Copyright & Social Media
Communications Law
Week 8 Fall 2024 – Slides & Video
Will discuss the most important aspects of this pre-recorded class next Monday.
US Copyright Office Rejects DMCA Exemption for Remote Access to Libraries’ Video Game Collections
Hi everyone! I would like to share with you an interesting article I came across on findlaw.com that discusses a recent decision by the U.S. Copyright Office following a petition for an exemption under Section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to make video game collections remotely accessible for scientific research. The Digital Millennium […]
Judge Dismisses Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against OpenAI
On Thursday, November 7, a New York district court dismissed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI that accused the company of misusing copyrighted material to train ChatGPT. News outlets Raw Story and AlterNet filed the copyright infringement lawsuit in February. The district judge ruled that the news outlets had not shown sufficient harm caused by ChatGPT […]
CanLII v. Caseway: Future of AI-generated Legal Databases on Trial
Resonating with our latest class discussion, in a fresh claim filed at the BC Supreme Court, the beloved CanLII gets in a legal dispute with Caseway, a company using AI as a legal researcher assistant to provide clients with legal information for a subscription fee. CanLII alleges that the company “coordinated the bulk and systematic […]
Copyright and AI
Since our class is focused on Canadian IP law, I’m working to incorporate some relevant discussions from Swiss legal literature that I’ve come across. This paper examines copyright issues related to generative AI, with a focus on text and image generation programs. The first part briefly outlines the basics of such AI programs. The discussion […]
“Text Mining” as Fair Dealing?
At the end of the last class, we realized that one of the pressing questions related to AI that courts around the world will soon have to answer is whether the equivalent of the Canadian “fair dealing” is met when generative AI uses copyrighted works to “learn”. That same day, I came across an interview […]
China finds in favour of copyright in AI
As we’re wrapping up the course section on copyright and considering we have focused a lot on AI, I thought it would be interesting to share a case from 2023 in China where it was held that there can be copyright in works of AI. The case involved an AI generated image which was created […]
Week 7 Fall 2024 – Slides & Video
My experience suggests mentally budgeting for roughly one technical gaffe per semester when using lecture capture. Guess this week was that class for IP Law. So close to Halloween the horrors of the “headless instructor” did seem oddly appropriate, but hardly useful. Accordingly, you will find only slides and my voice-over below. As well, the […]
Could Canadian IP Law Benefit from Anti-SLAPP Legislation?
This term I am taking another IP course with Professor Reynolds about the intersection between IP and human rights. I decided to write my final paper on how enacting Anti-SLAPP legislation at the federal level could bolster users’ rights (framed as free expression rights as well as IP rights) and the doctrine of fair dealing […]