Friday’s Endnotes – 05/08/26

By , May 08, 2026.

Publishers and Authors Sue Meta, Alleging ‘Massive’ Copyright Infringement Behind Its Llama AI Service — “‘Meta’s copying of these literary works was neither incidental nor accidental,’ the publishers’ suit claims. ‘It was a calculated decision driven by the need to appropriate the expressive value of copyrighted written works to produce an AI system capable of generating outputs that directly compete with literary works written by human authors.'”

NVIDIA’s Shadow Library Scripts ‘Have No Other Purpose’ Than Infringement, Judge Rules — “This appears to be the first AI training case to apply the new Cox standard, and the result didn’t go the way NVIDIA hoped. The scripts it offered satisfied both the new ‘inducement’ and ‘tailored to infringement’ standards required for a contributory infringement finding.”

ASTM v. UpCodes is a Troubling Misapplication of Warhol’s Transformative Use Clarifications — “The bottom line is that both ASTM and UpCodes published the works for the purpose of helping the public understand the codes and technical standards that impact and govern safety. To say that UpCodes’ purpose is transformative simply because they take the works and post them where the public can access them for free is antithetical to the foundations of copyright law. If that logic were applied widely, it would excuse almost any type of piracy so long as the infringer claimed it was in service of some kind of public interest.”

Annie Leibovitz copyright infringement lawsuit revived in case involving Star Wars movie photos — “The appeals court held that Leibovitz’s retention of certain rights does not automatically foreclose the representative from asserting status as an exclusive licensee, namely because rights can be divisible and subdivisible under Section 106 of the Copyright Act.”

CCC adds AI reuse rights to higher education copyright licence — “CCC said the expanded licence is intended to help institutions address what it describes as a ‘growing permissions gap’ by enabling the authorised internal reuse of lawfully acquired copyrighted content within AI systems for purposes including summarisation, chatbot development, prompting, and research support.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 03/06/26

By , March 06, 2026.

Can Copyright Survive the Age of A.I.? — “I’ve spent my career trying to make sure creators are not treated as collateral damage in someone else’s innovation story. In the age of A.I., copyright can still be a living promise, but only if we remember who it was written for—and if we give those human voices real power in shaping what comes next.”

AI licensing is working in the UK — “The first comprehensive review of how publishers license content for AI use in the UK, which has been released by the Publishers Association, shows that licensing is already being widely adopted by many AI developers.”

Faculty Spotlight: Professor Bruce Boyden — Can the Law Keep Up with Technology? — “In a brief he filed with the Supreme Court, he argued that judges should rely on broader, common-sense legal principles that have guided courts for generations. In other areas of law, especially personal injury law, courts often ask practical questions: Did someone know about another person’s plan to do something harmful? Did they contribute to it? Could they reasonably have prevented it? Professor Boyden believes those same questions can help courts decide when an internet company should be responsible for copyright violations happening on its network.”

CCC Launches New AI Re-Use Rights & Transactional Licensing Capabilities for AI — “CCC is launching internal-only AI re-use rights for text-based works from participating rightsholders in its Annual Copyright License for Higher Education (ACLHE), addressing use cases such as prompting, summarization, chatbots, and other AI uses, within a college or university. CCC will also launch AI Transactional Rights featuring pay-per-use options for specific AI use cases, beginning with content summarization.”

Course Hero owner must pay university $75 million in copyright dispute, US jury says — “Post University, a for-profit school in Waterbury, ​Connecticut, sued Learneo ​in 2021. It ⁠said Course Hero violated copyright law by hosting thousands of the school’s files and wrongfully altering ​them to identify the company as their copyright holder. Learneo ​denied ⁠the allegations.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 03/23/12

By , March 23, 2012.

Canard du jour:  Do residuals make you lazy? If the age of privacy is over, is the age of royalties over, too? — From time to time, you see a statement made that creators get paid repeatedly for work done once. Chris Castle takes on this silly canard. “Royalties, and especially residuals, are one of the breakthrough egalitarian concepts.  I will create a song for your movie and you can pay me a bit now, but I will retain my right to receive income in the future on exploitations of my works.”

Online publishers need an edge — Concurrent Media takes note of a “key nugget” from this week’s 2012 State of the News Media report from the Pew Center. The Big 5 tech companies — Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL — capture 68% of online ad revenues. As Concurrent Media points out, this highlights the big shift away from a market where the incentive is on producing content to one where the incentive is on tracking and monetizing user behavior.

“Copyright Math” is a Joke — Ken Sanney looks at the recent TED talk by Rob Reid making the rounds about two statistics and the maximum amount of statutory damages available to copyright holders under US law. As Sanney puts it, “ It in no way lives up to the TED Talk’s mantra of presenting ‘ideas worth spreading.'”

A Reply to William Patry — At Barry Sookman’s blog, Dan Glover continues an online discussion with Patry concerning fair use that sprung from an earlier blog post. Interesting and enlightening.

This is why Google is losing the future — Says Bobbie Johnson at GigaOM, “First, the search giant offers a little traffic boost to sites that organize data in certain useful ways. Then it turns the game on its head and — without any notice — starts using that structured data to inform its own services. Finally, with a disturbing inevitability, it launches its own competing product that steps in and replace yours.”

The Case for Ultraviolet— “[E]very industry recognizes its own inherent need to evolve or perish. Leaders and innovators in the content industry firmly and publicly acknowledge the imperative to evolve the current content model to meet the needs and desires of today and tomorrow’s, increasingly sophisticated consumers. What we are witnessing is an established industry with a lucrative, legacy business model adapting to disruption via process evolution. Not every step on the way will be perfectly placed, but this is about creating a long-term, successful partnership.”

OnCopyright 2012 — Next Friday, March 30, the Copyright Clearance Center is holding its OnCopyright conference at Columbia Law School in NYC. Check the link for registration details or to watch a live stream of the event. Full list of participants here.

Friday’s Endnotes – 04/08/11

By , April 08, 2011.

5 Mistakes “Anti-Copyrights” Constantly Make — PlagiarismToday’s Jonathan Bailey has an excellent article looking at the common errors of those who want to drastically reduce or eliminate copyright protection. I think number one is an especially common mistake: “Blaming the law for morons.”

A Mounting Crusade for Criminal Activity — A news conference was held this past week addressing recent efforts to reduce the ease and profit of digital piracy. The Copyright Alliance notes the predictable and troubling rhetoric from those opposed to such efforts — including the misuse of terms like “censorship”, which “is at best silly and at worst a dramatic and somewhat shocking shift in the definition of the very important principle of free speech.”

Direct Reporting: Tenenbaum Oral Argument — Oral argument for Sony BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum was heard this week. Joel Sage, at Legally Sociable, attended in person and shares his thoughts. You’ll find lots of links to the briefs and other analysis there, a link to the audio of the arguments, and a lengthy comment from one of the law students working on Tenenbaum’s appeal.

Google Books Settlement Unraveled — On March 30th, the Copyright Clearance Center presented a webinar to discuss the rejection of the Amended Settlement Agreement in the Google Books Settlement. The webinar is archived on the site, along with a link to a text transcript. Really great discussion regarding the issues in the case and what the rejection means, as well as an excellent and succinct history of the litigation. That alone is well worth a read if you want to know what the Settlement is all about.

The Discography — Billing itself as the “Legal Encyclopedia of Popular Music”, this site features “1,300 entries covering 2,400 court opinions (including over 30,000 pieces of data) spanning almost 200 years, fully summarized and searchable by numerous variables, featuring nearly every artist you’ll think of (many you won’t), covering copyrights and contracts, trusts, torts and more.” Quite a great resource!

Facebook Self-Publishing Ventures Keep Cloning — Not particularly copyright related, but fascinating nevertheless. Did you know there are currently at least seven different services that offer on-demand publishing of your Facebook profile in book form? Leading future archaeologists to the inevitable conclusion that ” Gosh, twenty-first century people sure ‘liked’ a lot of stuff.”

Beastie Boys – Make Some Noise — Finally, for any Beastie Boys fans out there, the group has released a track from their upcoming album, Hot Sauce Committee Part 2. The trio also has a companion short film with quite a cast list: Will Ferrell, Elijah Wood, Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, John C. Reilly, Jack Black, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Will Arnett, Ted Danson, Steve Buscemi, and many more.

Check the preview below (warning: adult language).

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