Supreme

Massive win for creators this week! A landmark 7-2 Supreme Court ruling (since when does THAT happen?) on Thursday couldn't have come at a more opportune moment, coinciding with the unprecedented Senate hearings on AI Oversight and the Copyright Office's AI listening initiative that I attended. The discussions at these events made it abundantly clear that the concept of fair use lies at the heart of how big tech behemoths intend to defend their ability to freely scrape and repurpose the works of others without giving due credit or compensation. The arguments put forth by these leviathans are very reminiscent of the infamous Warhol-Goldsmith case, so the ruling has far-reaching implications.

As a reminder, in a nutshell, forty years ago Andy Warhol appropriated and repurposed photographer Lynn Goldsmith's portrait of Prince as his own screen-printed artwork without bothering to compensate her. After years of legal back and forth, the Supreme Court ruled definitively against Warhol's estate, restricting the boundaries of fair use and presenting us with quite the legal page-turner (not exactly Grisham, but you get the idea). You can read it on the link below. The court unequivocally declares that fair use cannot be claimed because both Warhol's derivative use and Goldsmith's original use are similarly commercial in nature and revolve around what are obviously portraits of Prince. Well, yeah. Having personally negotiated many contracts for artists to adapt and create derivative works from other artists' commercial creations, that seems pretty straightforward, so it's amazing it took this long to bolt it onto the judicial branch. But there's more.

What caught my attention is the court's explicit reaffirmation that copyright owners hold the exclusive rights to create derivative transformed works based on their own original creations, and not anyone - or thing - else. This should send shockwaves through the Generative AI community, as it casts a spotlight on the precarious position of works that have been derived and transformed without attribution by Chat GPT and its ilk's internet-sized scrapers. Essentially, if an AI-generated creation can be deemed a derivative work of an original piece, existing copyright laws make it clear that a human intention likely instigated that process, and the human who expressed that intention in their art deserves to be compensated. This ruling presents an intriguing and necessary path towards adapting and deepening existing copyright law to accommodate the ever-expanding realm of AI - and keeping humans in the loop.

Massive win for creators this week! A landmark 7-2 Supreme Court ruling (since when does THAT happen?) on Thursday couldn't have come at a more opportune moment, coinciding with the unprecedented Senate hearings on AI Oversight and the Copyright Office's AI listening initiative that I attended. The discussions at these events made it abundantly clear that the concept of fair use lies at the heart of how big tech behemoths intend to defend their ability to freely scrape and repurpose the works of others without giving due credit or compensation. The arguments put forth by these leviathans are very reminiscent of the infamous Warhol-Goldsmith case, so the ruling has far-reaching implications.

As a reminder, in a nutshell, forty years ago Andy Warhol appropriated and repurposed photographer Lynn Goldsmith's portrait of Prince as his own screen-printed artwork without bothering to compensate her. After years of legal back and forth, the Supreme Court ruled definitively against Warhol's estate, restricting the boundaries of fair use and presenting us with quite the legal page-turner (not exactly Grisham, but you get the idea). You can read it on the link below. The court unequivocally declares that fair use cannot be claimed because both Warhol's derivative use and Goldsmith's original use are similarly commercial in nature and revolve around what are obviously portraits of Prince. Well, yeah. Having personally negotiated many contracts for artists to adapt and create derivative works from other artists' commercial creations, that seems pretty straightforward, so it's amazing it took this long to bolt it onto the judicial branch. But there's more.

What caught my attention is the court's explicit reaffirmation that copyright owners hold the exclusive rights to create derivative transformed works based on their own original creations, and not anyone - or thing - else. This should send shockwaves through the Generative AI community, as it casts a spotlight on the precarious position of works that have been derived and transformed without attribution by Chat GPT and its ilk's internet-sized scrapers. Essentially, if an AI-generated creation can be deemed a derivative work of an original piece, existing copyright laws make it clear that a human intention likely instigated that process, and the human who expressed that intention in their art deserves to be compensated. This ruling presents an intriguing and necessary path towards adapting and deepening existing copyright law to accommodate the ever-expanding realm of AI - and keeping humans in the loop.