Author: Brandon Butler

What AI Can Teach Us About Copyright and Fair Use

[Brandon Butler] The past six months or so have seen the seemingly sudden appearance of several startlingly powerful AI tools that create complex new textual and visual works in response to relatively simple prompts. You probably know at least a couple by name: ChatGPT (for text) and Stable Diffusion (for images) are the ones that seem to have taken over my social feeds. These tools are creating a buzz in part because the works they generate are sometimes good enough to pass for or replace the work of humans, at least in some contexts. This raises a laundry list of policy questions, some as old as the story of John Henry (will machines put humans out of work?), others as 21st-century as data sovereignty (how can nations govern data pertaining to their citizens when it flows seamlessly around the globe?).

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Cracking the Copyright Dilemma in Software Preservation: Protecting Digital Culture Through Fair Use Consensus

[Brandon Butler, Patricia Aufderheide Peter A. Jaszi, and Krista Cox] Abstract: Copyright problems may inhibit the crucially important work of preserving legacy software. Such software is worthy of study in its own right because it is critical to accessing digital culture and expression. Preservation work is essential for communicating across boundaries of the past and present in a digital era. Software preservationists in the United States have addressed their copyright problems by developing a code of best practices in employing fair use.

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Transformativeness on Trial

The House Judiciary Committee IP Subcommittee held a hearing this afternoon on “The Scope of Fair Use.” The witness list and the witnesses’ written testimony are online here. I was live-tweeting it, more or less, and you can see...

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