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Home :: Copyright Law
14 Aug 2023
In 2020 a group of book publishers sued the Internet Archive over their Controlled Digital
Lending program, which made PDF scans of books and lent them out from the Archive's
web site.
For books still in copyright, the Archive usually limited the number of copies of a book
lent to the number of physical copies of the book they had in storage.
Several publishers sued with an argument that can be summarized as
"that's not how it works".
In late March the judge made a ruling that can be summarized
as "of course that's not how it works."
(More background here.)
After several months of quiet negotiations, on Friday the two
parties filed
a
proposed consent agreement in which the Archive promised to stop it, and pay the plaintiffs
an undisclosed but presumably not huge amount of money.
The only disagreement was exactly what they promise to stop, with letters from each
to the judge explaining their positions.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/fryingfire.html
07 May 2023
Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT-4 and its front end ChatGPT work by ingesting
gigantic amounts of text from the Internet to train the model, and then responding to prompts
with text generated from those models.
Depending on who you ask, this is either one step (or maybe no steps) from Artificial General
Intelligence, or as Ted Chiang wrote in the New Yorker,
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.
While I have my opinions about that, at this point I'm considering what the relationship
is under copyright law between the input text and the output text.
Keeping in mind that I am not a lawyer, and no court has yet decided a LLM case, let's take a look.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/llmcopy.html
14 Apr 2023
The Internet Archive has for several years run a program they call Controlled Digital Lending (CDL.)
The Archive takes physical paper books, scans them, puts the books in storage, and
then lends out the scans, with each scan lent to only one person at a time.
Their theory is that the scans are equivalent to the books, so what they're doing is
the same as when a library lends physical books.
Not surprisingly, book publishers don't like this since they have their own idea about
how e-books work. In 2020 several publishers sued, and on March 24 the court ruled
quite firmly in favor of the publishers and said there is no such thing as CDL.
While there was a lot not to like about the plaintiffs, and there are certainly reasons to want CDL to exist
in some form, this decision reminds us that wishful thinking is not a substitute for legal
research.
What we think the law should say, or wishes it said, is not what it actually says.
It also reminds us yet again why copyright law is such a poor fit for digital materals.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/nocdl.html
11 Jan 2023
We hear that the widely touted ChatGPT can do a respectable job writing high school
essays, malware ransom notes, and the like. When it writes a document,
who owns the copyright?
An acquaintance asked ChatGPT for its advice and unsurprisingly it suggested
updating copyright law to give special recognition to material written
by AI software. (Tomorrow I plan to ask an herbalist if I should use more herbs.)
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/notai.html
06 Apr 2021
Back in the 1980s, everyone used the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet on their PCs.
In 1989, Borland released a competitor, Quattro Pro.
It used the same menu commands as 1-2-3 so that users could import their 1-2-3 spreadsheets
with keyboard macros.
Lotus sued Borland, and after a loss in the district court, Borland won on appeal, arguing
that the keyboard commands are a "method of operation" and not subject to copyright.
Lotus appealed to the Supreme Court, which deadlocked 4-4 (one justice was recused) in 1996.
That meant the appeals court decision was affirmed but it did not set a formal precedent.
Since then everyone assumed that settled the matter, you can't copyright the way a program works
or its interfaces.
Well, everyone except one guy in Hawaii.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/oragoog.html
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