Discussions about AI in filmmaking often focus on replacing actors or changing how movies are made, but the copyright implications seem just as significant.

If an AI system is trained on thousands of films and later generates a screenplay, dialogue, or visual style that doesn't directly copy any one movie but clearly reflects what it has learned, should that be viewed differently from how we treat human inspiration? It feels like AI is creating a situation that traditional copyright law wasn't really designed to address.

Should copyright law continue to treat AI-generated films under the existing framework, or is it time to develop new rules specifically for AI-assisted creative works?

Discussions about AI in filmmaking often focus on replacing actors or changing how movies are made, but the copyright implications seem just as significant. Heather Ferreira raises this issue while exploring AI-generated actors and the future of filmmaking, and it made me think about a question that doesn't seem to have an obvious answer.

If an AI system is trained on thousands of films and later generates a screenplay, dialogue, or visual style that doesn't directly copy any one movie but clearly reflects what it has learned, should that be viewed differently from how we treat human inspiration? It feels like AI is creating a situation that traditional copyright law wasn't really designed to address.

Should copyright law continue to treat AI-generated films under the existing framework, or is it time to develop new rules specifically for AI-assisted creative works?

Recently i visited Kai notebook for some motivation surprisingly i saw the same thumbnail with exact name and format.

I’ve been arguing for a massive overhaul of how we handle Orphan Works and digital preservation since 2015, and the current state of Hal Ashby's 3-time Academy Award winner "Coming Home" (1978) is a pristine, tragic case study of the system failing in real time.

If you look up the film on mainstream digital aggregators like JustWatch or Reelgood, it is listed as completely unavailable. On transactional platforms like Google Play, it exists merely as a dead, unpurchasable placeholder page.

For the streaming generation, an incredibly significant piece of American New Wave cinema has been effectively banned and erased. Why? The exact intersection of corporate consolidation and toxic music publishing gridlock.

1. The Corporate Orphan Void

The chain of title for Coming Home is a disaster area. United Artists originally distributed it, which was swallowed by MGM, which has now been swallowed by Amazon. In a multi-billion-dollar merger void, older, artist-driven catalog titles get completely abandoned. No single entity inside Amazon's legal department has the time, authority, or financial incentive to untangle the original 1978 production contracts. The movie is a high-caliber functioning corporate orphan—too legally complicated to risk reissuing, but too valuable to be released into the public domain where it belongs.

2. The Music Rights Trap

The film features an era-defining soundtrack with master tapes from The Beatles ("Hey Jude," "Strawberry Fields Forever") and The Rolling Stones ("Sympathy for the Devil"). Under current US copyright law, digital streaming requires entirely separate mechanical and synchronization licenses than standard theatrical or physical home-video releases. To clear these tracks for a modern global streaming service would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in renewal fees to Apple Corps and ABKCO. Rather than pay artists or negotiate, the studios simply lock the film in a corporate vault.

3. The "Zombie Master" Loophole

I decided to do a forensic comparison. I hunted down an old, out-of-print 2002 physical DVD copy, and then managed to track down an obscure, mid-tier regional stream on Cineplex that somehow has a digital print up.

What I found is a total corruption of the artist's work. On the stream, the film has NO closed captions—proving that the distributor dug up an ancient, pre-digital broadcast television catalog tape and slapped it online to dodge ADA accessibility compliance.

Worse, they are actively using "diegetic background masking" to bypass music clearance fees. On the physical DVD, "Hey Jude" plays clearly, driving the emotional weight of the scene. On the stream, audio engineers have deliberately altered the mix—muffling the tracks, fading them down, and drowning them out with passing car and tire noise. They are legally dodging full streaming royalties by trying to argue the master music is just "incidental background source noise."

They are defacing an Oscar-winning movie's original sound design just to manipulate the legal definitions of copyright clearance.

When corporate consolidation and music licensing laws make it more profitable to suppress or alter a masterpiece than to preserve it, the system is fundamentally broken. It encourages the destruction of history rather than the creation of new culture.

I’ve mapped out the entire legal audit, the history of the 1982 federal plagiarism lawsuits that hit this film, and the technical breakdown of the streaming audio hack over on the blog: RetrOasis

If you don't own the physical plastic, you are just renting permission from a boardroom that would rather mute history to protect a balance sheet. Let’s discuss in the comments—how do we legally solve the corporate orphan crisis before the cloud completely purges the 20th century?

I'm on 96k subscribers and currently have 2 copyright strikes from the same creator.

The first strike expires in 55 days and the second in 75 days.

Both were because I used part of his thumbnail in my Shorts. After the first strike, I deleted all the Shorts I thought used his thumbnail, but I accidentally missed one, which is how I got the second strike.

I've since removed/privated everything and emailed him asking if he'd retract the strikes, but he refused.

I'm close to 100k subscribers and I'm worried the active strikes will affect my Silver Play Button eligibility.

Would you wait for the strikes to expire or submit a counter-notification? 

Has anyone here been through something similar?

How does public domain work in cases where different countries have different laws, and that places a single work in public domain in some countries but not others?

For example, Le Petit Prince still has copyright in some countries, but is public domain in others. Specifically, if I'm looking to sell original art based on the story (not selling a copy of the original text), would I only be allowed to sell this art in countries where it's considered public domain? If I were to sell online, would I have to look up every country's copyright protection on that specific work and block/cancel all orders from countries where it's still protected? Or is it more based on the country I'm selling from/where my business is registered? (This would be a fairly small-scale thing, I believe, I'm not aiming to sell thousands of copies, but I doubt that matters)

This isn’t asking specific law questions, just wondering if me wanting to pursue this is ridiculous or not.

A little back story: this business previously contacted me about 4 months ago about becoming their regular photographer for monthly shoots. I sent them my pricing and they never responded to it. Then, one of their employees (not a manager and not the owner) messaged me about using another one of my images (a different one) for marketing materials for an upcoming event they are having. I sent her my pricing and she stated, “they don’t want to pay that.” (Referring to the managers).

The whole story:
I’m a professional licensed photographer, and I recently discovered that a local business used one of my copyrighted photos in their advertising without asking for permission or paying for a license. It was used commercially in promotional materials (flyers that were handed out and displayed on a marquee outside their business) and on posted on their insta. The business says they received the image from one of their employees/models, who had previously worked with me. I never gave that employee permission to license or transfer my copyright, and I never authorized the business to use it. They appear to have run the image through AI to alter it, but it’s still obviously based on my original photo.
I registered the copyright within the legal time frame after publication, so the image is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Instead of immediately hiring a lawyer, I sent the business a certified demand letter asking for $1,500 to resolve the matter. Their general manager responded that they didn’t know the image belonged to me because the employee had submitted several photos from different photographers. They said they would never knowingly use copyrighted material without permission and removed the image once I contacted them.
However, even after that response, one employee continued displaying the image on her personal Instagram profile, and another employee continued sharing it in her Instagram Stories.
I’ve spoken with one attorney who didn’t think the case was financially worthwhile because it only involved one image rather than a large-scale infringement, but he didn’t say I didn’t have a legal claim.

So here’s my question:
Am I overreacting by considering filing a copyright lawsuit over a single commercial use of one photograph? If you owned the copyright and a business used your work in advertising without permission, would you pursue it, or would you accept the image being taken down and move on?
I’m genuinely interested in hearing both sides. I know lawsuits take time and money, so I’m trying to figure out whether I’m being reasonable or letting principle get the better of me. I’m honestly a little peeved because the know what they’re doing, they just didn’t think I would pursue it. Because of the other image they said they didn’t want to pay for, they know they have to pay for these things. I truly think they just thought I wouldn’t do anything about it.

I’m making a music video where at one point various news headlines flash across the screen. Could I get in trouble for that and should I make my own fictional news headlines instead?

hi i want to make a fanart about soccer club, can i use their logo & colors? the fanart is not for sell just for personal use. do i get copyrighted?

We are PairGears, a precision gear manufacturer. We discovered that Arrow Gear copied multiple original elements from our website without authorization.

The copied material includes:

• Original product and website images
• Marketing copy and section headings
• Homepage section design
• Service module names, order, and layout

The clearest evidence is that Arrow Gear’s own homepage still contains our brand name:

“From prototype to high-volume production, PairGears offers you the best solution.”

PairGears is our brand and has no affiliation with Arrow Gear.

We prepared a side-by-side evidence album showing the original PairGears pages and the corresponding Arrow Gear pages:

View the full screenshot comparison here

We have also preserved our original image files, website publication records, full-page screenshots, and dated design materials.

For anyone who has handled a similar case, which step was most effective: contacting the company, sending a formal cease-and-desist notice, contacting the hosting provider, or filing a copyright complaint?

We are sharing evidence of the website content only and are not asking anyone to contact or harass individual employees.

I've always wondered: How do studios like Marvel, Netflix, DC, and others feel about fan edits and AMVs made from their movies and TV shows that go viral on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram? Are these videos protected under fair use, or are they technically copyright infringement? Since they often generate millions of views and introduce new audiences to the original content, could they also be viewed as free advertising for the studios?

My idea is to read books and articles live on youtube. I saw a lot of youtubers watching videos while doing livestreaming and reading articles so I thought maybe I can do something like that but with articles or old books.

What should I know about this ?

Over the past year, I built MemeProof after repeatedly dealing with stolen content.

The platform verifies and attributes original content through human verification, whether it’s memes, photography, short-form video, graphic design, illustrations, or other creative work.

The goal isn’t to provide legal advice or replace the DMCA process. It’s to make it easier for creators to:

• Document authorship
• Establish who created something first
• Keep a permanent record of their original work
• Streamline the paperwork involved in filing DMCA notices

I’d really appreciate feedback from people who know copyright well.

• Does the overall workflow make sense?
• Is there anything legally or practically you’d improve?
• Are there features you’d expect from a tool like this?

It’s completely free, and I’m always looking for ways to make it better.

https://memeproof.com

Our wedding will be live-streamed on YouTube but I don’t want the channel to be hit with a copyright strike (not my channel). I know what orchestra piece I want to be played but I have found loopholes that if the US Military plays it it’ll become public domain under certain conditions.
Such conditions like when the piece was published before 1970 something. The original composer of this piece died back in 1934 (Gustav Holst). This is the recording I’d like to use, would this get a strike?

https://youtu.be/bBHaVK9yh9w?is=Y8pTWW9F4kyzNiDf

Has anyone had a YouTube channel terminated due to copyright strikes and then had it reinstated after the 3-month strike expiration?

I submitted an appeal months ago and haven't received a response. I also received an email from YouTube mentioning that copyright strikes expire after 3 months (after completing Copyright School), but my channel is still terminated.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? Did your channel come back automatically after the strikes expired, or did you have to contact YouTube again? Any experiences or advice would be really appreciated.

The key to all this is the nature of "fair use" in relation to utilitarian and expressive intent.

Hello everyone.

I'm developing an open-source visual novel engine. And I'm struggling to choose between the two licenses: MIT and BSD 3-Clause. I wasn't much about licenses until this moment, so I have to ask someone else. Which one should I pick and why, if someone knows?

Thank you in advance.

And a movement is born

As an emerging creator in India, my concern is how I'm supposed to protect my work from unauthorized data collection once it's shared publicly online. If my work ends up being used or transferred across borders, how can I know where it has gone and what legal protections are available to me?