'The New York Times' takes OpenAI to court. ChatGPT's future could be on the line; NPR, January 14, 2025

 Bobby Allyn, NPR; 'The New York Times' takes OpenAI to court. ChatGPT's future could be on the line

"A group of news organizations, led by The New York Times, took ChatGPT maker OpenAI to federal court on Tuesday in a hearing that could determine whether the tech company has to face the publishers in a high-profile copyright infringement trial.

Three publishers' lawsuits against OpenAI and its financial backer Microsoft have been merged into one case. Leading each of the three combined cases are the Times, The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Other publishers, like the Associated Press, News Corp. and Vox Media, have reached content-sharing deals with OpenAI, but the three litigants in this case are taking the opposite path: going on the offensive."

Major Canadian News Outlets Sue OpenAI in New Copyright Case; The New York Times, November 29, 2024

 Matina Stevis-Gridneff, The New York Times ; Major Canadian News Outlets Sue OpenAI in New Copyright Case

"A coalition of Canada’s biggest news organizations is suing OpenAI, the maker of the artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, accusing the company of illegally using their content in the first case of its kind in the country.

Five of the country’s major news companies, including the publishers of its top newspapers, newswires and the national broadcaster, filed the joint suit in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on Friday morning...

The Canadian outlets, which include the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the CBC — the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — are seeking what could add up to billions of dollars in damages. They are asking for 20,000 Canadian dollars, or $14,700, per article they claim was illegally scraped and used to train ChatGPT.

They are also seeking a share of the profits made by what they claim is OpenAI’s misuse of their content, as well as for the company to stop such practices in the future."

Anheuser-Busch sued for copyright infringement of Montana artist’s fishing illustration; KMOV.com, November 15, 2024

 Pat Pratt, KMOV.com; Anheuser-Busch sued for copyright infringement of Montana artist’s fishing illustration

"A Montana wildlife artist is suing Anheuser-Busch for copyright infringement of one of his fishing illustrations. 

Artist Jon Q. Wright filed the lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in St. Louis, where the company is headquartered. He has requested damages including profits made from the artwork, that illicit copies be impounded and further use be prohibited.

First Alert 4 has reached out to Anheuser-Busch requesting comment and is awaiting a response.

Wright states in the lawsuit he penned the image in 1999 and copyrighted it the following year. The image depicts a fishing scene with a fish in the foreground and a man in a boat in the background.

According to the lawsuit, Wright gave Anheuser-Busch a limited-term, non-exclusive license for specific works of art about 20 years ago, including the image at the center of the litigation filed Thursday. The license also included that several of the company’s affiliates could use the work.

The lawsuit filed Thursday alleges that the license has expired and Anheuser-Busch has altered the photo and continues to use it."

OpenAI Gets a Win as Court Says No Harm Was Demonstrated in Copyright Case; Gizmodo, November 8, 2024

 Todd Feathers, Gizmodo; OpenAI Gets a Win as Court Says No Harm Was Demonstrated in Copyright Case

"OpenAI won an initial victory on Thursday in one of the many lawsuits the company is facing for its unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train generative AI products like ChatGPT.

A federal judge in the southern district of New York dismissed a complaint brought by the media outlets Raw Story and AlterNet, which claimed that OpenAI violated copyright law by purposefully removing what is known as copyright management information, such as article titles and author names, from material that it incorporated into its training datasets.

OpenAI had filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue because they had not demonstrated a concrete harm to their businesses caused by the removal of the copyright management information. Judge Colleen McMahon agreed, dismissing the lawsuit but leaving the door open for the plaintiffs to file an amended complaint."

Former OpenAI Researcher Says the Company Broke Copyright Law; The New York Times, October 23, 2024

Cade Metz, The New York Times; Former OpenAI Researcher Says the Company Broke Copyright Law

"Mr. Balaji believes the threats are more immediate. ChatGPT and other chatbots, he said, are destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the digital data used to train these A.I. systems.

“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told The Times."

Trump campaign ordered to stop using classic R&B song; Associated Press via Politico, September 3, 2024

Associated Press via Politico; Trump campaign ordered to stop using classic R&B song; Associated Press via Politico

"A federal judge in Atlanta ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump and his campaign must stop using the song “Hold On, I’m Comin’” while the family of one of the song’s co-writers pursues a lawsuit against the former president over its use.

The estate of Isaac Hayes Jr. filed a lawsuit last month alleging that Trump, his campaign and several of his allies had infringed its copyright and should pay damages. After a hearing on the estate’s request for an emergency preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Thomas Thrash ruled that Trump must stop using the song, but he denied a request to force the campaign to take down any existing videos that include the song."

OpenAI Pushes Prompt-Hacking Defense to Deflect Copyright Claims; Bloomberg Law, August 29, 2024

 Annelise Gilbert, Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Pushes Prompt-Hacking Defense to Deflect Copyright Claims

"Diverting attention to hacking claims or how many tries it took to obtain exemplary outputs, however, avoids addressing most publishers’ primary allegation: AI tools illegally trained on copyrighted works."

Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement; AP, August 19, 2024

 MATT O’BRIEN, AP; Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement

"A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed “large-scale theft” in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books.

While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.

The smaller San Francisco-based company — founded by ex-OpenAI leaders — has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way...

The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction...

What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation...

But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning the way humans do."

Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI; Reuters, October 30, 2023

Blake Brittain, Reuters; Judge pares down artists' AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI

"A judge in California federal court on Monday trimmed a lawsuit by visual artists who accuse Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt of misusing their copyrighted work in connection with the companies' generative artificial intelligence systems.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick dismissed some claims from the proposed class action brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, including all of the allegations against Midjourney and DeviantArt. The judge said the artists could file an amended complaint against the two companies, whose systems utilize Stability's Stable Diffusion text-to-image technology." 

Scraping or Stealing? A Legal Reckoning Over AI Looms; Hollywood Reporter, August 22, 2023

 Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter ; Scraping or Stealing? A Legal Reckoning Over AI Looms

"Engineers build AI art generators by feeding AI systems, known as large language models, voluminous databases of images downloaded from the internet without licenses. The artists’ suit revolves around the argument that the practice of feeding these systems copyrighted works constitutes intellectual property theft. A finding of infringement in the case may upend how most AI systems are built in the absence of regulation placing guardrails around the industry. If the AI firms are found to have infringed on any copyrights, they may be forced to destroy datasets that have been trained on copyrighted works. They also face stiff penalties of up to $150,000 for each infringement.

AI companies maintain that their conduct is protected by fair use, which allows for the utilization of copyrighted works without permission as long as that use is transformative. The doctrine permits unlicensed use of copyrighted works under limited circumstances. The factors that determine whether a work qualifies include the purpose of the use, the degree of similarity, and the impact of the derivative work on the market for the original. Central to the artists’ case is winning the argument that the AI systems don’t create works of “transformative use,” defined as when the purpose of the copyrighted work is altered to create something with a new meaning or message."