Really happy to have done a very small thing to help make the Supreme Court's historical records and briefs freely available. Thank you to the @archive.org for doing the hard part. blog.archive.org/2026/04/20/u...
Super-niche, but a few years ago I made an inventory of all the inventories of federal court records prepared in the late 1930s. I personally find these really useful if you're looking for a specific piece of history which doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere. mostlyiphistory.com/2019/12/10/a...
When the Copyright Office registers a claim under the rule of doubt, a letter goes out. That letter says we have registered under the rule of doubt, and the correspondence box is checked so that any practicing attorney who sees a certificate that has the correspondence box checked, I would argue, should go and see what the-Copyright Office said about it. "Registered under the rule of doubt" is not stamped on the certificate. The reason is that if the court looks and finds that it is copyrightable, you have got a certificate that has a cloud on it for the rest of its life; so we do not mark the certificates. So keep in mind that we do operate under a rule of doubt.
I've been wondering why the Copyright Office didn't really register anything under the rule of doubt until 2008 under the '76 act. It turns out they did, it's just not listed on the registration. Source: Presentation by Marybeth Peters, Esq., 17 U. DAYTON L. REV. 755 (1992).
Excited to speak about the implications of my historical work for AI in the patent system -- today at the Boston IP Law Association Symposium, with @zvirosen.bsky.social & Taylor Davis. & many thanks to Stephen Chow for the invite.
bipla.org/events/Event...
I've been reading more about the CONTU computer software commission lately, and an interesting somewhat related report came out of the Dept of Commerce in 1977 by Roy G. Saltman, later of voting tech fame - worth reading as well. archive.org/details/copy...
You must imagine, at the eventual heart of things to come, linked or integrated systems or networks of computers capable of storing faithful simulacra of the entire treasure of the accumulated knowledge and artistic production of past ages, and of taking into the store new intelligence of all sorts as produced. The systems will have a prodigious capacity for manipulating the store in useful ways, for selecting portions of it upon call and transmitting them to any distance, where they will be converted as desired to forms directly or indirectly cognizable, whether as printed pages, phonorecords, tapes, transient displays of sights or sounds, or hieroglyphs for further machine uses. Lasers, microwave channels, satellites improving on Comsat's Early Bird, and, no doubt, many devices now unnamable, will operate as ganglions to extend the reach of the systems to the ultimate users as well as to provide a copious array of additional services.
From Benjamin Kaplan, An Unhurried View of Copyright (1966).
People tend to skip over the Copyright Decisions reporter which the Copyright Office put out, but this is your reminder that is has otherwise unpublished decisions, like this early Learned Hand opinion (1919) on copyright in selection/arrangement of facts: babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=md...
Man, that looks geshmakh!
The other important change has to do with the deposit requirement for three dimensional works of art. Until 1948, the Copyright Office insisted that there be deposited actual copies of such three dimensional works. In July, 1948 this inflexible rule was changed so as to give the registrant an option to do one of three things. (a) In addidon to the submission of photographs of the work, the author may either send two copies of the best edition of the work which will be retained by the Office in accordance with its usual practice or (b) he may mark the package for return in which case the copies will be promptly returned to the copyright claimant or (c) he may send no copies of the work at all but rely on the photographs submitted in place of actual copies. The new rule states that by accepting such photographs alone the Copyright Office expresses no opinion as to the need for or possible effect of delay in making deposit of copies prior to suit for infringement of copyright.
And on the following page.
Two rather important changes were made by the Copyright Office during 1948 in its rules and regulations. Until this year, it had been the established practice of the Office not to accept for copyright registration any work of utility even though it may also have characteristics of a work of art. This rule has now been drastically changed by the new Rule 201(4) (b) (7) which defines a work of art as follows: Works of art and models or designs for works of art. The term 'work of art' includes works of artistic craftsmanship, in so far as their form but not their mechanical or utilitarian aspects are concerned, such as artistic jewelry, enamels, glassware, and tapestries; as well as all works belonging to the so-called fine arts, such as paintings, drawings and sculpture." In the light of this new rule, the Office will now accept as works of art even objects which also serve a utilitarian purpose or may be made for industrial use at the same time. This new rule is, of course, not intended to be legislative in nature but only a clarification on the part of the Copyright Office of Section 5(g) of the Act of 1909.
Discussing amendment to US Copyright Office rules to allow registration of utilitarian objects in 1948. The beginning of Mazer v. Stein etc. Source: Walter J. Derenberg, Copyright Law, 1948 ANN. SURV. AM. L. 774, 777 (1948). CC @christinefarley.bsky.social
And the rest are here: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/00358...
Will ponder this.
Really interesting. Old opinions should be in these. Obviously much (much) more work: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/01215...
I've just hit 250 uploads to @archive.org on copyright history (mostly) - check out the list if interested: archive.org/details/@zvi...
It's funny though, because the Court basically now says that the liability for making an infringing device they were accused of it one of the only forms of secondary liability, while all others besides inducement are now questionable.
Yup, Cox won. I don't think the internet was ever much in danger but mileage may vary there. Personally think the Sotomayor concurrence is better.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Court doesn't touch the second QT on whether the infringement was willful. Given how the first question went I'm sure copyright owners are breathing a minor sigh of relief there.
Seems to basically limit secondary liability to cases which fail the Sony and Grokster tests. No real recognition of pre-1976 caselaw of any kind re secondary liability. Unclear to me whether cases like Fonovisa are still good law. Depends how internet-specific decision is.
Sony v. Cox is out. Basically Thomas applying same methodology as Star Athletica but in secondary liability context to substantially cut back on judge-made doctrine: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...
Fair! I'm definitely not that, all I can do is go on the record.
Well, Allen could have made a disclaimer as well and had similar. Going to be interesting to see what he ends up with.
I don't know if people noticed, but the Copyright Office's response to Allen's summary judgment motion in Colorado includes a substantial discussion of AI authorship disclaimer and registration practices at 13-16: www.courtlistener.com/docket/69198...
CIA memo from 1948 on copyright in photographs and whether the agency should be taking a license or fair use applies. Source: web.archive.org/web/20250227...
The video of this event is available here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDfO...
You probably know this, but the record of one of the major Colt patent cases is available: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/01039...
but that's not so hard to do by hand and a macro in Word might be possible to further reduce the workload (although keeping it straight from abbreviations may be a challenge). Of course either way human review is still needed.
...but asking Claude then to format it as markup and pasting the markup into Google Docs did the trick. Obviously this is a bit of a niche use but if you're looking to republish an older article this is extremely helpful. Only remaining issue is small caps weren't recognized...
Figured out a bit of a white whale for me - converting a pre-digital document to formatted DOCX with footnotes properly linked. Uploaded the Heinonline PDF, and Claude was able to OCR and properly format it pretty readily to HTML, but the resulting HTML footnotes wouldn't convert into Word or Docs
