A. Feder Cooper
@afedercooper.bsky.social
340 followers 190 following 130 posts
ML researcher, MSR + Stanford postdoc, future Yale professor https://afedercooper.info
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afedercooper.bsky.social
This is a really great community of researchers, and every accepted paper gets a generously long talk slot to present.

CFP: computersciencelaw.org/2026-2/2026-...

Main track deadline (archival and non-archival): September 30, AoE
2026-CFP - ACM Symposium on Computer Science & Law
2026 Call for Papers 5th ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law March 3-5, 2026 Berkeley, California The 5th ACM…
computersciencelaw.org
afedercooper.bsky.social
The NeurIPS position track didn't take a large number of extraordinary papers that surpassed the acceptance bar, limiting the acceptance rate to an unusually low 6%.

If you have a rejected paper at the intersection of ML and law, consider submitting to ACM CSLaw '26.
2026-CFP - ACM Symposium on Computer Science & Law
2026 Call for Papers 5th ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law March 3-5, 2026 Berkeley, California The 5th ACM…
computersciencelaw.org
afedercooper.bsky.social
One more week to submit to CSLaw '26!!
afedercooper.bsky.social
15 days left to submit to the CSLaw '26 main track! (archival and non-archival)!
afedercooper.bsky.social
The CFP for ACM CSLaw '26 is up! Deadline for main-track papers (archival and non-archival) is September 30!

computersciencelaw.org/2026
afedercooper.bsky.social
at least 100k with all the appendices 🙃
Reposted by A. Feder Cooper
Reposted by A. Feder Cooper
mattielubchansky.com
was just looking for @seantcollins.com’s “goofy at the crucification” post and google is so cool now
afedercooper.bsky.social
Generative AI can be like a search engine, a website, a library, an author, or like any number of other things copyright has a well-developed framework for dealing with.

Prematurely accepting one of these analogies to the exclusion of the others would mean ignoring numerous relevant similarities
afedercooper.bsky.social
5. Generative AI does not make the ordinary business of copyright law irrelevant:

Courts will still need to make plenty of old-fashioned, retail judgments about individual works.

6. Analogies can be misleading: Generative AI systems blur the boundaries between things that were formerly distinct.
afedercooper.bsky.social
4. Fair use is not a silver bullet:

Generative AI scrambles past assumptions about ML and fair use. Some generations will infringe, and that could impact the fair use analysis at previous stages of the supply chain.
afedercooper.bsky.social
3. Design choices matter:

Every actor in the generative-AI supply chain is in a position to make choices that affect their copyright exposure, and others'.
afedercooper.bsky.social
2. Copyright concerns cannot be localized to a single link in the supply chain:

Decisions made by one actor can affect the copyright liability of another, potentially far away actor in the supply chain
afedercooper.bsky.social
Part III provides broader lessons. They (and the piece in general) have held up really well, in spite of how fast this landscape is changing:

1. Copyright touches every part of the generative-AI supply chain:

Every stage from collecting training data to alignment can make use of copyrighted works
afedercooper.bsky.social
Part I has the relevant background on ML, generative AI, and the complex, interconnected supply chain involved in the design, construction, deployment + use of generative-AI models & systems

Part II goes through the very many touch points between US copyright law and the generative-AI supply chain
afedercooper.bsky.social
We worked really hard to make this piece accessible and useful to both copyright and ML experts, alike.

And we've been thrilled to hear over the last two years how our paper has helped teachers, journalists, and other interested readers better understand these issues.
afedercooper.bsky.social
After 2 years in press, it's published!

"Talkin' 'Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative-AI Supply Chain," is out in the 72nd volume of the Journal of the Copyright Society

copyrightsociety.org/journal-entr...

written with @katherinelee.bsky.social & @jtlg.bsky.social (2023)
TALKIN' 'BOUT AI GENERATION: COPYRIGHT AND THE GENERATIVE-AI SUPPLY CHAIN | The Copyright Society
We know copyright
copyrightsociety.org
Reposted by A. Feder Cooper
jtlg.bsky.social
The Bartz v. Anthropic settlement is the polar opposite of the Google Books settlement: a discrete one-time payment for past copying, on a discrete and closed-ended class, and making no attempt at all to deal with a larger forward-looking issues.
afedercooper.bsky.social
not again…wrote a (really) long law review paper that started as a short response to some wildly inaccurate comments he made in a post about copyright and language models reproducing training data they’ve “memorized.” It’s 2 years later and that post still isn’t fully successfully debunked 🫠
afedercooper.bsky.social
But it’s really expensive in others. E.g., NeurIPS ‘25 is slated to reject 300+ papers that ACs voted to accept bc of physical resource constraints. This is all bad for science, and will hit junior scholars the hardest.

(I also have no idea to responsibly recruit students in this ecosystem.)
afedercooper.bsky.social
Also don’t think acceptance at these venues is a sign of quality anymore. Great, influential, unpublished arxiv paper seem to mean more. They’re dealing with the same slop + scale problems, without enough qualified reviewers. Drawing arbitrary lines is a “cheap” way to solve them in some sense.
afedercooper.bsky.social
oh, not all of this evidence is ML experiments.

But I agree in general. I also don’t think I’d know how to solve this problem, but this particular line drawing seems like it could go not so great for some really good work (like @mariaa.bsky.social’s). It’ll be a wait and see.
afedercooper.bsky.social
my current understanding @jacyanthis.bsky.social is this is targeting a new flavor of paper. A lot of good positions at ICML have supporting evidence. versions of these papers (even if not accepted) are arguably typical scientific papers (which often have positions), could go up as normal preprints?
afedercooper.bsky.social
(Having done some work on this, I think this type of clean room practice isn’t actually super feasible in practice. Even if you get curation like this right—a huge if—I’m finding that these types of counterfactuals are really brittle in practice)