Plenty of copyright news to start the week:
A court in Shenzhen, China ruled for the first time that an article written by artificial intelligence is covered by copyright. The case was brought by tech giant Tencent in 2018 against online platform Shanghai Yingxun Technology Company after Shanghai Yingxun reproduced a financial report generated by Tencent’s Robot Dreamwriter A.I. system. The court said the article’s articulation and expression had sufficient originality to be classified as a written work, and therefore entitled to copyright protection.
Speaking of A.I., Friday was the deadline for submitting comments to the U.S. Patent & Trademark office in its inquiry into whether inventions or works created by A.I. should be entitled to intellectual property protection in the U.S. Comments should be posted here shortly.
Satcaster Dish Network has filed a patent application (pdf) in the U.S. for a blockchain-based anti-piracy system. The system allows copyright owners to watermark their content with a unique identifier that would get stored on a blockchain, allowing copyright-friendly online platforms to quickly check whether content is being uploaded with permission. The basic idea isn’t new, but such a system could find application in Europe, where the new EU Copyright Directive requires online services to actively monitor their platforms for infringing content.
Paris Musées announced last week that it will make more than 100,000 high-quality digital images of artworks in the city’s museums available on an open-access basis (free and without restrictions) through its Collections portal. The initiative reflects the growing open-access movement among public museums and libraries, which includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the NY Public Library.
Speaking of New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been sending takedown notices recently targeting an alternate subway map created by Jake Berman, claiming it infringes the MTA’s copyrighted official map. Apart from why the MTA is bothering with a map Berman was selling for beer money on Ebay given all the other problems facing the New York City subway system, the case raises questions as to how much of the information presented in a map is actually protectable.
Oscar noms out
Bouncing back from a disappointing Golden Globes, Netflix leads all studios in Oscar nominations, which were announced this morning, thanks to “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story.”
Have a good week.