Last week wrapped Season 2 of The Pitt 🩺 While we wait until 2027 for new episodes, fans are keeping it alive with parody videos. Nurse Dana is a copyrighted character, but fair use is your right to do (or at least attempt) an impression of her wild accent and no-BS personality.

Tomorrow's event at Blum Gallery in LA just got an updated website, and now I'm getting super excited. @jennytoomey.bsky.social was an early inspiration for me - seeing her talk about @futureofmusic.bsky.social at SXSW 2002 showed me there was good work to do at the intersection of art and policy!

I will beat this drum until I die: Most of copyright law was based on assumptions about inefficiency, because things were mostly done by humans. Unfortunately, in trying to "update" the law to cope with greater efficiencies, we ignore--and often hobble--those core, human-driven uses.

Copyright law has never, at any point, been written by--or to protect--artists. It's ALWAYS been formed by political negotiations among record labels, publishers, movie studios, broadcasters, and (now) tech companies. Literally since the dawn of copyright law.

Looking forward to speaking on a panel this Friday as part of Mozilla and USC's "Copyforward" event, a kind of legal nerd pre-party for the Flux Festival, all held at the Blum Gallery in LA: flux.net/

Chairman Issa's opening statement pretty wild so far. He smeared critics as "wanting everything to be free," and he used the human genome project as an example of IP protectionism promoting progress. Which, uh, is not what ppl usually say about that project. #procodes biology.mit.edu/the-human-g...

🚨Tomorrow, @JudiciaryGOP & @HouseJudiciary hold a hearing on the PRO CODES Act. As SCOTUS has already ruled: “No one can own the law.” This bill threatens that precedent by extending copyright to public laws and standards, restricting your right to access the rules we live by. ⚖️🏛️

Just re-upping this from Friday because I thought it was a pretty sick burn. #fairusefriday ❤️‍🔥

Holy SHIT someone found the test pressing of Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues and it is clear as a PIN www.openculture.com/2026/04/reco...

Happy #fairusefriday TL;DR: Copying thousands of copyrighted works into a database for analysis to create something entirely new (like a groundbreaking article) is quintessential fair use. No permission needed and no fees paid. 🚫💰 Read Executive Director @bc_butler’s full thread below ⬇️

On #fairusefriday we celebrate the fair use rights of all creators and innovators, even if they don’t grant their fellows the same courtesy. Take, for example, the @nytimes and John Carreyrou, who just published a blockbuster investigative piece on the creator of Bitcoin.

Next time they purport to speak for artists, remember the major labels hired SCOTUS super-litigator Paul Clement (again - he also fought their losing battle in Cox v. Sony) to attack artists’ rights to reclaim their copyrights globally. www.billboard.com/pro/major-l...

Of course doc film legend Werner Herzog understands fair use, and recognizes it’s part of free speech, available even to people we don’t like or who misunderstand our art! From this week’s “Regulator” newsletter from the Verge.

Last month, @bb.usefairuse.com warned that rushing HR 6028, which would separate the Copyright Office from the Library of Congress, could disrupt key relationships and weaken checks and balances in copyright policymaking. Learn more:

With Cox V. Sony The Supreme Court Provides Yet Another Internet-Protecting Decision The Supreme Court has now issued its decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. This was a case where Cox, a broadband provider, had been held liable for the alleged copyright infringements of its…

ICYMI: Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cox in the landmark case, Cox v. Sony. Executive Director @bb.usefairuse.com explains how this is a win for creativity, innovation, and free expression on and off the internet:

On family vacation, playing cards with the kids and Frank Ocean comes on the streaming music shuffle. I tell my daughter: “I liked his early work better, when he was still Frank Glacier. He’s gone soft.” #dadjokes

#FairUseFriday: Exactly 0 perfect brackets remain, but that is part of what makes March Madness so fun! And of course it's not just for basketball fans – the memes, GIFs, and videos created to make fun of the busted brackets (all made possible thanks to fair use) are half the entertainment.

Check out the @eff.org's latest victory against troll-ish law firm Higbee & Associates - lots of lessons here about liability, copyright incentives, and why you can't give rightsholders unchecked power to censor and extort the web: www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Anthropic just proved why site-blocking is a dangerous tool. They showed what over-blocking actually looks like: thousands of takedown requests that nuked legitimate content, not just content that infringed on their copyright.

🆕 In a unanimous 9-0 decision, the Supreme Court reversed a $1 billion copyright infringement verdict against Cox Communications, securing a massive victory for the open internet by ruling that internet service providers are not liable for their users' actions.

Y’all. Who’s going to tell the Swifties all the Elizabeth Taylor *license fees* are going to a couple of Hollywood studios and Getty Images? It’s the *streaming royalties* going to the ET estate! #itsmeimthepedant

Exciting things are happening today at the UVA Special Collections library. TJ's gone BOGO CRAZY! ONE DAY ONLY! www.instagram.com/p/DWmQXiKkQ...

The Supreme Court says ISPs aren’t responsible for everything their users do online. That means your access to the internet is less likely to be cut off over accusations alone. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

⚾ Let’s play ball! Yesterday, baseball season kicked off with plenty of exciting moments, from Carson Benge’s dream debut with the New York Mets to easy dubs from the Washington Nationals and Los Angeles Dodgers. Baseball is officially back and so are the fun memes and fan critiques.

TIL that New York Times journalists are “not in the facts business.” That’s according to the NYT VP/counsel on this panel about scraping and AI, resisting a question about whether it’s hard to enforce use of unprotected factual information. Litigation is a helluva drug.

Much-needed and hotly anticipated decision today from the Supreme Court, putting copyright liability where it belongs: on infringers, not the platforms and tools we all rely on.

ICYMI: Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI over AI training. Following a similar complaint against Perplexity, Re:Create Executive Director @bb.usefairuse.com called the move "the definition of hypocrisy." Read why here: recreatecoalition.org/a-note-from-...

ICYMI, the American Law Institute has responded to a letter from Sens. Tillis and Schiff, which asked pointed questions (strikingly similar to Copyright Alliance talking points) about the Restatement of Law, Copyright. ALI doesn't take the bait.

Why are these congressmen trying to make it more expensive to build safe, accessible housing? Building codes and other safety standards incorporated into the law should be free for all to access and reuse. PRO-CODES is an unconstitutional cash grab for standards publishers.

#FairUseFriday Conan O’Brien’s cold open at the Oscars wasn't just a “replay” of highlights from this year’s best films; it was a fair use parody. By inserting Conan into Weapons, Sinners, and all the Best Picture nominees, the Academy created a new transformative work. youtu.be/XjvnclCos_0

The President's AI Legislative Framework, released this AM, gets fair use right on substance and process. Training is fair use, and Congress should leave fair use issues to the courts. TRAIN Act, CLEAR Act, and mislabeled TRUMP AMERICA AI Act are all at odds with White House policy.

Our full statement on the deeply dangerous "TRUMP AMERICA AI Act" is up:

More to come on this, but for now I'll just say that it is deeply ironic that the ongoing, apparently escalating campaign against the Restatement of the Law, Copyright is exactly what it accuses the Restatement of being: a cynical, partisan hatchet job untethered from the law.

Plaintiffs take note: no one owns genre tropes! AI plaintiffs and dilution theory partisans, especially: copyright scope is a thing. You can't block the creation of new works that share only unprotected elements with your own.

Would love to have been a fly on the wall at UMG's litigators' office when they saw their client's leadership emphatically deny that AI "market dilution" is actually a thing that will happen, now or ever, and then double down on it days later.

Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record www.eff.org/deeplinks/20... @eff.org

In light of reports that House leadership may move to advance H.R. 6028, the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act, without going through the usual committee process, Executive Director @bb.usefairuse.com released the following statement in opposition: recreatecoalition.org/press_releas...

Confiscate 99.8% of Andreesen’s net worth for the public good, wait 20 minutes, and then tell him his memory of ever having more than $4 million is false.

Our latest #PublicPolicyBriefing includes: 📮 CARL Welcomes Amendment to #BillC15 ©️ ARL @recreatecoalition.bsky.social Host #FairUseWeek Congressional Briefing ✨ CARL Hosts Discussion of User Rights in Age of Gen #AI ⚖️ What #CLEARAct Gets Wrong www.arl.org/our-prioriti... @carl-abrc.bsky.social

Is there anything more boring-sounding than "the server test"? And yet - AND YET! - it's one of the most important pieces of legal infrastructure undergirding the open web. Now it's under attack in court, and Re:Create members are rushing to defend it. We summarize their arguments here:

☘️ #FairUseFriday Want to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with a cinematic visit to Ireland? Check out the Irish Times’ roundup of the Top 10 Irish films of all time (circa 2019), with preview clips powered by fair use to help you decide what to watch! ⬇️ www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnCt...

Rest in Power, Phil Bourne. He was a kind and decent person who managed to actually do that thing that UVA and so many other institutions have as their aspiration: to be "both great and good" - to pursue excellence and also to make the world a better place.

Charlottesville: Swords Into Plowshares needs your input. How should we recast the bronze ingots from the melted Lee statue? How can we reclaim public space? Come meet the design firms, see their proposals, view photos of the melting. 6pm Saturday, March 14 at the Jefferson School. www.sipcville.com

It's always useful to tune in to these investor calls, where companies have a legal obligation to tell the truth, among other incentives, which makes it harder to claim that the sky is falling due to whatever the current bogeyman may be: progresschamber.org/news/univers...

My daughter (15) was calling her least favorite classmates "pick me girls" for years before I realized it had something to do with Gray's Anatomy—which she has never seen. Culture travels and morphs in such interesting ways! Happy #fairusefriday, y'all!

#Fairusefriday is a good day for Prof. Ed Lee's paper, Copyright Dilution Under Constitutional Scrutiny, to be officially published in its final form. It's a vital contribution, as theories of "market dilution" continue to be proffered against AI training as a fair use.

Agreed. Technology may ease the way to creating art or expressing ideas, but deciding what to create, what to say, and (among all the options available to you with whatever tech you have) how to say it, is still the crucial step that is, IMO, irreducibly human.

Not sure it it's exactly the same as social media, but interesting thread on the moral panic about kids becoming addicted to books a century ago

ICYMI: Exeuctive Director @bb.usefairuse.com authored a blog for @harvardlibrary.bsky.social's Fair Use Week series.