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Copyright as a general principle is under attack. Too many times in the popular press and media we see copyright portrayed as a barrier to doing something, not a reward to creative artists whose work enriches our lives. So, one would think that writers, who depend upon copyright for their very existence, would have the incentive, indeed the obligation, when discussing copyright to at least get the facts correct. Nova Southeastern University's Copyright Officer, Stephen Carlisle, J.D., serves up the Disney/Marvel movie “Thunderbolts*” as the latest example of copyright being portrayed as an artificial barrier to doing something good and worthwhile, and insists that Mickey can do better.

On September 13, 2024, a Federal Court Judge issued summary judgement against Donald Trump and his campaign in the long running copyright infringement dispute with Barbadian based musician Eddy Grant over the Trump campaign’s use of Grant’s song “Electric Avenue” in a Trump campaign video. To anyone who read the Judge’s initial ruling denying Trump’s Motion to Dismiss, the ruling against Trump should not be surprising. The only real surprise is why the case got this far. Nova Southeastern University's Copyright Officer, Stephen Carlisle, J.D., looks at the strategy behind the defense of this lawsuit and wonders if a quick settlement would have been a lot more cost effective.

It’s one of those principles that should not need to be debated: people are entitled to equal protection under the law. Yet strangely, one Federal Court went out of its way to penalize a litigant, because they were a “sophisticated copyright litigator” causing the dismissal of the case. Now, the Second Circuit has weighed in on whether there is “sophisticated plaintiff” exception to the discovery rule or to a defendant’s burden to plead and prove a statute of limitations defense. Nova Southeastern University's Copyright Officer, Stephen Carlisle J.D., goes inside the Court’s ruling and reminds everyone that in America everyone is entitled to “equal protection under the law.”

We use locks constantly in our everyday life. Our houses have locks on them. Our autos have locks on them. Even our interactions on the internet require that our actions are protected by usernames and passwords. It’s only common sense. However, that common sense has eluded the folks over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They contend that the legal ban on defeating the copy-protection systems which prevent unauthorized copying of copyrighted works is an unconstitutional restriction on their free speech rights. Nova Southeastern University's Copyright Officer, Stephen Carlisle, J.D., examines the loopy reasoning behind this illogical contention, and explains the Court’s holding that what the Copyright Act prohibits is conduct, not speech.

The late Sonny Bono now adds his name to another chapter of copyright law. The first, of course, was the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended copyright protections for an additional 20 years. Now, his name gets attached to a very novel copyright fight: can the copyright termination provisions of Section 304 trump the terms and conditions of a State marital property settlement agreement?

On May 9, 2024, the Supreme Court definitively ruled that damages in a copyright infringement suit were unlimited. In other words, as long as the suit was timely filed, damages for infringement could be recovered, no matter how old they might be. What they failed to answer was when a copyright lawsuit was “timely filed.” Nova Southeastern University's Copyright Officer, Stephen Carlisle, J.D., examines the facts of the case and the ruling, and explains how the decision could easily be construed as only deciding “half” of the issue.

In a recent filing with the UK Parliament, OpenAI stated: “It would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.” Then, more recently, “If you were to do private negotiations for every piece of content that you need to train one of these models,” they wouldn’t exist… “Inherent in these statements is the assumption that the world is demanding AI created works, they need to exist and somehow artists are standing in the way. There are 100 million music tracks on Spotify, do we really need more? There are 3,600 movies and 1,800 television shows on NetFlix, do we really need more? Nova Southeastern University's Copyright Officer, Stephen Carlisle, J.D., takes a look at the big picture, and discovers AI is just another bad business model proposed by big tech companies, who expect artists to subsidize their bad judgement.

News broke recently that an unnamed AI company was preparing to pay Reddit $60 million a year to be allowed to scrape the content off the popular website. The company, rumored to be Google, and the deal, according to Bloomberg Law is “…the first major public licensing deal between a US social media giant and an external AI company.” But Reddit does not own the copyright to the content that appears on its site. How can it strike this deal? Nova Southeastern University's Copyright Officer, Stephen Carlisle, J.D., gets to the details and finds just another tech slight of hand, but one that still doesn’t work. So where’s the money going to go?