Under US copyright law, to receive protection, a work must be “fixed” which means that a work must be expressed or embodied in a material medium that lasts for more than a transitory period.
The US Copyright Office recently made headlines for partially revoking a copyright registration it previously issued for an AI-generated graphic novel. Artist Kristina Kashtanova used the Midjourney platform to create images that she included in her graphic novel called Zarya of the Dawn.
Ed Sheeran recently successfully defended against a copyright infringement lawsuit over his 2014 hit “Thinking Out Loud.” Songwriter Ed Townsend’s heirs brought the suit alleging Sheeran had infringed Townsend’s copyrights in the 1973 Motown classic, “Let’s Get It On” which Townsend co-authored with Marvin Gaye.
General Mills, Inc. obtained design patent USD759,342 for a “shaped tortilla” —a concept that has been around probably as long as the tortilla itself.
Inventors and designers have the challenging job of inventing and designing around many issues: prior art, competitive products, budgets, physics, consumer safety, market demand, supply chain hiccups, government regulations, and … taxes.
American publishing houses consistently snapped up the works of the famous British author, re-published them in cheap editions, which sold all over the country, and they pocketed the proceeds without any remuneration to Charles Dickens.
For many of us, the term “Easter egg” conjures up memories of dying hard-boiled eggs in bright colors or hunting for treasures and candies stuffed inside plastic orbs hidden around the neighborhood.
Artificial Intelligence tools have been all the rage in recent months. From ChatGPT to Midjourney, these tools take different forms but the premise is the same: a user enters a prompt in text form, and the AI tool creates a response in text-form or image.
This practice is often called the “Poor Man’s Copyright” and the idea has been around for a long time. The theory is that mailing a copy of a work to yourself will provide you with certain legal rights akin to a copyright registration so long as the envelope remains sealed and bears a postmark by the United States Postal Service.
Unlike the Matrix, Star Wars, and Austin Powers, respectively, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGPT, is not a robot in disguise or a bot of science fiction. We, the users, provide prompts in text form, and ChatGPT converses in response to the prompts.
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