night talk show host who mocked a former congressman’s ostensible willingness to “say anything for money” in personalized video greetings made a fair use of the politician’s words, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has held. The court, in affirming the Manhattan federal court’s dismission of the copyright infringement lawsuit, emphasized that the TV host used the recorded greetings for a different purpose than the original and that any harm to the market for the politician’s video greetings was a result of the parody and therefore not actionable.
The named plaintiffs in a putative class action over Google’s generative artificial intelligence services could not rope Google’s parent company Alphabet into the proceedings, the federal court for San Jose, California has held. The court, in granting a motion to dismiss the parent company from the action, underscored that the named plaintiffs identified nothing that would tie Alphabet to the allegedly infringing conduct beyond the mere fact that Alphabet and Google had a traditional parent-subsidiary relationship.
A gravestone designer will have to persuade a federal jury that its designs had independent economic value in order to collect statutory damages for each design individually rather than as a group of collections, the federal court for Columbus, Georgia has held. But the court, in rejecting the designer’s motion for summary judgment on the statutory damages claim, narrowed the scope of trial in other ways by concluding as a matter of law that the designer had a legally meritorious copyright infringement claim.
An artist who waited to file suit more than three years after an allegedly infringing video was uploaded to the internet was barred by the statute of limitations from pursuing her claim, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has held. The court, in its second encounter with the lawsuit—itself the third of three lawsuits brought by the same artist over the same works—emphasized that the statute of limitations began upon the artist’s discovery of the alleged infringement and not, as the artist contended, at the later time that the Copyright Office ruled on the application for registration of her works.
A lawsuit between a cultural icon of the disco era and her one-time music producer will be transferred from its current venue of Manhattan to a federal court in Los Angeles, the Manhattan federal court has held. The court, in transferring the case, avoided the need to tangle with the merits of a high-profile lawsuit that accused the former producer of absconding with royalties, wrongly claiming ownership of popular music compositions and sound recordings, and allegedly forging signatures on intellectual property transfer agreements.
The unlicensed use of books to train the large language model powering a popular AI “chatbox” services “was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act,” the federal court for San Francisco has held. But the court’s landmark decision—the first to directly opine on whether the training of generative AI models could be considered fair use—comes with some important limitations that may distinguish it from other AI-related cases pending throughout the federal judiciary.