Symposium: Exploring Copyrightability and Scope of Protection — The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts has published its issue dedicated to Columbia Law School’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts annual symposium, held last October. The symposium covered such topics as “whether and how copyright attaches to new and emerging forms of creative expression, as well as doctrines, such as merger and scènes à faire, which may render unprotectable key elements of an otherwise copyrightable work.”
Places a Seuss-Trek Mashup Will Go May Include Back to Court — Bloomberg Law‘s Kyle Jahner covers the recent Ninth Circuit oral arguments in Dr. Seuss Enterprises v. ComicMix. The court is reviewing the lower court’s decision holding defendants’ mashup of Dr. Seuss and Star Trek to be a fair use.
21 and illegal in all states? The German Pelham court confirms when sampling is illegal — In a sad bit of irony, the decision finding the use of a two-second sample of Kraftwerk’s “Metall auf Metall” (Metal on Metal) infringing came out just days before the world lost Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider.
Copyright in the Age of Artificial Intelligence — The U.S. Copyright Office has posted videos from an all day symposium it co-sponsored with the World Intellectual Property Organization. Tune in to hear discussions regarding “the relationship between AI and copyright; what level of human input is sufficient for the resulting work to be eligible for copyright protection; the challenges and considerations for using copyright-protected works to train a machine or to examine large data sets; and the future of AI and copyright policy.”
YouTube Rippers and Record Labels Clash in US Appeals Court — The question of when U.S. courts have personal jurisdiction over operators of foreign websites took center stage as the Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments in UMG v. Kurbanov.
Finally, a copyright hypo: A Webcam Company Is Demanding Payment From an Artist Who Used Screenshots From Its Feeds to Document Italy’s Deserted Streets. Are these images protected by copyright?