Elizabeth Townsend Gard
For the second issue of Volume 72, we are pleased to present Part II of our Copyright and AI Special Issues, started in 2024 in Volume 71. In this issue, we present three pieces that are engaged with students working on the topic of AI and Copyright. What I love about all three pieces is that faculty/mentors were involved with students exploring Copyright and AI. We have one sophisticated piece with Ph.D. Computer Science students, and two with J.D. students. We begin Part I with our featured article, the work of Katherine Lee, A. Fedder Cooper and James Grimmelman’s 'Talkin’ ’Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative AI Supply Chain,' a piece that is nearly 150 pages long. Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in in Computer Science, Cornell University, along with Cooper, who also completed his Ph.D. from Cornell (and has since gone on to a number of impressive positions, including a position as an Assistant Professor at Yale, beginning in 2026. This piece is one of a series of articles the three have been writing together. We are pleased to publish this foundational work. Their work is impressive and important in the field of AI and Computers. We then turn to two student articles, that began in the classroom: Copyright AI Litigation versus Licensing: A Study, where my Advanced Copyright and Trademark course at Tulane University Law School embarked on trying to understand the status of copyright AI cases and found ourselves also looking into licensing deals. While not as sophisticated as the Lee, Cooper and Grimmelman piece, the Article seeks to understand on a basic level how to approach the many cases pending and the ever-changing landscape that is AI and Copyright. With seventeen students working on the piece, we hope we got it right, but I think the spirit is clear: where litigation dominated 2023, licensing deals with media companies and AI companies dominated 2024. We will see what 2025 brings. The third article comes from a J.D. student at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Maria Crusey, who wrote, 'Student Note: Section 1202(b) of the DMCA and AI: Implications for Copyright Infringement Lawsuits and Considerations for Digital Creators,' with oversight by Dave Hansen In Part II, we then turn to an interview I conducted with Chad Rutkowski and Theresa Weisenberger, both attorneys at Baker Hostetler. They discuss their work and thoughts related to Copyright and AI. It was a most lovely conversation. And then, just as we were going to press, three stories broke: the release of the third Copyright and AI report from the U.S. Copyright Office, the firing of the Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyright, and the approval of the ALI Restatement on Copyright. Aaron Moss agreed to contribute our republishing of his Copyright Lately blog, 'Five Takeaways from the Copyright Office’s Controversial New AI Report.' And as we were going to press, the fired Register of. Copyright, Shira Perlmutter, has filed a lawsuit in federal court on May 22, 2025, claiming her removal waws 'unlawful and ineffective.' We have republished the complaint as part of this issue. Late breaking news, then, concludes the issue with Part III.
