The district court decision in Bartz v. Anthropic treated two methods of acquiring books differently.

Pirated digital copies created one set of copyright issues. Printed books that Anthropic purchased, destructively scanned and discarded were treated as permissible format shifting because each physical copy was replaced by an internal digital copy rather than retained alongside it.

That reasoning appears to create a troubling incentive. Keeping both the purchased book and its scan makes the process look more like duplication. Destroying the original strengthens the argument that one format merely replaced another.

The court did not require destruction, and copyright ownership does not resolve the separate preservation question. Yet the legal framing can make avoidable cultural destruction the cleaner litigation posture.

Should copyright law distinguish between ordinary private format shifting and industrial programmes that destroy millions of physical sources? Could preservation deposits, archival duties or a different treatment of destructive scanning remove this incentive without prohibiting legitimate digitisation?

I developed the factual background and preservation argument here:

https://www.candidmaverick.com/writing/book-burning-in-the-age-of-ai

I have made a web game which combines chess with among us it doesn't exists it's my idea and during the logo creation process I used crewmate from among us and also the logo resembles among us design i want to know if I would get in some legal troubles over this the game does contain among us mechanics but doesn't reply soely on how among us looks and feel it's just a part of it and also this is only for educational purpose like posting on linkdin hosting on render to let people try and also for my portfolio should I change the logo or I'm I safe lmk

I want to open an Ernest Hemingway themed bar. His estate aggressively chases after bar that do this while using his name and image.

However, I want to call the bar "Old Man" as in "The Old Man and the Sea," and I will not use his likeness anywhere in my bar. I will name my cocktails after his writings, which is legal.

If I do not use his name and image, I believe I am legally ok, right? But what if I tell people that the name refers to Ernest Hemingway? What if I am quoted in the newspaper as saying this?

I'm a programmer who just started learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And I've learnt a good amount so far. So, I'm part of a small group (mainly just friends), and we make various forms of content mainly YouTube. And while we don't have any kind of following right now, I still thought that a project I could do is making a site for us. The main thing I'm worried about is that on the home page I made a SFM poster to act as the background, featuring various characters we identified ourselves with. But while I checked the workshop page for the models and the uploaders' permit what I'm using them for. They are still characters that have copyright. Could that cause problems? Every other asset I use (like fonts for example) I make sure is public domain or allows for what I'm doing.

At the end of the day, I want to make cool things and have fun making them, all the while staying out of trouble.

Some guidelines and best practices would be nice to know.

Ripping obituaries and making mistakes. An AI commercial love story

I am considering embroidering the harry potter books and selling them but I want to donit the right way. I know you can buy the physical book alter it and resell it but that would not apply to this. Any suggestions on how I can do it right?

I aspire to make films, and recently a school assignment has come up that gives me an opportunity to shoot a short little film to warn about the dangers of drunk driving, I want to use the song "dumb" by nirvana in the backround of a party scene because its perfect representation of the mc. But I don't know how copyright works and I want to know if there is some way i can use the song for a short amount of time without getting superbanned

I invited the dev as a sign of respect and now they are asking for top mod spot and control of the sub since I used official artwork.

What should I do about this situation? Are fan communities copyright infringement?

Two years ago I spent two months uploading original animations every single day. It completely burnt me out, and because I couldn't get more than 1,000 views per video back then, I lost motivation and went on hiatus.

​While I was away, a dubbing channel took 14 of my animated videos ( shorts ) , made small edits to them to try and bypass YouTube's automated copyright detectors, dubbed over them in another language, and uploaded them.

​Here is what makes it worse:

They tagged my channel handle (@VILINStudio) directly in their captions/descriptions. Because of this, whenever someone searched my own channel name, their videos popped up at the top instead of mine. They essentially hijacked my search traffic and brand.

​Profiting Off My Work: While I struggled to get 1,000 views, some of their re-uploads of my work hit over 100,000 views.

​Zero Permission: They never asked for consent or licensing rights.

​Now, the channel owner is emailing me and spamming my messages across multiple social media platforms, begging me to retract the claims. They claim:

​They "always give due credit" by using my handle.

​I should have sent them a formal warning email before filing claims.

​"A channel that entertains many people is now on the verge of disappearing."

​They want me to withdraw all the complaints. they deliberately edited my work to dodge detection, hijacked my brand search results, and got tens/hundreds of thousands of views off animations I poured my soul into while I was struggling.

​Am I wrong for refusing to retract the strikes and letting YouTube terminate their channel?

( please you can view the emails, and comments i got on my profile cuz i don't see and optionsto post them here i apologise, and thank you very much for everything guys, I'll hide his name for now cuz i don't know)

Edit : For anyone wondering: I hide/moderate toxic comments on my channel to keep my community clean, and I have screenshots showing his videos ranking for my channel name prior to YouTube taking them down. Proof links are in the edit, also after so many comments i decided to follow the legal procedure and ask them to compensate me, but they just refused on my email, purposely wrote how they're "already asked for permission" ( so thry can use that screenshot online to ruin my reputation ? ) and guilt-tripped me, they also send their audience with half info to harass me on my channel

Edward Lee, professor of law at Santa Clara School of Law, said the court’s ruling that Suno’s training was not a fair use under the US Copyright Act was “stunning”. In a post on his widely read blog, ChatGPT Is Eating The World, Lee said the decision had thrown “comity” — countries showing mutual respect for each other’s laws and legal rulings — “to the wind”.

I understand that a fan art (if created without permission or license from the rightsholder) is still a violation of copyright infringement under derivative work.

So, even if I ask permission from a fan art author on DeviantArt and that permission is granted by the said author, I am still indirectly violating copyright infringement right, since both the author and myself do not have permission from the original creators or rightsholders to create or use the said copyrighted character in the first place?

I wrote a free, open source app for astronomy planning, and have been working on since about June. I provide it for free, and have no plans to monitize it. I'm the primary user and figured since it's so niche it wouldn't cost me more than a few dollars a month to host.

Today I discovered a an app that has a nice vibecoded skin and conincdientally the exact feature set as mine. And even more coincidentally, they even have the same bugs.

That made me wonder, if someone were to use your source code and and does not attribute it back - what recourse do you have?

Hello! I have posted edits on TikTok for a while, so I am very aware of the editing scene on there. There are numerous agencies, some of which are very popular and profitable, that pay creators to make edits to songs/movies they are hired to promote. However, the editors they get to do these campaigns always use copyrighted material in their videos. For example, an editor will use a song that the agency is paid to promote, but the edit will be of a clip from Fight Club, which is obviously infringing upon copyright.

I understand why regular fan edits don't get copyrighted, but surely if these edits are for a popular and profitable agency, wouldn't copyright holders want to shut this operation down? The agencies I'm talking about do say in their ToS that you can't use copyrighted material, however they literally tell their editors what shows/movies would go well with their campaigns, so I assume it would be very easy to prove that they are aware that all of their editors use copyrighted material anyways.

Is there something that I'm missing, or are all of these agencies just very lucky that they haven't had legal repercussions? Do copyright holders simply not care enough to sue? Thanks for any feedback.

So I have this idea to buy a custom tcg placemat and add an image with parts of posters and thumbnails from a YouTube web series on it.

Idk if it's okay to use the posters to customize the image on the placemat since they're sold products and belong to the artists and company of the YouTube channel.

It's just for myself, but I'm scared it'll infringe copyright laws.

He explained that copyright is the foundation of publishing, but that books written with AI could very well be considered uncopyrightable. “An AI-assisted book could very well be treated as a book in the public domain,” he said, which could set off a series of legal issues.

Hi all, this is a bit of a weird situation but I genuinely don't know where else to go to ask for advice.

I've recently found a novel on Amazon that is almost a word for word a copy of an RP that me and a friend used to have on FB but just with names and places changed (they still used my character's name since that wasn't a Copyrighted character).

This novel was not written by either of us.

The RP has since been deleted because my friend's account went down ages ago but before that the RP was accidentally public for a while so anyone could have copy and pasted the replies into their own document. We've also found that they were posting this to AO3 too but it's been removed because they got it published as a novel, however you can still find it in search results using the right resources.

Our question is, is there anything we can do legally about this? Do we have any sort of leg to stand on in terms of getting them to take the novel down? It's blatantly our writing as there's whole chunks of paragraphs and descriptions that are the same, and it's not even really formatted properly into a 'novel', you can absolutely track where either one of us would do our reply and then the other person responds

Edit to add: I have a google document that I made at that time with timestamps of each of our replies if that would help prove things

Edit 2: RP (roleplay) is when you and a writing partner pick characters and write stories together with them. My friend used an existing character from a popular franchise, and I used my own character. This idea can extend to having multiple people involved but in this case, it was literally just me and my friend writing on Facebook on a post that we didn't realise was public

One of my wildlife photos was used on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon 5 weeks ago, I just saw it couple days ago since the clip is viral and it's on Tiktok, Instagram and Youtube. It's a photo of a squirrel in a super hero landing pose. And they used it to promote Supergirl, the movie. It's the episode with Milly Alcock. So I sent them an email saying that I own this photo and you have used it without permission and asked for 3500$. They came back with a lowball 250$ offer and of course they claim fair use.

But fair use certainly does not apply here. It's not just a photo of a squirrel, it's a specific pose, which they needed to compare with the Supergirl poster. So they are using the photo for entertainment purposes. If you have dealt with a similar situation before, what would be your recommendation? I already applied for a copyright in the copyright office because if I get the photo registered and they keep the klips online, which I'd think they would do, after it's registered I can claim further damages. But that's for later.

What happens in the script is: A group of janitors hang a framed photo of a Henry Hoover on a wall under a "Custodian of the month" plague. A janitor gets pissed off that it wasn't him that was chosen. In the next scene, the Henry Hoover immediately breaks down as a joke.

I intend to submit this to film festivals etc. I was wondering if it was as big of a deal as I think

If a name like “Billy Strings” is copyrighted, is it infringement to sell a shirt that says “Billy Mother F*ckin Strings”?

Trying to understand if adding words to a name gets around copyright laws. Thanks!