Two notable copyright decisions came down last week, one of which could have an immediate and significant effect on your life.

Let the Ice Cream Flow

I’m talking, of course, about the McDonald’s ice cream machine rule. Thanks to the U.S. Copyright Office, you may hear “Sorry, ice cream machine broken” a little less often.

(Well, if you call that ice cream . . .)

The Mcnews broke on Nov. 2, after the copyright office and Library of Congress announced an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Previously, the DMCA forbade the fast food franchise from fixing its ice cream machines, which had copyright-protected digital codes that could not be accessed by third-party vendors. The exemption makes it possible for the machines to be fixed in a more timely fashion.

We’ll see if our waistlines object to this new freedom.

AI OK for Now

More relevant to writers and other creators, a judge has ruled that AI companies can use copyrighted material without permission to “train” their apps in natural language.

AI companies are feeding published content into their apps to teach the bots how to sound more human and less like it was written by a machine. A number of authors, digital artists and publishers consider this copyright infringement and have sued.

Two of them, AlterNet and Raw Story, lost a battle in their lawsuit against OpenAI. On Nov. 7,  District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled for OpenAI, which had argued that the content it used was publicly available and within the bounds of fair use.

Fair use is the wide-open loophole that allows one creator to re-use another’s work if it’s for non-profit purposes such as criticism, news or educational content. The legal site nolo.com has an excellent explanation of the four factors that determine fair use.

The decision is a blow to creators who object to use of their work without compensation or credit. But this isn’t the end of the matter. The New York Times is one of the plaintiffs in the array of lawsuits over large-language A.I. models, and there’s more to come for some time.

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