Copyright & Social Media
Communications Law
“Webtoons” and Generative A.I. in South Korea – Is Artistic Style Copyrightable?
I came across an interesting situation unfolding in South Korea regarding the development of image generating A.I. for web comics (commonly known as “webtoons” in Korea). As a preface, I would like to highlight that I do not know much about webtoons nor about industry all that well. I tried my best translating Korean to […]
Sweden™?
Hi everyone, I recently came across an interesting Forbes article about Sweden’s efforts to trademark its name, making it the first country in the world to apply to do so. As the article notes, it’s unclear whether this application is a marketing move or an initiative by Visit Sweden (the country’s tourism board) “to protect […]
OpenAI defeats news outlets’ copyright lawsuit over AI training, for now
I came across this interesting article that neatly ties into what the class has covered on Copyright in the last few classes. I find the New York district court has ruled in an unfortunate way, as it seems that AI-learning algorithms can seemingly circumvent traditional copyright protections. It seems that at least in the state […]
Podcast: Interview with Canadian Entertainment Lawyer and drummer of “One Bad Son”: Kurt Dahl the “Lawyer-Drummer”
Kurt Dahl the “Lawyer/Drummer”
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 […]