News and Commentary
Kendrick Lamar is being sued by Terrance Hayes for the former’s infringement Hayes’ song “Loyalty” in a song of the same name.
After initially prevailing in court last year, the 9th Circuit has partially reversed a decision in favor of Hewlett Packard in a claim of copyright infringement brought by Oracle. HP provided patches to Oracle’s Solaris software system, which Oracle required users to purchase annual support contract to access. While some of Oracle’s claims were limited by statutes of limitations, the 9th Circuit court determined that the district court erred in its summary judgment of direct infringement claims related to patch installations by HP and of indirect infringement claims for pre-installation conduct.
In The Wall Street Journal, Aisha Al-Muslim discusses how amid a wave of corporate bankruptcies the intellectual property held by firms has become an important asset for both the buyers of assets from distressed firms and licensees of the firms before they went bankrupt.
Lizzo has prevailed in against a copyright claim brought by brothers Justin and Jeremiah Raisen who claimed the rights to the “DNA test” line from Lizzo’s hit “Truth Hurts.” The Raisens claimed that their collaboration with Lizzo on “Healthy,” which also includes the hook, made them co-authors of “Truth Hurts” but a district court judge said that “as a matter of law, a joint author of one copyrightable work does not automatically gain ownership of a derivative work in which the joint author had no hand in creating.”
In a post for the blog of the Alliance of Independent Authors, AA Abbott writes about the legal implications of works produced by AI. While the law is fairly clear in many jurisdictions that only works produced by a human can be registered, there is some ambiguity about how to treat the works read by the AI in order to generate the original stories.
Here’s a fun one from Professor Yaniv Heled: a diagram depicting the life cycle of a patent from application to invalidation or public domain.
New Research
A new paper from the VATT Institute for Economic Research finds that increasing the terms of patents in the pharmaceutical industry are a sub-optimal policy because they create an incentive to challenge long-lived patents. Instead, the authors advocate for broader patents with shorter terms. You can read a writeup of their findings on VoxEU here.
Loading...