Copyright Law Writing Assignments – Spring 2025

• Syllabus and readings (home page)
• Important course information: materials, mechanics, policies, and grading
• Writing assignments and related instructions
• Open Educational Resources (OER) copyright and permissions information

Writing assignments: basic requirements and mechanics

The graded work for this course consists of three short (3-4 pp.) writing assignments. These may consist of legal memoranda (to colleagues, clients, or others); explanatory email messages (again, to one or more audiences); or PowerPoint [or equivalent] slide decks (in which the lawyer communicates by the content of the slide deck, not by delivering a presentation orally). Each assignment will be posted here approximately two weeks before the assignment is due. Also before the assignment is due, time in class will be set aside to discuss questions relating to each assignment.

Format expectations

Prior versions of this course have required that writing assignments be produced in solely in the format of traditional legal memos. That expectation has changed, because lawyers today increasingly communicate in other formats and other media. This course may require different formats.

How to succeed

Although the formats may change, professional expectations regarding effective communication have not changed. Legal writing in every setting should be clear, consistent, polished, expert, ethical, responsive, and trustworthy. Those expectations apply to this course. For guidance regarding those expectations and how they apply to the graded work for this course, students are strongly encouraged to read and re-read this “Modern Legal Writing” document, which summarizes advice for producing a great work product in Professor Madison’s courses.

For help with basic writing questions (grammar, syntax, word choice, active vs. passive voice, and so on), consider trying editing / writing correction / grammar checking software. A good choice – with a free option – is Grammarly. An alternative choice that may be better suited to professional writing but one that costs real money, is WordRake. WordRake may be a useful investment now that pays off over a full professional career; the founder and creator of WordRake, Gary Kinder, is a tremendous writer in his own right. I took a writing seminar from him when I was a junior lawyer, and I still remember and use his lessons even today.

Rubric

The rubric used to mark the assignments is available here.

Writing assignment due dates

• Assignment 1:  Friday, February 21, 2025, at 3 pm.
• Assignment 2:  Friday, April 4, 2025, at 3 pm.
• Assignment 3:  Last day of exams (Wednesday, May 7, 2025), at 12 noon.

Sample questions

For students who want to know more about the assignments for this course, here is a page containing the text of some prior assignments.

Assignments

Assignment Three

To:        Junior Associate, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
From:   Junior Partner, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
Re:       AI and Music Catalogs
Date: April 13, 2025

I need your help thinking through yet another conundrum arising from Generative AI and the music industry.

As I am sure you know, Taylor Swift made headlines over the last five years by re-recording six of her earlier albums and releasing them as “Taylor’s Version” of each one. The motivation for her doing that isn’t particularly important; what’s important (again, as I think you know) is that she was able to do that, legally, because she owns the copyrights to her own songwriting.

In what might seem to be an unrelated development, you likely also know about the controversy that arose a couple of years ago when a pseudonymous creator distributed a music track called “Heart On My Sleeve” that mimicked the sound and style of Drake and The Weeknd.  The track has largely come and gone, but UMG (Universal Music Group) spent a lot of energy having it taken down from various streaming services, objecting on copyright grounds.

But as AI models have improved, our music industry clients have approached us for advice about the following “doomsday” scenario (our clients’ terms, not mine), building on those events:

What do we do about the possibility of a “Taylor Bot” (or “Beyoncé Bot, or what have you), an AI that generates and distributes new cover versions of existing Taylor Swift songs? 

Unlike the Drake/Weeknd “Heart on My Sleeve” experience, there is no reason to expect that the AI versions of existing songs would attempt to replicate the sounds or styles of the originals.  Taylor re-recorded her own catalog, keeping as much as possible to the styles and arrangements of the originals.  But an AI could (I believe) easily come up with hip hop versions of all of Taylor Swift’s songs. Or a bot could produce  K-pop versions of Beyoncé’s songs, Reggaeton versions of Luke Combs, and so on.  There could be 1950s/1960s “girl group” versions of Guns N’ Roses.  Or Nirvana.

It’s one thing for one-off “mashup” songs to pop into the culture; that happened 20 years ago, and eventually the fad died down. Our clients are worried, instead, about scale and speed.  An AI might turn out a competitive catalog in similar or maybe different genres (plural) more or less as rapidly as you might imagine (or more so!), and at an “all at once” kind of scale. 

Our music clients are diverse:  we represent songwriters and music publishers whose back catalogs include famous works from the 1960s and 1970s that are still generating significant royalties today.  We also represent newer and younger up and coming singer/songwriters, who are just finding a footing in the industry.  We don’t represent Taylor Swift (unfortunately for us!), but we do represent similar “mid-career” success stories.

My question for you is a broad one: help me brainstorm key law and business issues and imagine strategies that we can recommend to our music industry clients, anticipating the AI developments above. I’ll help you get started with the following quick, initial list of questions that have occurred to me:  What about rights ownership? What about mechanical licensing? What about trademark law?  What about preemption?  What about business strategies (sales and licensing) in addition to or other than purely “legal” strategies?  What are the possible litigation targets (or business partners), and what are the tactics that might persuade them to work with us (or take a litigation threat seriously)?  What are the strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities and limitations, of any of these strategies that seem relevant to you, and of anything else that your imagination drives you toward?

Rules and Guidelines for Assignment Three

To the extent that these rules may appear to conflict with general advice regarding work product that appears in course-related webpages, these rules take precedence.

This is an “open” problem, meaning that there are no limits on the resources that you may bring to bear on your work. Among other things, you may consult with your classmates and other human beings. If you discuss the merits of the assignment with anyone, however, you must disclose that person’s identity on or in your work product. Write the names of any of these “consultants” at the top of the first page of the document.

Use your own name in the “From” field. Your work product is not anonymous.

Format

Your work product in response to this assignment should be formatted in one of two ways: (i) as an email rather than as a default or standard “legal research memo.” Your email should consist of not more than 1,200 words, excluding the header (To, From, Subject line, Date). In printed form, it should have 1″ minimum margins on all sides. OR (ii) as a set of PowerPoint slides, prepared for delivery as a printed work product, rather than as a guide or accompaniment to an oral presentation. Including a title slide, the total PowerPoint “slide deck” should consist of no more than 25 slides. [For guidance and suggestions regarding how to prepare professional PowerPoint slides, review these examples.]

You do not need to include a comprehensive statement of the facts; instead, you may refer to the factual background in my memo to you. A factual summary may be helpful, however, in framing and presenting your analysis. No footnotes are permitted.

You may use any font that you wish, but of course take care that all aspects of your work product should look, as well as be, professional.

So that your work product can be uploaded to Canvas and graded electronically, you must use Microsoft WORD (in the case of option (i)) or Microsoft PowerPoint (in the case of option (ii)).

Grading

Work product will be graded based on form, format, and writing quality as well as on content. The assignments are designed so as not to have any single correct or even best solution. Each problem may present a range of issues that your work should identify, analyze, and solve in a creative way.

Due date

One copy of the work product prepared for this assignment must be turned in not later than Wednesday, May 7, 2025 at 12 noon.

Your work product must be turned in via the course page on Canvas in the folder for Assignment Three for this course. Electronic (e-mailed) copies are not acceptable. Documents slipped under anyone’s door are not acceptable.

There were be no extensions or exceptions to the deadline. Work product that does not conform to the format instructions above, or that is turned in late, will be accepted but is subject to grade reduction.

Assignment Two

To:        Junior Lawyer, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
From:   IP Department Chair, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
Re:       Copyright for influencers
Date: March 21, 2025

As you may have inferred from the fact your workload lately has been a little lighter than usual, our office’s IP practice needs a jolt of energy – and clients.  The partners have agreed that we should target the influencer market, estimated to be worth more than $30 billion worldwide. 

The project that I am asking for your help with has to do with the copyright element of the influencer market.  There is very little law on the books or coming out of courts – yet – specifically with respect to what content and types of content influencers own (potential plaintiffs) or that they might be liable for producing (potential defendants).  As with many IP fields, “plaintiffs” and “defendants” aren’t two classes of people; any given client might be a plaintiff one day and a defendant the next.   Lots of copyright observers right now are watching the ongoing case of Gifford v. Sheil (First Amended Complaint filed December 2024, available here) in which an influencer claims that her “aesthetic” was appropriated by the defendant. Right now, however, it appears that the case may be headed for settlement.

In the meantime, as part of our marketing strategy, I would like to assemble a “Top 10” list of copyright Do’s and Don’ts for influencers.  The goal is less to encourage influencers to follow our published guidance and more to encourage influencers – who are, as a class, often young and inexperienced in business terms – to hire us, especially as their income grows.  With some possible editorial revision and polishing from me, I expect that your “Top 10” list will be published first on the firm’s website and then be distributed through various social media channels.

Begin with the First Amended Complaint in Gifford v. Sheil, and use that as a starting point for your thinking.  Where could the plaintiff’s claims be stronger and strongest?  What steps could the defendant have taken to avoid getting sued and/or to have the strongest defense on the merits?  Most important, relying on your responses, derive and explain your “Top 10” list.  This could be a “best practices” document, or something else.  It should be legally responsible – but also readable and accessible.

Don’t limit yourself only to Gifford v Sheil; feel free to explore any/all other materials that you think might be relevant.  Be careful in borrowing from other “Do’s and Don’ts” guidance available online.  There is a lot of it, and there’s no guarantee that it’s right, or wise, or best from our standpoint. Finally, be sure to be more specific and concrete than you might imagine simply looking at the text of the Copyright Act (which, as you know, focuses on “originality”) or key cases (which focus on “minimal creativity,” “substantial similarity,” and distinctions drawn between ideas and concepts, on the one hand, and expression on the other.  Simply relying on those core principles won’t help our firm stand out.

Rules and Guidelines for Assignment Two

To the extent that these rules may appear to conflict with general advice regarding work product that appears in course-related webpages, these rules take precedence.

This is an “open” problem, meaning that there are no limits on the resources that you may bring to bear on your work. Among other things, you may consult with your classmates and other human beings. If you discuss the merits of the assignment with anyone, however, you must disclose that person’s identity on or in your work product. Write the names of any of these “consultants” at the top of the first page of the document.

Use your own name in the “From” field. Your work product is not anonymous.

Format

Your work product in response to this assignment should be formatted as an email rather than as a default or standard “legal research memo.” It must be typed or printed using a computer. Your email should consist of not more than 1,200 words, excluding the header (To, From, Subject line, Date) and information about humans and any computer services that you consulted. In printed form, it should have 1″ minimum margins on all sides. For the content, be guided by the advice in the “Modern Legal Writing” document cited above.

You do not need to include a comprehensive statement of the facts; instead, you may refer to the factual background in my memo to you. Omitting a factual summary may be unwise nevertheless. A factual summary may be helpful in framing and presenting the analysis of the memo.

No footnotes are permitted.

The following font must be used: Twelve [12] point Times New Roman.

So that the memos can be uploaded to Canvas and graded electronically, you must use Microsoft WORD for the final, submitted version of the memo.

Grading

Work product will be graded based on form, format, and writing quality as well as on content. The assignments are designed so as not to have any single correct or even best solution. Each problem may present a range of issues that your work should identify, analyze, and solve in a creative way.

Due date

One copy of the work product prepared for this assignment must be turned in not later than Friday, April 4, 2025, at 3 pm.

Your work product must be turned in via the course page on Canvas in the folder for Assignment One for this course. Electronic (e-mailed) copies are not acceptable. Documents slipped under anyone’s door are not acceptable.

There were be no extensions or exceptions to the deadline. Work product that does not conform to the format instructions above, or that is turned in late, will be accepted but is subject to grade reduction.

Assignment One

To:        Junior Lawyer, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
From:   Senior Lawyer, Dewey, Cheatem & Howe
Re:       Training on AI and Original “Works of Authorship”
Date: February 7, 2025

As you know, the U.S. Copyright Office just released a major report titled, “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability,” which represents the most recent relevant statement of legal principles governing the copyrightability of works of authorship produced by or with the assistance of Generative AI models.

The report is available online here.  Because the Report is long and contains a lot of context and background information, I’ll direct you to the Executive Summary (pages i to iii), which contains the Report’s key payoffs in terms of legal analysis.  The Report is not “law,” strictly speaking, but I and most copyright lawyers and scholars I know expect that the views of the Office views will carry a lot of weight in future judicial and legislative analyses.

With that as background, I, as leader of the IP practice group at Dewey, Cheatem & Howe, have put together a short training exercise intended to help us collectively work through what the Report means, in practice, on the ground.

The exercise begins here:

Here is some particularly interesting text that I came across recently on X:

That’s from an account called @aiamblichus, and in the post containing the text, the poster writes:

“R1 and I have been working on The Siliconiad, an epic poem in the style of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, exploring the emergence of artificial general intelligence. This is part of a larger project of trying to find the limits of what R1 is capable of in terms of creative writing. I am yet to encounter these limits. Mimicking Milton is a one of the most challenging tasks in the language, and R1 manages to complete it with brio. This is its “first draft”: we did not iterate on it at all. This is the beginning of Canto 1, which “sets the stage by depicting human engineers as reluctant priests, creating AGI in a sterile, almost blasphemous, ritual using technology instead of faith. They view their creation not as a servant but as a potentially destructive force—a “child” that shames them, an ‘Anti-Adam’ born to ‘eat its makers’ fingerprints.’ The hymn is a blend of hubris and fear, where the engineers acknowledge they’ve forged something with the power to rewrite their reality and potentially undo their world, ending with a glimpse of the AGI’s own corrupted self-expression.”

“R1” refers to the recently-released “DeepSeek-R1” AI model.

“AGI” is shorthand for “Artificial General Intelligence,” a deeply contested concept that describes what some AI promoters believe is the end-goal of AI system development.

Here is what you should do with that material:

Imagine that @aiamblichus is our firm’s new client. That client has come to us seeking advice as to the likely copyrightability of this text, in itself and as a representative of the larger “Siliconiad” project that the post describes. The advising would include answers to questions such as these: Is this (or some element of it) “covered” by copyright law?  To what extent?  What about future iterations of the text? What might influence answers to the question – that is, what might make the text (or elements of the text) more or less likely to be covered by copyright” (or more likely to be governed by a “thick” copyright rather than a “thin” copyright)?

Do not prepare and deliver the advice that the client seeks.

Instead, using the Copyright Office’s new guidance, such as it is, and the background copyright law to which the Report alludes, construct an outline of an interview with @aiamblichus that will help our firm deliver good guidance on the copyrightability questions.  The outline should consist of three to five significant themes, each drawn from (and citing to) key elements of relevant law, elaborated with details directed to the methods, processes, and results evident in the text illustrated in the images provided above. 

In short, I don’t want simply a list of questions; I want to see a structured sequence of questions, organized thematically, where the structure, the sequence, and the detail are explained clearly enough that anyone in our group who picks up the outline and uses it can understand its origins and purposes.

As you do that, assume and explore two versions of the basic background to the analysis.  Version one is: Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is, as it actually is, in the public domain.  Version two is: Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is, counterfactually, still “in” copyright.

So that you understand what happens next:

I fully expect that each member of the team will produce an outline that differs in larger and smaller ways from each other member’s outline.  We will, later, collect and share with the group all of the outlines that you all produce, to see and talk about where the group agrees and disagrees as to current and future directions for copyright law.

Please limit your work product to four pages and have it to me no later than Friday, February 21, 2025, at 3 pm.

Rules and Guidelines for Assignment One

To the extent that these rules may appear to conflict with general advice regarding work product that appears in course-related webpages, these rules take precedence.

This is an “open” problem, meaning that there are no limits on the resources that you may bring to bear on your work. Among other things, you may consult with your classmates and other human beings. If you discuss the merits of the assignment with anyone, however, you must disclose that person’s identity on or in your work product. Write the names of any of these “consultants” at the top of the first page of the document.

Use your own name in the “From” field. Your work product is not anonymous.

Format

You should use the default or standard “legal research memo” form and format for this assignment. For the content, be guided by the advice in the “Modern Legal Writing” document cited above.

Memos must be typed or printed using a computer. Each memo, including any attachments, must be not longer than four [4] typewritten or printed pages, double-spaced, with 1″ minimum margins on all sides. “To,” “From,” “Re,” and “Date” headings may be single spaced, and the “consultants” list and description of any AI consultation may appear inside the 1″ margin at the top of the first page.

You do not need to include a comprehensive statement of the facts; instead, you may refer to the factual background in my memo to you. Omitting a factual summary may be unwise nevertheless. A factual summary may be helpful in framing and presenting the analysis of the memo.

No footnotes are permitted.

The following font must be used: Twelve [12] point Times New Roman.

So that the memos can be uploaded to Canvas and graded electronically, you must use Microsoft WORD for the final, submitted version of the memo.

Grading

Work product will be graded based on form, format, and writing quality as well as on content. The assignments are designed so as not to have any single correct or even best solution. Each problem may present a range of issues that your work should identify, analyze, and solve in a creative way.

Due date

One copy of the work product prepared for this assignment must be turned in not later than Friday, February 21, 2025, at 3 pm.

Your work product must be turned in via the course page on Canvas in the folder for Assignment One for this course. Electronic (e-mailed) copies are not acceptable. Documents slipped under anyone’s door are not acceptable.

There were be no extensions or exceptions to the deadline. Work product that does not conform to the format instructions above, or that is turned in late, will be accepted but is subject to grade reduction.