Copyright & Social Media
Communications Law
Joanna Xia
Fair use as a sword? The dancing baby case
It all started when Lenz posted a YouTube video of her then-toddler-aged son dancing while Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy” played in the background, and Universal used copyright claims to get the link disabled. The case brought to the court is: whether a rightsholder can use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to take down an obvious fair […]
Different interpretation of “purpose and character of the use” in US fair use doctrine – Andy Warhol decision commentary
The Andy Warhol decision released in May of this year reflects the US court’s latest interpretation of the fair use doctrine, and sparked controversy of what constitutes the first factor in the fair use doctrine, namely, “the purpose and character of the use”. The differences between the majority and dissent opinions highlight the tension between […]
Input or Output? Framing legal arguments in ChatGPT training model copyright cases
Generative AI raises a host of interesting legal issues. An area of large controversy involves the creation of large language models to train systems such as ChatGPT. Professor Festinger has mentioned the case of Margaret Atwood, specially the world-renowned author’s response when she found out pirated copies of her books were used to train AI. In […]