“Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed — “Emails discussing torrenting prove that Meta knew it was ‘illegal,’ authors alleged. And Bashlykov’s warnings seemingly landed on deaf ears, with authors alleging that evidence showed Meta chose to instead hide its torrenting as best it could while downloading and seeding terabytes of data from multiple shadow libraries as recently as April 2024.”
More Great Copyright Books Freely Available on Information Law Series Archive — “Following the successful launch of the Information Law Series Archive in September 2024, ten more volumes have been made freely available on the IViR website. These include the groundbreaking and much-cited dissertations by Martin Senftleben on copyright and the three-step test, Mireille van Eechoud on applicable law in copyright, and Ashwin van Rooijen on software copyright and competition law.”
US court says copyright termination applies globally, potentially causing ‘chaos’ for rightsholders — “Until now, it was generally understood that when an author exercises their termination right under US law, this applies only to US rights – international rights remain with the assignee (i.e., the publisher who bought the rights). However, a recent ruling by the US District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana upended this: The court concluded that a termination under US law applies globally – or, at least, in all the countries that participate in the Berne Convention, the international treaty that requires signatory countries to recognize copyrights created in other signatory countries.”
Inside the Copyright Office’s Report, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability — “Part 2: Copyrightability analyzes the type and level of human contribution sufficient for outputs created using generative AI to be eligible for copyright protection in the United States. It provides an overview of the technologies and discusses existing U.S. copyright laws, the policy implications of copyrighting AI-generated works, and whether legislative changes are needed. It also describes how other countries are approaching the question of copyrightability.”
DC Comics Sued Over Superman’s Foreign Copyright Protections — “The assignment of the rights to the Superman story under copyright law in countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia automatically terminated 25 years after the author’s death, according to the complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York”