Communications Law
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“My Name Is” – Trademark within hiphop?
“Murda on the Beat, so it’s not nice”, “We got London on the Track”, “Young chop on the beat”. If you have listened to popular music in the past decade, particularly hip-hop, you have likely heard recurring phrases such as these included at the start of a song. These clips are known as “producer tags” […]
Against Intellectual Property: Final Project
*This post is submitted as my final project for the course* AGAINST INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY In this essay, I argue that intellectual property (“IP”) cannot be justified by property rights alone, as it is based on artificially created scarcity. IP rights are rights to intangible things, which, by definition, cannot be scarce. […]
This is a tesla, not a Tesla
In most Slavic languages, a tesla is a type of hammer (see main post picture). It’s great for pulling out nails and as a kid, grandma and I used teslas to plant potatoes on the farm. It’s also good for settling disputes. But can it be used in a lawsuit for IP infringement? Drumroll….: it […]
Judge dismisses artists’ claims that AI “fed” by their works infringed copyright
Original article: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-pares-down-artists-ai-copyright-lawsuit-against-midjourney-stability-ai-2023-10-30/ Summary: visual artists accuse Stability AI, Midjourney and DevianArt of misusing their copyrighted works in connection with the companies’ generative artificial intelligence systems. Allegations: Stability (AI system) used billions of images “scraped” from the internet, including theirs, without permission to teach Stable Diffusion to create its own images. Outcome: judge dismissed all […]
AI wins state fair art contest, annoys humans (and bureaucrats too!)
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/09/us-rejects-ai-copyright-for-famous-state-fair-winning-midjourney-art/ Why bother?! Was that not the first question that came to you after reading the piece? Why was the artist trying to obtain copyright registration in the first place? For possible monetary gains? To cause an outrage? To see if he can get away with it, thus gaining notoriety? Despite appearances, most of us […]
Trade Secret Law
Trade Secrets Hi everyone! Brandon and I were talking about things IP law might not cover. While chatting we started thinking about things like secret recipes or processes, and stumbled upon trade secrets as a branch of IP law. Looking further into it, we realized that this is both an important type of Intellectual Property […]
EDM Video with Live Sampling
IMG_9742 Hi everyone! Hope you’re all enjoying reading break. I wanted to share this video I took last Friday night at an EDM concert. In the clip, Timmy Trumpet is sampling a song by David Guetta, which is in turn itself sampling a song by Eiffel 65. It reminded me of our discussion last class […]