"There is simply nothing fair about a company using theft to build for purely commercial purposes a multi-billion dollar business while those from which they steal receive nothing," Round Hill said. Ethan Millman, August 17, 2026
Briefly, Baylis v Valve is at the Ninth Circuit and the issue is the misapplication of discretionary (precatory) comity rather than the "Mandatory Standard" under the Berne Convention Implementation Act 1988 ("BCIA").
In GEMA v Suno a U.S. AI firm's "fair use" argument was analyzed and rejected. Also Germany doesn't have any fair use law. Under Berne Convention Rules (Article 5(2)) this German ruling shouldn't affect U.S. cases involving § 107 because under the same Berne Convention framework U.S. Law applies in the U.S.
But under the Valve standard (DC level) A German ruling would be afforded comity and Suno would be bound by German Law, thus negating their ability to advance a fair use defense in the US.
To put it another way, a U.S. district court would blind itself to the Berne Convention, afford comity to the German ruling, and treat the parties as bound by the foreign adjudication. Therefore, completely negating a U.S. fair use defense in the U.S.! Thus, effectively letting foreign decrees on fair use nullify a domestic federal statute § 107!
Briefly, Baylis v Valve is at the Ninth Circuit and the issue is the misapplication of discretionary (precatory) comity rather than the "Mandatory Standard" under the Berne Convention Implementation Act 1988 ("BCIA").
In GEMA v Suno a U.S. AI firm's "fair use" argument was analyzed and rejected. Also Germany doesn't have any fair use law. Under Berne Convention Rules (Article 5(2)) this German ruling shouldn't affect U.S. cases involving § 107 because under the same Berne Convention framework U.S. Law applies in the U.S.
But under the Valve standard (DC level) A German ruling would be afforded comity and Suno would be bound by German Law, thus negating their ability to advance a fair use defense in the US.
To put it another way, a U.S. district court would blind itself to the Berne Convention, afford comity to the German ruling, and treat the parties as bound by the foreign adjudication. Therefore, completely negating a U.S. fair use defense in the U.S.! Thus, effectively letting foreign decrees on fair use nullify a domestic federal statute § 107!
Question Presented: Does the District Court’s standard in Baylis v. Valve imply that a foreign court’s localized ruling such as, the German court’s rejection of fair use in GEMA v. Suno can be used via comity to upend and bypass statutory U.S. copyright law?
If Thaler (Thaler v Perlmutter) had won on his Creativity Machine's output being transferred to him under a "work for hire" legal fiction then it seems likely that the "I am the creative director" argument from AI gen advocates need not be invoked.
AI Gen advocates could happily claimed the AI gen Outputs as their copyrighted property via "work for hire" legal fiction without claiming any other parts of the process as authorship such as iterative prompting.
The economic benefits that AI gen could offer them would then not need to be justified.
If Thaler (Thaler v Perlmutter) had won on his Creativity Machine's output being transferred to him under a "work for hire" legal fiction then it seems likely that the "I am the creative director" argument from AI gen advocates would not be invoked.
They would instead have happily claimed the AI gen Outputs as their copyrighted property via "work for hire" legal fiction without claiming any other parts of the process as authorship such as iterative prompting.
So that raises the question. If Thaler (Thaler v Perlmutter) had won on his Creativity Machine's output being transferred to him under a "work for hire" legal fiction - would AI gen advocates still claim to be authors themselves?
This highlights the reality that AI gen advocates don't really understand the law and only want the law to side with them regardless. They don't care about being artists. They care about the economic benefits that AI gen could offer them.
If AI gen advocates get copyrights via a "work-for-hire" loophole without doing anything requiring any creative expression, they would gladly stop the obvious, disingenuous charade of pretending to be artists.
"Don't touch it. It's not worth the legal liability"
Edward Lee, professor of law at Santa Clara School of Law, said the court’s ruling that Suno’s training was not a fair use under the US Copyright Act was “stunning”. In a post on his widely read blog, ChatGPT Is Eating The World, Lee said the decision had thrown “comity” — countries showing mutual respect for each other’s laws and legal rulings — “to the wind”.
He explained that copyright is the foundation of publishing, but that books written with AI could very well be considered uncopyrightable. “An AI-assisted book could very well be treated as a book in the public domain,” he said, which could set off a series of legal issues.
"...finding that entering prompts for a neural network is a technical process rather than creative work, the state news agency RIA Novosti reported"
[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]
Nvidia’s Board Is Latest Sued by Shareholders Over AI Scraping Aug. 3, 2026, Martina Barash
This is soooo soooooooooo bad.
Oracles licensing strategies only work by inventing the law.
I've mentioned how bad this is before. It's really bad.
Judge rules copyright law governs public data scraping, not X’s terms.
Ashley Belanger – 11 May 202
"A Manhattan federal judge on Friday rejected most of Perplexity AI's bid to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Reddit accusing it of violating U.S. copyright law by scraping the online discussion platform's data to train Perplexity's AI-powered search engine."
"f you’re a lawyer for a publisher or a film/TV production house, even the hint of possible legal entanglement is enough to raise the shields. It’s already in contracts for both film/TV and for publishing houses that the author attests their work is wholly original, so, again, any hint that anything is other than that brings things to a screeching halt."(John Scalzi)
"Basically, questions were raised over whether the author, an SMU grad student, used AI as a tool in the writing of the book. The problem: publishers and movie companies cannot register copyright and come away with a clear title chain if there is anything AI in the mix. That’s because AI-aided copy is an amalgamation of many other copyrighted works." (Mike Fleming Jr)