Posts by dandowney1
IS THERE A RIGHT TO SQUAT IN TEXAS?
You come home from vacation or maybe you visit your second home for vacation, and you arrive to find strangers living in your house and they refuse to leave. They are criminal trespassers to be sure but how do you get them out? Well, it depends on state law. This problem of the homeless becoming…
Read MoreTRIAL BY SPECIAL JUDGE HAS NEVER BEEN MORE APPEALING
For decades, I have been touting Chapter 151 of the Texas Civil Practices and Remedies Code, Trial By Special Judge, as a preferred alternative to arbitration. (See Trial By Special Judge: An Alternative to Arbitration Roulette, Construction Law Journal Vol. 11 No. 1 (2013); Trial By Special Judge, Texas Bar Journal, June 2005). Now it…
Read MoreNIL Free-For-All
After the Alston case held the NCAA rule prohibiting student athletes from accepting compensation for use of their name, image and likeness, (NIL), to be in violation of federal anti-trust laws, college athletic departments held their collective breath. What would the NCAA do now? The answer was not much. The best the NCAA could do…
Read MoreHOLLYWOOD DILEMMA: COURT RULES A PRODUCT CREATED BY AI IS NOT ELIGIBLE FOR COPYRIGHT PROTECTION
A federal district court in Washington D.C. has just concluded that a piece of visual artautonomously created by a computer algorithm is not eligible for copyright protection becauseit lacked human authorship. Stephen Thaler sought to register for copyright a picture generatedby a computer program, naming the machine as the author and seeking transfer of thecopyright…
Read MoreIS THE PRODUCT OF AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ALGORITHM “SPEECH” AND ENTITLED TO PROTECTION UNDER THE FIRST AMENDMENT?
This question is certain to arise in many contexts but is particularly relevant in the area of copyright law. The laws of copyright were written to protect human creative content in books, songs, photographs, etc. A common defense to copyright infringement, (of a song for example), is that the offending product is a new “work”…
Read More