Justices require actual knowledge that application was erroneous to invalidate copyright filing — Writing at ScotusBlog, Ronald Mann takes a look at Thursday’s decision in Unicolors v. H&M, so far the only copyright case taken up by the US Supreme Court this term, and likely Justice Breyer’s last copyright opinion. The result is a good one: copyright owners don’t lose their ability to defend legitimate infringement claims because of inadvertent mistakes made on their registration application.
Appeals Court Revives Copyright Lawsuit Over ‘Servant’ — “The decision in favor of Gregorini is at least the third from the federal appeals court since 2020 reversing a federal judge’s decision to toss a copyright lawsuit. In each of the cases, the 9th Circuit cautioned lower courts against imposing their views on what are supposed to be subjective inquiries requiring further arguments and expert testimony.”
Authors Guild Statement on AAP’s Win in Maryland E-book Licensing Case — “‘Public libraries deserve and require more public funding to meet the growing needs of library patrons, including the ability to purchase an adequate number of e-book licenses,’ [Authors Guild CEO Mary] Rasenberger added. ‘Mandatory e-book licensing laws don’t address this issue, and unfairly target authors and publishers. Moreover, the publishing industry depends on a system of stable, consistent rules, including federal control over copyright law. ‘If we let all 50 states make up their own copyright laws, authors and publishers would need to comply with different requirements in each state.'”
Sorry, Your NFT Is Worthless: The Copyright and Generative Art Problem for NFT Collections — Franklin Graves writes at IPWatchdog, “If software is used to autonomously create 10,000 musical compositions based on a set of four cords, should those compositions be eligible for copyright protection? Does it make a difference if an AI or machine learning model was used? What if the model was trained using the top songs from the Billboard charts to mimic popular music styles?”
Why you can’t rebuild Wikipedia with crypto — An engaging interview with crypto skeptic Molly White. “Towards the end of 2021 I started to see so much web3 hype, everywhere: on social media, in conversations with friends, in technical spaces, in the news. When I went to look up what ‘web3’ even was, I found no end of articles talking about how one company or another was doing something with web3, or how some venture capital firm was setting up a web3 fund, or how all the problems with the current web were going to be solved by web3… but very few that would actually succinctly describe what the term even meant.”