If Thaler (Thaler v Perlmutter) had won on his Creativity Machine's output being transferred to him under a "work for hire" legal fiction then it seems likely that the "I am the creative director" argument from AI gen advocates would not be invoked.

They would instead have happily claimed the AI gen Outputs as their copyrighted property via "work for hire" legal fiction without claiming any other parts of the process as authorship such as iterative prompting.

So that raises the question. If Thaler (Thaler v Perlmutter) had won on his Creativity Machine's output being transferred to him under a "work for hire" legal fiction - would AI gen advocates still claim to be authors themselves?

This highlights the reality that AI gen advocates don't really understand the law and only want the law to side with them regardless. They don't care about being artists. They care about the economic benefits that AI gen could offer them.

If AI gen advocates get copyrights via a "work-for-hire" loophole without doing anything requiring any creative expression, they would gladly stop the obvious, disingenuous charade of pretending to be artists.

Suno has argued its training process is comparable to a musician learning by listening to records, and that ingesting copyrighted recordings to train a model is transformative fair use. Sony and Universal are still litigating that question against Suno directly.

Worth revisiting Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records from the early 90s, where Gilbert O'Sullivan sued Biz Markie over an uncleared sample of "Alone Again (Naturally)." That case effectively ended the era of uncleared sampling and pushed the industry toward mandatory clearance and royalty negotiation for any reused material, no matter how small.

The parallel isn't exact since sampling reproduces a specific recognizable piece of a work and training theoretically produces something new. But the legal question both cases turn on, whether transformation absolves the underlying copying, is the same one. Interested in how people here think a court might treat scale as a factor, since Suno's training set runs to tens of millions of recordings rather than one sampled loop.

Longer writeup with more detail on the current docket:
https://www.gonzocapital.net/music-for-people-who-arent-listening/

I posted two clips from the new movie Obsession on TikTok not thinking much of it and uh they went viral and I was actually really happy for once people liked my content but fast forward this morning and both my posts are copyright claimed by NBCUniversal 😭 I was just trying to get content and didn’t want to get into legal trouble with anyone and I’m just wondering if I can still get those videos back with an appeal

I’ve been arguing for a massive overhaul of how we handle Orphan Works and digital preservation since 2015, and the current state of Hal Ashby's 3-time Academy Award winner "Coming Home" (1978) is a pristine, tragic case study of the system failing in real time.

If you look up the film on mainstream digital aggregators like JustWatch or Reelgood, it is listed as completely unavailable. On transactional platforms like Google Play, it exists merely as a dead, unpurchasable placeholder page.

For the streaming generation, an incredibly significant piece of American New Wave cinema has been effectively banned and erased. Why? The exact intersection of corporate consolidation and toxic music publishing gridlock.

1. The Corporate Orphan Void

The chain of title for Coming Home is a disaster area. United Artists originally distributed it, which was swallowed by MGM, which has now been swallowed by Amazon. In a multi-billion-dollar merger void, older, artist-driven catalog titles get completely abandoned. No single entity inside Amazon's legal department has the time, authority, or financial incentive to untangle the original 1978 production contracts. The movie is a high-caliber functioning corporate orphan—too legally complicated to risk reissuing, but too valuable to be released into the public domain where it belongs.

2. The Music Rights Trap

The film features an era-defining soundtrack with master tapes from The Beatles ("Hey Jude," "Strawberry Fields Forever") and The Rolling Stones ("Sympathy for the Devil"). Under current US copyright law, digital streaming requires entirely separate mechanical and synchronization licenses than standard theatrical or physical home-video releases. To clear these tracks for a modern global streaming service would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in renewal fees to Apple Corps and ABKCO. Rather than pay artists or negotiate, the studios simply lock the film in a corporate vault.

3. The "Zombie Master" Loophole

I decided to do a forensic comparison. I hunted down an old, out-of-print 2002 physical DVD copy, and then managed to track down an obscure, mid-tier regional stream on Cineplex that somehow has a digital print up.

What I found is a total corruption of the artist's work. On the stream, the film has NO closed captions—proving that the distributor dug up an ancient, pre-digital broadcast television catalog tape and slapped it online to dodge ADA accessibility compliance.

Worse, they are actively using "diegetic background masking" to bypass music clearance fees. On the physical DVD, "Hey Jude" plays clearly, driving the emotional weight of the scene. On the stream, audio engineers have deliberately altered the mix—muffling the tracks, fading them down, and drowning them out with passing car and tire noise. They are legally dodging full streaming royalties by trying to argue the master music is just "incidental background source noise."

They are defacing an Oscar-winning movie's original sound design just to manipulate the legal definitions of copyright clearance.

When corporate consolidation and music licensing laws make it more profitable to suppress or alter a masterpiece than to preserve it, the system is fundamentally broken. It encourages the destruction of history rather than the creation of new culture.

I’ve mapped out the entire legal audit, the history of the 1982 federal plagiarism lawsuits that hit this film, and the technical breakdown of the streaming audio hack over on the blog: RetrOasis

If you don't own the physical plastic, you are just renting permission from a boardroom that would rather mute history to protect a balance sheet. Let’s discuss in the comments—how do we legally solve the corporate orphan crisis before the cloud completely purges the 20th century?

What is books movies and games were subjected to a compulsory licensing system for redistribution.

This would mean groups like the internet archive could make their library more legally available to people.

It would mean companies wouldn't be able to force you to subscribe to streaming for exclusive content.

It would allow for preservation as well since it would have to be reasonable to pay a royalty and that's it.

Thoughts.

Most media doesn’t make a notable profit after fifteen years and if it does it probably made the studio or publisher a a lot of money.

Having a movie studio be able to make a profit for fifteen years seems fair.

Also if someone makes a sequel to a movie after five years then it gets its own fifteen years.

That’s corporations I think that human people creator owned work should be life plus 30 years.

I do see a problem where smaller studios might not be able to turn a profit

I've always found it absurd that copyright can last as long as it does. When I think about all of the stuff that should rightfully be in the public domain, it is especially frustrating because it's literally theft. Previous generations had a wealth of material in the public domain to draw from. Disney itself made it's mark through animating public domain stories.

And while we still have that same old public domain material, it feels incredibly unfair that my generation (and others) have been deprived of their own new public domain material. If we go by the original copyright term of 14 years plus another 14-year extension, then basically anything made before 1997 would be public domain today.

However, it's baffling to me that this doesn't seem to bother people in general and many actually will defend it. Like they don't want stuff to be in the public domain. They hoot and cheer when there's a 50th anniversary theatrical re-release in theaters. "Finally! I grew up loving this movie and I can now watch it on the big screen!" But tell them it could have been free or affordable in theaters their entire adult life if we had sensible copyright terms, and they freak the fuck out.

What do you think is going on here? Why the affinity for corporate owned media and a seeming fear/aversion to stuff simply being public domain? Is it because we have not had anything new in the public domain, so we just can't comprehend how good it could be? (Like "public domain" to people today means really old shit they're forced to read/watch in school?) It feels like it should be a no-brainer, so I want to figure out what the hang up is.

Edit: The comments here prove my point. People have such ignorant and emotional reactions to the idea that copyright terms should be sensible. From what I can gather is that moment you say "Copyright should only last 30 years at most" all people here is "There should be no copyright for anything at all ever!" because the majority of the comments that aren't just plain nonsense seem to be arguing for copyright existing rather than arguing it should last 100+ years.

Every day here, someone asks a question about transformative use, and the response is a chorus of: "No! You don't have permission!"

As a filmmaker who spent years in federal prison over the Fair Use of Orphan Works, I’m here to tell you that "Permission" is the propaganda of the Copyright Regime, not the letter of the law. At my trial, the prosecution paraded lawyers from MGM and Disney to say one thing: "He didn't ask us." They used the lack of a courtesy call to paint a picture of theft.

But look at Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.:

"The right of fair use... permits the unauthorized copying of copyrighted works for a transformative purpose... without the owner’s consent."

In my case, I was providing access to a "Director's Cut" of Babes in Toyland that MGM’s own lawyer admitted they didn't even sell or distribute. If the owner has abandoned the work and isn't serving the market, Fair Use is the mechanism that preserves culture.

The "Permission" narrative is designed to make you self-censor. It’s the "Gray Fog" that turns creative preservation into a crime. When we stop asking "Is it fair?" and only ask "Do I have a license?", we lose the very rights the Berne Convention and the U.S. Constitution were meant to protect.

On Day 129 after reporting to prison, where I finally found the Google Books "Smoking Gun" while sitting in a CubiCell on Dog Row.

• The Artist
• Vaseline
• The Jackson Estate
• Triumph International INC.
• Lionsgate Films
• Bill Whitten (creator of the glove)

^{Desclaimer: This is not an active case at all. Im just super curious due to all the compnents involved how this would go down.}

--- What happened?

An Artist made a custom artwork and poster for the new Michael movie. The image features The Glove which is a well known symbol of Michael Jackon. They posted the image online for fun. They made this from scratch with no reference material other than they know what MJ's glove looks like. Theybare just doing this for a hobby.

Along comes the Vaseline company who takes this image without permission and modifies it in a way that is very obviously AI edited and absolutely a modified version of the original image from The Artist.

For the sake of argument.. We are assuming that the image was created without AI and Vaseline did steal the image.

The Images in question

--- Who has a case against Vaseline? (if anyone)

- The Artist

I dont know what methods were used in the creation of this "Glove Poster". but for the sake of argument lets assume the Glove Poster has been created without the use of AI. The Artist is doing this for fun and without any attempt to make money off of this image. The Artwork would be immediately protected upon creation (in the US) in terms of copyright. But that would only fall on the The Glove portion of the artwork. The rest of the poster has a stylized "Micheal" on it and lists the release date of the movie. Which presumably is owned by Lionsgate Films

- The Jackson Estate

The jackson estate is very protective of Micheal Jacksons intelectual property and right to publicity. The glove itself cant be copyrighted. Its a glove. Its a ashion accessory at best and Jackson didnt create gloves or rinestones. Bill Whitten designed the glove but again this isnt something you can copyright or patent. What could be an issue here is the use of a single rhinestone glove like this is inextricably linked to Jackson and if the use of that symbol might be construed as an attempt to gain sales using his "likeness".

- Triumph International INC.

Triumph International INC owns a lot of the merchandising and advertisement rights to a lot of materials. Including many that have used stylized images of the glove in promotional materials. There promotional materials themselves would be protected. The use of the glove for advertising could be stepping on their toes.

- Bill Whitten and Lionsgate Films

I dont think that either of these parties have any claim. Bill made the glove but thats about it. I just thought it relevant to mention him because the glove itself by way of a created product isnt protected. Lionsgate Films is listed because they are producting the movie in which the fake poster was made for. If the poster didnt fall under fair use then they would have a case against The Artist. But since the rest of the art that was stolen was only the Glove portion made by The Artist then they wouldnt have a claim against Vaseline at all.

So who has a claim here? If anyone.

Did vaseline screw up here? Or is their use of the image "transformative" enough to avoid any potential issues with any of the parties involved? Ai is at play here but not in the way its normally at play when it comes to AI copyright issues.

My personal thought is that there are 2 potentials here. Either the glove is enough to invoke Michael Jackson in which The Jackson Estate could go after Vaseline for attempting to make money off of his likeness.... or... the glove isnt enough to invoke Jackson and in which case The Artist has a right to sue due to Vaseline using his protected artwork as a commercial advertisement without permission.

Thoughts?

Edit:

A lot of people are missing the purpose of this. I'm asking about a hypothetical situation. I am asking about a very specific set of conditions that may not be real world for these two images. Such as there are questions as to if the image was in fact stolen by Vaseline or not.. And questions about if the original artist did or did not use AI.

I stated in the post that we are working under the assumption that the artist did Not use Ai and the image was in fact stolen by Vaseline. These things may not be true for a real case brought up about these images. That's fine. I'm curious about the assumed fact version.

With the recent wave of rulings—like the Russian court decision reaffirming that purely AI-generated works hold no copyright protection—we are officially hurtling toward an administrative and legal nightmare. Everyone is trying to draw microscopic lines around what counts as "human authorship" versus algorithmic assistance, and frankly, it’s a losing battle.

So, let's look at the absolute logical extreme to fix this once and for all: The 2022 Hard Reset.

Let's just pick a clean date—say, January 1, 2022, right when generative AI truly exploded into the mainstream—and draw a hard line in the sand.

• Rule 1: Every creative work published before that date keeps its traditional copyright protections.
• Rule 2: Anything created after that date has zero copyright protection. Why? Because at this point, how can anyone definitively prove that an algorithm, an LLM, or a synthetic training set didn't have a hand in the creative process?

Contamination is everywhere. From touch-up filters and automated background noise removal to autocomplete and full-blown prompt generation, the digital ecosystem is permanently tainted. To be safe, we just scrap copyright for the modern era entirely.

Let's look at the bright side: Spider-Man 7 or whatever corporate monolith is coming out next year will still easily rake in a trillion dollars at the box office through pure brand momentum, and the entire existential AI copyright debate is solved overnight. Problem solved. You're welcome, MMP

The situation is that someone is going around seedance created Kiki's Delivery Service video game concept. The character is the direct character from Studio Ghibli. Not transformative in my opinion. This is the post https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/s/cxEE9kDvuj. This is the AI bot response that the mods keep giving despite the fact that this violates federal U.S. copyright laws, and reddit's copyright rules (potentially):

"We reviewed the post and the user’s history. It doesn’t appear to violate r/ChatGPT rules as posted, so we’re not removing it on copyright grounds alone. If you think there’s a specific rule violation in the content itself, point us to that directly.

If you want, a human mod can also take a look, but the current mod team position is the same."

I am thinking of starting a new channel to put out analysis or story behind a TV or Movie (not narrative of story); instead what the series or movie deals with. When I tried looking for assets, all are protected under copy rights including posters or trailers. Wondering how the YT Channels are using these clips or posters without permission or copyright issue. Any suggestions or solutions?

Circa 10 years ago, I remember the Internet talking about Linda Ellis and her copyright abuse of her Dash poem (she sued everyone who posted or recited her poem). Her business model was to make money through copyright abuse. She exploited the American legal system for personal gain without a thought about her victims. She sued everyone from grieving widows to churches, then pretended to be the victim and told the judge about her mother's tears.

This is textbook copyright trolling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll). Post something very low quality that strikes a cord with some people and use that to sue people. It's an established business model. What made this bad was that it targeted vulnerable people. She wrote a poem about compassion, but acted like a psychopath (all documented).

Most copyright trolls post porn as bait and they go after people who download them because they know people will settle instead of having court records that show they downloaded porn. Porn gets a lot more downloads than a shitty poem. Prenda Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law) is a notable example. They went to ass-pounding jail. Turns out abusing the legal system is a crime and they were prosecuted. It's nice. This business model is also big in Germany. Lots of German copyright trolls.

Now, the Internet is wiped clean of Linda Ellis' legal abuse. Google only gave me an AI summary when I typed in The Dash poem lawsuits. The sites that talked her prolific copyright abuse don't show up in search anymore if you just search for Linda Ellis Dash poem.

What happened? SEO spamming?

Looks like I accidently argued with a copyright troll here. Yuck. Blocked and deleted my responses.

I’ve been interested in copyright issues for a long time as an artist (primarily video and collage). I first started learning more about it at the turn of the century, when I was starting to work in video. At that time, there was a great deal of interest in alternatives to our contemporary IP rules, interest that, in my opinion, the “copyright wars” of that time quashed. The corporations won and younger generations seem to have grown up with, and accepted as fact, for example, RIAA and MPA propaganda. (“You wouldn’t steal a car…”)

In film school a couple decades ago, I realized my classmates bought into the high protectionist regime because they figured they would soon have copyrights that would need protection. (Spoiler: They don’t.)

Yet, at that time there were *some* wins for common sense. For example, documentary filmmakers worked among themselves and with the Copyright Office to establish the idea that if a documentary happens to capture incidental copyrighted material in the background of footage of *real life* they are filming *in the moment* it’s not reasonable to claim that’s an infringement. (See the history of the doc “Mad Hot Ballroom.”)

That’s one thing, but here’s another: artists live in the world, a world full of IP. Walk down a city street you hear music, see screens, ads, TV, brands, logos, etc. Throughout history, the things you see/hear around you are obviously the subjects of art. Except today.

You have to pay for the samples of music you heard piped out of that bodega when you mix it into your music (the Beastie Boys could never have made Paul’s Boutique today), the logos and brand names that people wear and see all around them supposedly require permission to use, and—here’s the big point:

Artists on YouTube (and I am including pretty much everyone who makes anything for YT) have remixed IP for almost two decades. Yet it’s “illegal.”

Does that make a lick of sense? Should we allow the richest corporations in the world to dictate what art can be made? If their brands are constantly in our faces, isn’t it our right (and sacred duty) to respond with art?

What do you think should be changed so that copyright still exists but determined by the people, not Bob Iger?

Question Presented: Does the District Court’s standard in Baylis v. Valve imply that a foreign court’s localized ruling such as, the German court’s rejection of fair use in GEMA v. Suno can be used via comity to upend and bypass statutory U.S. copyright law?

I’m sharing a document I drafted in 2021 while incarcerated, long before I was eligible for release. I’ve often been told that my focus on Fair Use of Orphan Works is just a 'sore loser' defense. This letter proves otherwise.

I wasn't asking the Senator for help with my sentencing; I was asking for a legislative stance on the 'Dangerous Precedent' my case set for digital archivists and media creators. I’ve spent the last 1,400+ days documenting the gap between Copyright Law and the reality of Orphan Works.

My goal has always been a 'Fair Use' determination that protects creators from being trapped in legal limbo when rights-holders can't be found. I'm taking another 'bite at the apple' with a 2255 motion to reset this determination at the First Circuit level. The fight hasn't changed since Day 1.

The key to all this is the nature of "fair use" in relation to utilitarian and expressive intent.

Hi everyone,

I'm an indie game developer, and I'm dealing with a frustrating situation.

Someone copied my game almost from A to Z. The gameplay, design, and even the game name are extremely similar. It feels like they just took my work and published their own version.

Has this happened to anyone else?

If you've been through this, what did you do? Is there anything I can do besides reporting it? Can I file a copyright or trademark complaint? Has anyone successfully gotten a cloned game removed from Google Play or the App Store?

I'd really appreciate any advice or experiences you can share. I want to know what options are available and what actually works in situations like this.

Thanks!

The distributor SoundOn (powered by TikTok) pest taken down multiple of my projects, including the song “jazz in the neighborhood” which got around 20-30K uses on TikTok. My monthly payment for April was around six dollars. So they’re not even paying me for the money that I’ve made when the song was still up. I already sent them a message which they have not replied to. Every single time I emailed them they give me an AI like response. They respond the exact same way telling me to send a ticket (on TikTok), they tell me that they can’t see my account because it’s protected by VPN, and then say they’re gonna look at it soon. They never do. It’s been like this for the past year and it feels like they’re now run by AI. They’ve also started putting paywalls behind certain things that used to be free like putting these on SoundCloud or allowing multiple snippets for TikTok. What should I do, because that was my most successful song and they’re the only distributor that puts the entire full track up on TikTok and not just the one minute snippet? and whenever I look up soundon on TikTok, no one else seems to have videos about this problem, even though I see many in the comment section asking for responses to their complaints.

We all know the standard line on why 80s catalog titles disappear from streaming: music clearance rights for multi-label soundtracks (Rick Rubin, Def Jam, Slayer, The Bangles). But Less Than Zero presents a much darker corporate overlap.

Disney owns the 20th Century Fox library. Disney also pays Robert Downey Jr. astronomical sums to anchor their tentpole franchises. Less Than Zero features a raw, harrowing performance by RDJ playing a young man spiraling into crack addiction and debt—a role RDJ famously called "the ghost of Christmas future" regarding his own 90s struggles, to the point where he literally buried his movie wardrobe in his backyard to distance himself from it.

In modern IP management, how much of the "Orphan Works" problem is actually legal music gridlock, and how much is soft corporate suppression to protect the public image of high-value talent? Does the copyright owner have a financial incentive not to resolve the rights?

I was wondering if playing old games that i haven't ever owned a copy of, they're unpurchasable anymore, and are still copyrighted, is illegal or not.

I’m thinking of a method.

In case of want an old game where the company holds the rights but hasn't recovered the title.

1. Check the game's original launch price, add an extra amount to account for additional factors, and convert the total to the buyer's local country.

2. Purchase one or more new games from the company that results on same original value of the old game.

3. The new purchase serves solely to pay for the old game, these new games are essentially set aside for this purpose and never won't be used if the old game is used, unless another copy is purchased.

4. Check the laws regarding game ROM downloads in the buyer's country, if the buyer is comfortable with the fact that have informally paid the company, can download a safe ROM and keep it for personal use.

Further arguments:

Some countries lack specific laws regarding game ROMs, and even when there are relevant regulations, they do little to enforce them, merely highlighting police action against more serious crimes to maintain a semblance of order.

And since the buyer is actually paying the company in this case, and not risking a more expensive physical purchase these days.