In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense; TechCrunch, January 15, 2025

 

Kyle Wiggers

Maxwell Zeff

, TechCrunch ; In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense

"Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have used YouTube’s battle to remove pirated content to defend his own company’s use of a data set containing copyrighted e-books, reveals newly released snippets of a deposition he gave late last year.

The deposition, which was part of a complaint submitted to the court by plaintiffs’ attorneys, is related to the AI copyright case Kadrey v. Meta. It’s one of many such cases winding through the U.S. court system that’s pitting AI companies against authors and other IP holders. For the most part, the defendants in these cases – AI companies – claim that training on copyrighted content is “fair use.” Many copyright holders disagree."

AI's assault on our intellectual property must be stopped; Financial Times, December 21, 2024

 Kate Mosse, Financial Times; AI's assault on our intellectual property must be stopped

"Imagine my dismay, therefore, to discover that those 15 years of dreaming, researching, planning, writing, rewriting, editing, visiting libraries and archives, translating Occitan texts, hunting down original 13th-century documents, becoming an expert in Catharsis, apparently counts for nothing. Labyrinth is just one of several of my novels that have been scraped by Meta's large language model. This has been done without my consent, without remuneration, without even notification. This is theft...

AI companies present creators as being against change. We are  not. Every artist I know is already engaging with AI in one way or another. But a distinction needs to be made between AI that can be used in brilliant ways -- for example, medical diagnosis -- and the foundations of AI models, where companies are essentially stealing creatives' work for their own profit. We should not forget that the AI companies rely on creators to build their models. Without strong copyright law that ensures creators can earn a living, AI companies will lack the high-quality material that is essential for their future growth."

Can You Copyright a Vibe?; The New York Times, December 5, 2024

 Sandra E. Garcia , The New York Times; Can You Copyright a Vibe?

"Ms. Gifford claims that Ms. Sheil, 21, not only started to mimic her online persona but also appropriated her entire look. And now she is suing.

Ms. Gifford had copyrighted several of her social media posts in January, after noticing the similarity between Ms. Sheil’s posts and her own. Several photos were submitted as evidence in the lawsuit Ms. Gifford filed this year in a federal court in Texas accusing Ms. Sheil of copyright infringement. But in the carefully curated world of social media, Ms. Gifford has leveled a perhaps more severe charge against her: stealing her vibe...

In several interviews beginning in August, experts said influencers have to navigate a blurry landscape in which assigning credit to who created what can be daunting and, in some cases, impossible.

“There really is a sense that you’re both a creator and a borrower,” said Jeanne Fromer, a professor of intellectual property law at New York University. “Fashion is built on that. All the creative industries — painting, music, movies — they’re all built on borrowing in certain ways from the past and also ideally trying to bring your own spin to something. I don’t know that anyone wants to go too far as a result.""

Indian news agency sues OpenAI alleging copyright infringement; TechCrunch, November 18, 2024

 Manish Singh, TechCrunch; Indian news agency sues OpenAI alleging copyright infringement

"One of India’s largest news agencies, Asian News International (ANI), has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content in the world’s most populous nation.

Asian News International filed a 287-page lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on Monday, alleging the AI company illegally used its content to train its AI models and generated false information attributed to the news agency. The case marks the first time an Indian media organization has taken legal action against OpenAI over copyright claims.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Justice Amit Bansal issued a summons to OpenAI after the company confirmed it had already ensured that ChatGPT wasn’t accessing ANI’s website. The bench said that it was not inclined to grant an injunction order on Tuesday, as the case required a detailed hearing for being a “complex issue.”

The next hearing is scheduled to be held in January."

‘Blade Runner 2049’ Producers Sue Elon Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery, Alleging Copyright Infringement; Variety, October 21, 2024

 Todd Spangler , Variety; ‘Blade Runner 2049’ Producers Sue Elon Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery, Alleging Copyright Infringement

"Alcon Entertainment, the production company behind “Blade Runner 2049,” sued Tesla and CEO Elon Musk, as well as Warner Bros. Discovery, alleging that AI-generated images depicting scenes from the film used for the launch of Tesla’s self-driving Robotaxi represent copyright infringement.

In its lawsuit, filed Monday in L.A., Alcon said it had adamantly insisted that “Blade Runner 2049,” which stars Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, have no affiliation of any kind with “Tesla, X, Musk or any Musk-owned company,” given “Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech.”"

Art Collective Behind Viral Image of Kamala Harris Sues for Copyright Infringement; artnet, October 11, 2024

Jo Lawson-Tancred , artnet; Art Collective Behind Viral Image of Kamala Harris Sues for Copyright Infringement

"A lawsuit filed by Good Trubble in a California district on October 10 alleges that Irem Erdem of Round Rock, Texas, deliberately committed copyright infringement because of the image’s “widespread dissemination” online.

The digitally-created artwork designed by Bria Goeller for Good Trubble is titled That Little Girl Was Me. It was released on October 20, 2020, and went viral shortly after the last U.S. presidential election in November 2020, when Harris became the first Black and South Asian woman to be elected vice president. The image can be bought as a print or on t-shirts and other products on Good Trubble’s website, including a new version featuring the White House in celebration of Harris’s current bid for the presidency.

The image pairs the figure of Harris with silhouette of activist Ruby Bridges as a young girl. It quotes from Norman Rockwell‘s iconic 1964 painting The Problem We All Live With, which depicts the historic event of a six-year-old Bridges being escorted by four deputy U.S. marshals into the all-white public school during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis of 1960. This measure was taken to protect her from the threat of violence, which is hinted at by a racial slur and the splatter of thrown tomatoes scrawled on the wall behind her."

Trump’s other legal problem: Copyright infringement claims; The Washington Post, September 7, 2024

 

Herb Scribner

 and 

Janay Kingsberry

 The Washington Post; Trump’s other legal problem: Copyright infringement claims

"Music industry experts and copyright law attorneys say the cases, as well as Trump’s decision to continue playing certain songs despite artists’ requests that he desist, underscore the complex legalities of copyright infringement in today’s digital, streaming and licensing era — and could set an important precedent on the of use of popular music in political campaigns."

ABC, Kimmel Defeat George Santos Cameo Video Copyright Suit; Bloomberg Law, August 19, 2024

 Kyle Jahner , Bloomberg Law; ABC, Kimmel Defeat George Santos Cameo Video Copyright Suit

"Jimmy Kimmel and ABC defeated former Rep. George Santos’ copyright lawsuit as a New York federal court found use of his Cameo videos on television constituted fair use."

Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators; The Hollywood Reporter, August 13, 2024

 Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter; Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators

"Artists suing generative artificial intelligence art generators have cleared a major hurdle in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over the uncompensated and unauthorized use of billions of images downloaded from the internet to train AI systems, with a federal judge allowing key claims to move forward.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Monday advanced all copyright infringement and trademark claims in a pivotal win for artists. He found that Stable Diffusion, Stability’s AI tool that can create hyperrealistic images in response to a prompt of just a few words, may have been “built to a significant extent on copyrighted works” and created with the intent to “facilitate” infringement. The order could entangle in the litigation any AI company that incorporated the model into its products."

Music labels' AI lawsuits create copyright puzzle for courts; Reuters, August 4, 2024

 Blake Brittain, Reuters; Music labels' AI lawsuits create copyright puzzle for courts

"Suno and Udio pointed to past public statements defending their technology when asked for comment for this story. They filed their initial responses in court on Thursday, denying any copyright violations and arguing that the lawsuits were attempts to stifle smaller competitors. They compared the labels' protests to past industry concerns about synthesizers, drum machines and other innovations replacing human musicians...

The labels' claims echo allegations by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude that use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are still pending and in their early stages.

Both sets of cases pose novel questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI's use of copyrighted material to create something new...

"Music copyright has always been a messy universe," said Julie Albert, an intellectual property partner at law firm Baker Botts in New York who is tracking the new cases. And even without that complication, Albert said fast-evolving AI technology is creating new uncertainty at every level of copyright law.

WHOSE FAIR USE?

The intricacies of music may matter less in the end if, as many expect, the AI cases boil down to a "fair use" defense against infringement claims - another area of U.S. copyright law filled with open questions."

Religious education group sues Fort Wayne man over copyright claims; The Journal Gazette, July 8, 2024

 Ashley Sloboda  , The Journal Gazette; Religious education group sues Fort Wayne man over copyright claims

"LifeWise claims in its lawsuit that Parrish signed up online to volunteer with the hope of publishing information that might damage the organization’s reputation and prompt parents to oppose LifeWise Academy chapters in their communities.

Parrish accessed LifeWise’s information storage systems, downloaded internal documents and posted them along with the LifeWise curriculum on his website, parentsagainstlifewise.online, according to the lawsuit. It said Parrish also posted links to the curriculum on the Facebook group.

“He improperly obtained our entire copyright protected curriculum, and he posted to his website without our permission,” LifeWise said in a statement Monday.

LifeWise tried to get Parrish to voluntarily remove its curriculum, but the complaint said the organization’s efforts – including an attorney’s cease-and-desist letter and social media messages the chief operating officer sent him – were unsuccessful.

The lawsuit said Parrish responded to the letter with a meme stating, “It’s called fair use (expletive).”

LifeWise disagrees. In its statement, the organization said its curriculum is licensed through a publisher called LifeWay, and anyone is welcome to purchase the LifeWay curriculum through its website.

“Posting the entire curriculum is not ‘fair use,’ and we are confident that the judge will agree,” LifeWise said Monday."

Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it’s on the open web; The Verge, June 28, 2024

  Sean Hollister, The Verge; Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it’s on the open web

"Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use. 

When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:

I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding...

I am not a lawyer, but even I can tell you that the moment you create a work, it’s automatically protected by copyright in the US." 

Richard Prince to Pay Photographers Who Sued Over Copyright; The New York Times, January 26, 2024

Matt Stevens, The New York Times; Richard Prince to Pay Photographers Who Sued Over Copyright

"The artist Richard Prince agreed to pay at least $650,000 to two photographers whose images he had incorporated in his own work, ending a long-running copyright dispute that had been closely monitored by the art world...

Brian Sexton, a lawyer for Prince, said the artist wanted to protect free expression and have copyright law catch up to changing technology...

Marriott said the judgments showed that copyright law still provided meaningful protection to creators and that the internet was not a copying free-for-all.

“There is not a fair use exception to copyright law that applies to the famous and another that applies to everyone else,” he said."

Patent Poetry: Judge Throws Out Most of Artists’ AI Copyright Infringement Claims; JD Supra, November 20, 2023

 Adam Philipp, AEON Law, JD Supra; Patent Poetry: Judge Throws Out Most of Artists’ AI Copyright Infringement Claims

"One of the plaintiffs’ theories of infringement was that the output images based on the Training Images are all infringing derivative works.

The court noted that to support that claim the output images would need to be substantially similar to the protected works. However, noted the court,

none of the Stable Diffusion output images provided in response to a particular Text Prompt is likely to be a close match for any specific image in the training data.

The plaintiffs argued that there was no need to show substantial similarity when there was direct proof of copying. The judge was skeptical of that argument.

This is just one of many AI-related cases making its way through the courts, and this is just a ruling on a motion rather than an appellate court decision. Nevertheless, this line of analysis will likely be cited in other cases now pending.

Also, this case shows the importance of artists registering their works with the Copyright Office before seeking to sue for infringement."

A.I. May Not Get a Chance to Kill Us if This Kills It First; Slate, October 17, 2023

 SCOTT NOVER, Slate; A.I. May Not Get a Chance to Kill Us if This Kills It First

"There is a disaster scenario for OpenAI and other companies funneling billions into A.I. models: If a court found that a company was liable for copyright infringement, it could completely halt the development of the offending model." 

EU legal advisor: disclosing identities of suspected copyright pirates "compatible" with EU privacy laws; Boing Boing, September 29, 2023

 ROB BESCHIZZA, Boing Boing; EU legal advisor: disclosing identities of suspected copyright pirates "compatible" with EU privacy laws

"Releasing pirates' identities is "Compatible With EU Privacy Laws," says a top legal advisor to the European Union's highest court following the discovery that the French government retains more than a decade of data collected about millions of people suspected of infringing copyrights."

'Peaky Blinders' creators blast DeSantis for copyright violation in controversial ad; UPI, 7/5/23

Adam Schrader, UPI; 'Peaky Blinders' creators blast DeSantis for copyright violation in controversial ad

"The production team for the hit series Peaky Blinders has ripped Ron DeSantis for copyright violation after the Florida governor used a clip of Cillian Murphy's character in the show without license or permission...

The video, which lasts just over a minute, criticizes Trump for seemingly supporting multiple gay-rights topics, as well as selling "LGBTQ for Trump" shirts, saying he would allow Caitlyn Jenner to use the bathroom at Trump Tower and for celebrating Pride Month in a 2019 tweet. Midway through, the video switches to a meme-filled, music-driven celebration of all the steps DeSantis has made to strip people of their rights in Florida.

The bizarre clip includes several extremely quick shots of Murphy as Thomas Shelby, the fictional boss of a brutal crime family in Britain in the 1920s, smoking a cigarette as if comparing DeSantis' leadership style with that of a criminal."

PRH, Internet Archive Clash Over ‘Maus’; Publishers Weekly, February 15, 2022

Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly; PRH, Internet Archive Clash Over ‘Maus’

"However, Lisa Lucas, senior v-p and publisher of Pantheon Schocken, the PRH division which publishes Maus, denies the allegation. In response, Lucas emphatically denied the claim. “That is not true,” she said, framing the issue around copyright concerns rather than consumer demand. “Art Spiegelman has never consented to an e-book of Maus," Lucas said. "Therefore, PRH asked the Internet Archive to remove the PDF and stop pirating Maus because it violates Art Spiegelman’s copyright.”

Although best known for its collection of public domain titles, the Internet Archive also offers a lending library of more than 2 million modern titles “not in the public domain,” Freeland said. IA offers digital lending of these titles under a controversial policy called Controlled Digital Lending, or CDL, in which IA scans the book and lends out a PDF of the title, one copy per lender at a time, much like a physical book.

In June 2020, four publishers, including PRH, filed a lawsuit against the IA charging it with copyright infringement. The case is still working its way through the courts."

Twitter disables video retweeted by Donald Trump over copyright complaint; The Guardian, July 19, 2020

Reuters via The Guardian; Twitter disables video retweeted by Donald Trump over copyright complaint

"Twitter has disabled a campaign-style video retweeted by Donald Trump, citing a copyright complaint.

The video, which included music from the group Linkin Park, disappeared from the president’s Twitter feed late Saturday with the notification: “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”

Twitter removed the video, which Trump had retweeted from the White House social media director, Dan Scavino, after it received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice from Machine Shop Entertainment, according to a notice posted on the Lumen Database which collects requests for removal of online materials."

Publishers Sue Internet Archive Over Free E-Books; The New York Times, June 1, 2020

Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times; Publishers Sue Internet Archive Over Free E-Books

Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette and Wiley accused the nonprofit of piracy for making over 1 million books free online.

"A group of publishers sued Internet Archive on Monday, saying that the nonprofit group’s trove of free electronic copies of books was robbing authors and publishers of revenue at a moment when it was desperately needed.

Internet Archive has made more than 1.3 million books available free online, which were scanned and available to one borrower at a time for a period of 14 days, according to the complaint. Then in March, the group said it would lift all restrictions on its book lending until the end of the public health crisis, creating what it called “a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners.”

But many publishers and authors have called it something different: theft.

“There is nothing innovative or transformative about making complete copies of books to which you have no rights and giving them away for free,” said Maria A. Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, which is helping to coordinate the industry’s response. “They’ve stepped in downstream and taken the intellectual investment of authors and the financial investment of publishers, they’re interfering and giving this away.”"