Copyright Law, Essential Cases and Materials

Alfred C. Yen, Boston College Law School

Joseph P. Liu, Boston College Law School

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Table of Contents

In this fifth edition of the casebook, in addition to the standard updates and edits, we have made a number of significant changes to reflect new developments in this dynamic field. Specifically:

• In Chapter One, we omitted Gracen v. Bradford Exchange and added a new section on artificial intelligence and the challenges it poses to copyright. This includes a brief introduction to familiarize students with how large language models work and how those models are trained. We follow this with Thaler v. Perlmutter, one of the first appellate opinions to deal with copyright and artificial intelligence.
• In Chapter Five, in the discussion of improper appropriation, we replaced Satava v. Lowry with a new case, Blehm v. Jacobs (though the facts of Satava remain in a problem after Blehm). We also streamlined the material on digital copyright by deleting both Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings and Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes. Finally, we added notes after Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and Religious Technology Center v. Netcom to introduce students to the challenges associated with possible infringement committed by the use and training of artificial intelligence systems.
• In Chapter Six, we substantially revised and reorganized the material on fair use to reflect recent U.S. Supreme Court caselaw. Instead of dividing the cases into different categories (i.e. Criticism, Parody, Duplication, etc.), we start by introducing two “Early Cases,” Harper & Row Publishers v. Nation Enterprises and Sony v. Universal City Studios, along with underlying theories of fair use. (In so doing, we deleted American Geophysical Union v. Texaco, which we summarize in a note after Sony). We then place the remaining cases in a longer section titled “Transformative Use.” This section starts with Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, then proceeds through Blanch v. Koons, Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley, and Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. (A note after Kelly raises the issue of fair use in the context of training AI programs). This section then ends with the two major recent Supreme Court cases Google v. Oracle of America and Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (replacing the lower court decision found in the previous edition of the casebook).
• In Chapter Eight we added a short discussion of the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act.

Learn more about this series.