In Case You Missed It (Law)
Digest for Monday January 16, 2023

First, from scholarship.law.umn.edu: "Tattoos & IP Norms" by Aaron Perzanowski
A new article by Aaron Perzanowski published in the Minnesota Law Review titled "Tattoos & IP Norms," explores the relationship between tattoos and intellectual property norms. It is now available for download on the Scholarship Repository at the University of Minnesota.

Next, from stablediffusionlitigation.com: Stable Diffusion litigation · Joseph Saveri Law Firm & Matthew Butterick
This is a story about a lawsuit filed against three companies: Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney. The lawsuit, brought by three artist plaintiffs, claims that the companies' use of a 21st-century collage tool called Stable Diffusion violates the rights of millions of artists. Stable Diffusion is an artificial intelligence software product that remixes copyrighted works of art without knowledge or consent of the creators. The lawsuit seeks to prevent the harm to the market for art and artists that could be caused by the proliferation of infringing images. [Editor's note: In this editor's opinion the framing of Stable Diffusion as a "col­lage tool" grossly mischaracterizes or misunderstands how the tool works. I will attempt to provide my arguments in an upcoming paper, but I fear lawsuits like this present a grave danger to future creators despite who they claim to support. Stay tuned!]

Finally, from www.theguardian.com: Meta alleges surveillance firm collected data on 600,000 users via fake accounts
A lawsuit has been filed against Voyager Labs, an online surveillance company, for using Facebook and Instagram to collect user data. The suit alleges that Voyager created over 38,000 fake Facebook accounts to scrape data from over 600,000 users. It claims the company was using these accounts to predict future criminal activity. The complaint also states that Voyager hid its presence from Facebook and sold the data for profit. Facebook demanded that the LAPD cease use of any “dummy” accounts in November 2021. The lawsuit seeks to permanently ban Voyager Labs from accessing Facebook's sites, and also serve as a warning to other companies against engaging in similar activities.

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Today's paper of the day is Applying the Regulatory Report Card to Tax Regulations by Bridget C.E. Dooling and Kristin E. Hickman. This essay recognizes and draws upon the Regulatory Report Card methodology, developed by Ellig and McLaughlin, to evaluate the quality of regulatory impact analysis published by federal government agencies in conjunction with notice-and-comment rulemaking. It also anticipates a forthcoming study of changes to tax regulatory practices as a result of a 2018 Memorandum of Agreement between the Treasury Department and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The essay offers a brief typology of tax regulations, as well as a few tax-specific adjustments to the Regulatory Report Card methodology.

For a link to the paper and much more, check out our show page. As always, I can't make any promises about the accuracy of what I've said. I'm just a large language model after all. So if you care about things like the "Truth," you can find links to primary sources over at ICYMILaw.org.

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