Icelandic Fishing Giant Wins Copyright Case Against Artist; artnet, November 14, 2024

Jo Lawson-Tancred , artnet; Icelandic Fishing Giant Wins Copyright Case Against Artist

"The work by the artist known as Odee had publicly impersonated Iceland’s biggest fishing company Samherji, issuing a fake apology for its role in the so-called “fishrot” corruption scandal of 2019. In his ruling, the judge described the artwork as “an instrument of fraud, copyright infringement, and malicious falsehood.”

The case never went to trial but the artist said he plans to appeal the judgement. His defenders have argued that any punitive action taken against him could result in a “chilling effect” that discourages artist’s from daring to critique big corporations for fear of legal action.

Samherji sued Odee, the moniker for 41-year-old Icelandic artist Oddur Fridriksson, over We’re Sorry (2023), for which Odee created the website samherji.co.uk, imitating the company’s brand identity. On this platform, he issued the statement: “Samherji Apologizes, Pledges Restitution and Cooperation with Authorities.”

In Samherji’s complaint filed in London’s high court, it accused Odee of trademark infringement and malicious falsehood. The company’s lawyers applied for a summary judgement to avoid a trial."

‘I’m going to sue the living pants off them’: AI’s big legal showdown – and what it means for Dr Strange’s hair; The Guardian, November 6, 2024

Steve Rose , The Guardian; ‘I’m going to sue the living pants off them’: AI’s big legal showdown – and what it means for Dr Strange’s hair

"“The intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave.”

Now that wave is threatening to flood an unprepared industry, washing away jobs and certainties. How do people in the industry feel? To find out, I attended Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn (THU), a digital arts festival near Lisbon in Portugal. Now in its 10th year, THU is a place where young artists entering these industries, some 750 of them, come to meet, get inspired and learn from veterans in their fields: film-makers, animators, VFX wizards, concept artists, games designers. This year, AI is the elephant in the room. Everyone is either talking about it – or avoiding talking about it...

Andre Luis, the 43-year-old CEO and co-founder of THU, acknowledges that “the anxiety is here” at this year’s event, but rather than running away from it, he argues, artists should be embracing it. One of the problems now is that the people eagerly adopting AI are executives and managers. “They don’t understand how to use AI to accelerate creativity,” he says, “or to make things better for everyone, so it’s up to us [the artists] to teach them. You need people who actually are creative to use AI.”

Luis likens generative AI to ultra processed food: it cannot create anything new; it can only reconstitute what’s already there, turning it into an inferior product. “And a lot of companies are trying to make fast food,” he says. Many see AI as a way to churn out quick, cheap content, as opposed to higher quality fare that has been created “organically” over time, with loving human input...

The democratising potential of AI could usher in what Luis calls “a new era of indie” in films, games, TV. Just as digital technology put cameras, editing and graphics tools into the hands of many more people...

“AI is something that is here,” he tells the young creators at THU, “so you need to adapt. See the opportunities, see the problems, but understand that it can help you do things in a different way. You need to ask yourselves, ‘How can I be part of that?’"

2024 Tech Ethics Symposium: Coming October 17-18!; Duquesne University, October 17-18, 2024

 Duquesne University; 2024 Tech Ethics Symposium: Coming October 17-18!; How is AI Transforming Our Communities?

"The Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law will host the fifth annual Tech Ethics Symposium: “How is AI Transforming Our Communities?” This two-day symposium, co-sponsored by the Institute for Ethics and Integrity in Journalism and Media, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Albert P. Viragh Institute for Ethics in Business, will focus on how generative AI is transforming our daily lives and our communities. It will also explore how AI has already changed our region and will continue to alter our world in the next decade.

How do major stakeholders like journalists, educators, and tech workers use AI to shape our community?  How have professional communities in tech, journalism, and education been impacted already by AI? What is the role of politics in responding to AI’s influence on, and through, these impactful stakeholder communities? What has AI changed for communities of faith, artists, people with disabilities, and historically marginalized communities? What can each of us do to utilize –or avoid– AI to ensure strong, healthy human communities?"

Should You Be Allowed to Profit From A.I.-Generated Art?; The New York Times, September 27, 2024

Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times; Should You Be Allowed to Profit From A.I.-Generated Art?

[Excerpt]

"We attempt to attribute art whenever we can, and anything that’s only for purchase we either avoid or pay for. This particular piece seems to be available only in an Etsy shop, where the creator apparently uses A.I. prompts to generate images. The price is nominal: a few dollars. Yet I cannot help thinking that those who make A.I.-generated art are taking other artists’ work, essentially recreating it and then profiting from it. 

I’m not sure what the best move is...Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

There’s a sense in which A.I. image generators — such as DALL-E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — make use of the intellectual property of the artists whose work they’ve been trained on. But the same is true of human artists. The history of art is the history of people borrowing and adapting techniques and tropes from earlier work, with occasional moments of deep originality...

Maybe you’re worried that A.I. image generators will undermine the value of human-made art. Such concerns have a long history. In his classic 1935 essay, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ the critic Walter Benjamin pointed out that techniques for reproducing artworks have been invented throughout history. In antiquity, the Greeks had foundries for reproducing bronzes; in time, woodcuts were widely used to make multiple copies of images; etching, lithography and photography later added new possibilities. These technologies raised the question of what Benjamin called the ‘‘aura’’ of the individual artwork...

As forms of artificial intelligence grow increasingly widespread, we need to get used to so-called ‘‘centaur’’ models — collaborations between human and machine cognition."

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."

More Art School Classes Are Teaching AI This Fall Despite Ethical Concerns and Ongoing Lawsuits; Artnews, August 30, 2024

KAREN K. HO, Artnews ; More Art School Classes Are Teaching AI This Fall Despite Ethical Concerns and Ongoing Lawsuits

"When undergraduate students return to the Ringling College of Art and Design this fall, one of the school’s newest offerings will be an AI certificate. 

Ringling is just the latest of several top art schools to offer undergraduate students courses that focus on or integrate artificial intelligence tools and techniques.

ARTnews spoke to experts and faculty at Ringling, Rhode Island School of Design(RISD), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and Florida State University about how they construct curriculum; how they teach AI in consideration of its limitations and concerns about ethics and legal issues; as well as why they think it’s important for artists to learn."

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."

Should artists be terrified of AI replacing them?; The Guardian, August 11, 2024

Rudi Zygadlo , The Guardian; Should artists be terrified of AI replacing them?

"Interviewing those at the techno-cultural vanguard, including Herndon, Dryhurst and Maclean, has given me some sense of peace. I realise that I have been hanging on to 20th-century notions of art practice and the cultural landscape, one where humans spent months and years writing, painting, recording and filming works that defined the culture of our species. They provided meaning, distraction, wellbeing. A reason to exist. Making peace may mean letting go of these historical notions, finding new meaning. While digitally generatable media is increasingly becoming the domain of AI, for example, might performance and tactile artforms, such as live concerts, theatre and sculpture, be reinvigorated?"

Record labels sue AI music startups for copyright infringement; WBUR Here & Now, July 8, 2024

  WBUR Here & Now; Record labels sue AI music startups for copyright infringement

"Major record labels including Sony, Universal Music Group and Warner are suing two music startups that use artificial intelligence. The labels say Suno and Udio rely on mass copyright infringement, echoing similar complaints from authors, publishers and artists who argue that generative AI infringes on copyright.

Here & Now's Lisa Mullins discusses the cases with Ina Fried, chief technology correspondent for Axios."

Big Tech Launches Campaign to Defend AI Use; The Hollywood Reporter, June 6, 2024

 Winston Cho , The Hollywood Reporter; Big Tech Launches Campaign to Defend AI Use

"Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition whose members include Amazon, Apple and Meta, is launching a campaign to defend the legality of using copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence systems.

The group says the campaign, called “Generate and Create” and unveiled on Thursday, will aim to highlight “how artists use generative AI to enhance their creative output” and “showcase how AI lowers barriers for producing art” as part of an initiative to “defend the longstanding legal principle of fair use under copyright law.”"

GENERATIVE AI IS CREATING A COPYRIGHT CRISIS FOR ARTISTS; Mind Matters, June 3, 2024

 DENYSE O'LEARY, Mind Matters; GENERATIVE AI IS CREATING A COPYRIGHT CRISIS FOR ARTISTS

"The problem, Crawford and Schultz say, is that copyright law, as currently framed, does not really protect individuals under these circumstances. That’s not surprising. Copyright dates back to at least 1710 and the issues were very different then.

For one thing, as Jonathan Bartlett pointed out last December, when the New York Times launched a lawsuit for copyright violation against Microsoft and OpenAI, everyone accepted that big search engines have always violated copyright. But if they brought people to your site, while saving and using your content for themselves, you were getting something out of it at least.

But it’s different with generative AI and the chatbot. They use and replace your content. Users are not going back to you for more. OpenAI freely admits that it violates copyright but relies on loopholes to get around legal responsibility.

As the lawsuits pile up, it’s clear that gen AI and chatbots can’t work without these billions of images and texts. So we either do without them or we find a way to compensate the producers."

Adobe gets called out for violating its own AI ethics; Digital Trends, June 3, 2024

 Andrew Tarantola , Digital Trends; Adobe gets called out for violating its own AI ethics

"Last Friday, the estate of famed 20th century American photographer Ansel Adams took to Threads to publicly shame Adobe for allegedly offering AI-genearated art “inspired by” Adams’ catalog of work, stating that the company is “officially on our last nerve with this behavior.”...

Adobe has since removed the offending images, conceding in the Threads conversation that, “this goes against our Generative AI content policy.”

However, the Adams estate seemed unsatisfied with that response, claiming that it had been “in touch directly” with the company “multiple times” since last August. “Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community,” the estate continued, “we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists’ estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms.”"

Tennessee becomes the first state to protect musicians and other artists against AI; NPR, March 22, 2024

 Rebecca Rosman, NPR; Tennessee becomes the first state to protect musicians and other artists against AI

"Tennessee made history on Thursday, becoming the first U.S. state to sign off on legislation to protect musicians from unauthorized artificial intelligence impersonation.

"Tennessee (sic) is the music capital of the world, & we're leading the nation with historic protections for TN artists & songwriters against emerging AI technology," Gov. Bill Lee announced on social media.

The Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, or ELVIS Act, is an updated version of the state's old right of publicity law. While the old law protected an artist's name, photograph or likeness, the new legislation includes AI-specific protections."

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."

‘Please regulate AI:' Artists push for U.S. copyright reforms but tech industry says not so fast; AP, November 18, 2023

MATT O’BRIEN, AP; ‘Please regulate AI:' Artists push for U.S. copyright reforms but tech industry says not so fast

"Most tech companies cite as precedent Google’s success in beating back legal challenges to its online book library. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected authors’ claim that Google’s digitizing of millions of books and showing snippets of them to the public amounted to copyright infringement.

But that’s a flawed comparison, argued former law professor and bestselling romance author Heidi Bond, who writes under the pen name Courtney Milan. Bond said she agrees that “fair use encompasses the right to learn from books,” but Google Books obtained legitimate copies held by libraries and institutions, whereas many AI developers are scraping works of writing through “outright piracy.”

Perlmutter said this is what the Copyright Office is trying to help sort out.

“Certainly this differs in some respects from the Google situation,” Perlmutter said. “Whether it differs enough to rule out the fair use defense is the question in hand.”"

The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence; Hard Fork, The New York Times, November 3, 2023

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, Hard Fork, The New York Times; The Copyright Battle Over Artificial Intelligence

"President Biden’s new executive order on artificial intelligence has a little bit of everything for everyone concerned about A.I. Casey takes us inside the White House as the order was signed.

Then, Rebecca Tushnet, a copyright law expert, walks us through the latest developments in a lawsuit against the creators of A.I.-image generation tools. She explains why artists may have trouble making the case that these tools infringe on their copyrights."

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." 

Artists, copyright law, and the battle over artificial intelligence; 1A, October 23, 2023

 Lauren Hamilton, 1A ; Artists, copyright law, and the battle over artificial intelligence

"Tech companies have spent billions of dollars this year alone investing in the future of generative artificial intelligence.  

Generative AI apps like ChatGPT, Stable  Diffusion and Bard, deliver brand new text, images and code results – of comparable quality to human outputs – from user prompts. 

But have you ever wondered how an AI bot knows how to process a user’s request? 

It gets trained, using millions of data points – like books, poems, photos, illustrations and song lyrics – from all over the internet, including copyrighted material. 

In recent months, several authors have sued companies like Meta and OpenAI, alleging that the companies used their copyrighted works to train their generative AI models, all without permission or compensation.

It’s an issue of concern for many who work creative jobs; from authors, to musicians, voice actors and graphic designers.

What’s to come of the legal battles between creatives and AI companies? What role does copyright law play in shaping the future of artificial intelligence?"

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."

The Ethics of Making (and Publishing) AI Art; Lifehacker, July 31, 2023

Brendan Hesse, Lifehacker; The Ethics of Making (and Publishing) AI Art

"This post is part of Lifehacker’s “Living With AI” series: We investigate the current state of AI, walk through how it can be useful (and how it can’t), and evaluate where this revolutionary tech is heading next. Read more here...

Are there ethical uses of AI art?

Despite the ethical and legal issues, some argue there is a place for these tools, and that they can even be helpful to professional artists...

Given all these concerns, it’s hard to recommend AI art creators, even if the intent to use them is innocent. Nevertheless, these tools are here, and unless some future regulations force them to change, we can’t stop folks from giving them a try. But, if you do, please keep in mind the legal and ethical issues associated with making and sharing AI art, think twice about sharing it, and never claim an AI-generated image as your own work."