Brewster Kahle, founder and director of the Internet Archive. Digital librarian and computer engineer.
James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. Studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power."
Annelise Levy, Bloomberg Law; Anthropic Agrees to Enforce Copyright Guardrails on New AI Tools
"Anthropic PBC must apply guardrails to prevent its future AI tools from producing infringing copyrighted content, according to a Monday agreement reached with music publishers suing the company for infringing protected song lyrics.
Eight music publishers—including
Blake Brittain, Reuters ; Tech companies face tough AI copyright questions in 2025
"The new year may bring pivotal developments in a series of copyright lawsuits that could shape the future business of artificial intelligence.
Nicola Jones, Nature; The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do?
"A prominent study1 made headlines this year by putting a number on this problem: researchers at Epoch AI, a virtual research institute, projected that, by around 2028, the typical size of data set used to train an AI model will reach the same size as the total estimated stock of public online text. In other words, AI is likely to run out of training data in about four years’ time (see ‘Running out of data’). At the same time, data owners — such as newspaper publishers — are starting to crack down on how their content can be used, tightening access even more. That’s causing a crisis in the size of the ‘data commons’, says Shayne Longpre, an AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who leads the Data Provenance Initiative, a grass-roots organization that conducts audits of AI data sets...
Several lawsuits are now under way attempting to win compensation for the providers of data being used in AI training. In December 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft for copyright infringement; in April this year, eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital in New York City jointly filed a similar lawsuit. The counterargument is that an AI should be allowed to read and learn from online content in the same way as a person, and that this constitutes fair use of the material. OpenAI has said publicly that it thinks The New York Times lawsuit is “without merit”.
If courts uphold the idea that content providers deserve financial compensation, it will make it harder for both AI developers and researchers to get what they need — including academics, who don’t have deep pockets. “Academics will be most hit by these deals,” says Longpre. “There are many, very pro-social, pro-democratic benefits of having an open web,” he adds."
Kate Knibbs, Wired; Every AI Copyright Lawsuit in the US, Visualized
"WIRED is keeping close tabs on how each of these lawsuits unfold. We’ve created visualizations to help you track and contextualize which companies and rights holders are involved, where the cases have been filed, what they’re alleging, and everything else you need to know."
MATT GROWCOOT, PETAPIXEL; GETTY IMAGES WANTS $1.7 BILLION FROM ITS LAWSUIT WITH STABILITY AI
"Getty, one of the world’s largest photo agencies, launched its lawsuit in January 2023. Getty suspects that Stability AI may have used as many as 12 million of its copyrighted photos to train the AI image generator Stable Diffusion. Getty is seeking $150,000 per infringement and 12 million photos equates to a staggering $1.8 trillion.
However, according to Stability AI’s latest company accounts as reported by Sifted, Getty is seeking damages for 11,383 works at $150,000 per infringement which comes to a total of $1.7 billion. Stability AI has previously reported that Getty was seeking damages for 7,300 images so that number has increased. But Stability AI says Getty hasn’t given an exact number it wants for the lawsuit to be settled, according to Sifted."
JON BLISTEIN, Rolling Stone; KATHLEEN HANNA, TEGAN AND SARA, MORE BACK INTERNET ARCHIVE IN $621 MILLION COPYRIGHT FIGHT
"Kathleen Hanna, Tegan and Sara, and Amanda Palmer are among the 300-plus musicians who have signed an open letter supporting the Internet Archive as it faces a $621 million copyright infringement lawsuit over its efforts to preserve 78 rpm records...
The lawsuit was brought last year by several major music rights holders, led by Universal Music Group and Sony Music. They claimed the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project — an unprecedented effort to digitize hundreds of thousands of obsolete shellac discs produced between the 1890s and early 1950s — constituted the “wholesale theft of generations of music,” with “preservation and research” used as a “smokescreen.” (The Archive has denied the claims.)
While more than 400,000 recordings have been digitized and made available to listen to on the Great 78 Project, the lawsuit focuses on about 4,000, most by recognizable legacy acts like Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Ella Fitzgerald. With the maximum penalty for statutory damages at $150,000 per infringing incident, the lawsuit has a potential price tag of over $621 million. A broad enough judgement could end the Internet Archive.
Supporters of the suit — including the estates of many of the legacy artists whose recordings are involved — claim the Archive is doing nothing more than reproducing and distributing copyrighted works, making it a clear-cut case of infringement. The Archive, meanwhile, has always billed itself as a research library (albeit a digital one), and its supporters see the suit (as well as a similar one brought by book publishers) as an attack on preservation efforts, as well as public access to the cultural record."
Kyle Wiggers , TechCrunch; OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit
"OpenAI tried to recover the data — and was mostly successful. However, because the folder structure and file names were “irretrievably” lost, the recovered data “cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs’ copied articles were used to build [OpenAI’s] models,” per the letter.
“News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time,” counsel for The Times and Daily News wrote. “The news plaintiffs learned only yesterday that the recovered data is unusable and that an entire week’s worth of its experts’ and lawyers’ work must be re-done, which is why this supplemental letter is being filed today.”
The plaintiffs’ counsel makes clear that they have no reason to believe the deletion was intentional. But they do say the incident underscores that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools."
Caitlin Huston , The Hollywood Reporter; News Corp Sues AI Company Perplexity Over Copyright Claims, Made Up Text
"Dow Jones, the parent company to the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post filed a lawsuit Monday against artificial intelligence company Perplexity, alleging that the company is illegally using copyrighted work.
The suit alleges that Perplexity, which is an AI research and conversational search engine, draws on articles and other copyrighted content from the publishers to feed into its product and then repackages the content in its responses, or sometimes uses the content verbatim, without linking back to the articles. The engine can also be used to display several paragraphs or entire articles, when asked."
Jacob Shamsian , Business Insider; Why The New York Times' lawyers are inspecting OpenAI's code in a secretive room
"OpenAI is worth $157 billion largely because of the success of ChatGPT. But to build the chatbot, the company trained its models on vast quantities of text it didn't pay a penny for.
That text includes stories from The New York Times, articles from other publications, and an untold number of copyrighted books.
The examination of the code for ChatGPT, as well as for Microsoft's artificial intelligence models built using OpenAI's technology, is crucial for the copyright infringement lawsuits against the two companies.
Publishers and artists have filed about two dozen major copyright lawsuits against generative AI companies. They are out for blood, demanding a slice of the economic pie that made OpenAI the dominant player in the industry and which pushed Microsoft's valuation beyond $3 trillion. Judges deciding those cases may carve out the legal parameters for how large language models are trained in the US."
Aruni Soni, Bloomberg Law; Meta Fails to Block Zuckerberg Deposition in AI Copyright Suit
"A federal magistrate judge opened the door to a deposition of
Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson denied the request to block the deposition because the plaintiffs supplied enough evidence that Zuckerberg is the “chief decision maker and policy setter for Meta’s Generative AI branch and the development of the large language models at issue in this action,” he said in the order filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District."
Nick Robins-Early, The Guardian ; The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet sue OpenAI for copyright infringement
"OpenAI and Microsoft are facing a fresh round of lawsuits from news publishers over allegations that their generative artificial intelligence products violated copyright laws and illegally trained by using journalists’ work. Three progressive US outlets – the Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet – filed suits in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, demanding compensation from the tech companies.
The news outlets claim that the companies in effect plagiarized copyright-protected articles to develop and operate ChatGPT, which has become OpenAI’s most prominent generative AI tool. They allege that ChatGPT was trained not to respect copyright, ignores proper attribution and fails to notify users when the service’s answers are generated using journalists’ protected work."
Senior Lecturer, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University, The Conversation; ; The New York Times’ AI copyright lawsuit shows that forgiveness might not be better than permission
"The lawsuit also presents a novel argument – not advanced by other, similar cases – that’s related to something called “hallucinations”, where AI systems generate false or misleading information but present it as fact. This argument could in fact be one of the most potent in the case.
The NYT case in particular raises three interesting takes on the usual approach. First, that due to their reputation for trustworthy news and information, NYT content has enhanced value and desirability as training data for use in AI.
Second, that due to its paywall, the reproduction of articles on request is commercially damaging. Third, that ChatGPT “hallucinations” are causing reputational damage to the New York Times through, effectively, false attribution.
This is not just another generative AI copyright dispute. The first argument presented by the NYT is that the training data used by OpenAI is protected by copyright, and so they claim the training phase of ChatGPT infringed copyright. We have seen this type of argument run before in other disputes."
Megan Morrone , Axios; Copyright law is AI's 2024 battlefield
"Looming fights over copyright in AI are likely to set the new technology's course in 2024 faster than legislation or regulation.
Driving the news: The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on December 27, claiming their AI systems' "widescale copying" constitutes copyright infringement.
The big picture: After a year of lawsuits from creators protecting their works from getting gobbled up and repackaged by generative AI tools, the new year could see significant rulings that alter the progress of AI innovation.
Why it matters: The copyright decisions coming down the pike — over both the use of copyrighted material in the development of AI systems and also the status of works that are created by or with the help of AI — are crucial to the technology's future and could determine winners and losers in the market."
J. Edward Moreno , The New York Times; Boom in A.I. Prompts a Test of Copyright Law
"The boom in artificial intelligence tools that draw on troves of content from across the internet has begun to test the bounds of copyright law...
Data is crucial to developing generative A.I. technologies — which can generate text, images and other media on their own — and to the business models of companies doing that work.
“Copyright will be one of the key points that shapes the generative A.I. industry,” said Fred Havemeyer, an analyst at the financial research firm Macquarie.
A central consideration is the “fair use” doctrine in intellectual property law, which allows creators to build upon copyrighted work...
“Ultimately, whether or not this lawsuit ends up shaping copyright law will be determined by whether the suit is really about the future of fair use and copyright, or whether it’s a salvo in a negotiation,” Jane Ginsburg, a professor at Columbia Law School, said of the lawsuit by The Times...
Competition in the A.I. field may boil down to data haves and have-nots...
“Generative A.I. begins and ends with data,” Mr. Havemeyer said."
, Forbes; Testing Ethical Boundaries. The New York Times Sues Microsoft And OpenAI On Copyright Concerns
"We have at least seen Apple announce an ethical approach to discussing upfront with the US Media giants their interest in partnering on AI generative AI training needs and finding new revenue sharing models.
Smart Move by Apple...
The court’s rulings here will be critical to advance ethical AI practices and guard rails on what is “fair” versus predatory.
We have too many leadership behaviors that encroach on others Intellectual Property (IP) and try to mask or muddy the authenticity of communication and sources of origination of ideas and content.
I for one will be following these cases closely and this also sends a wake -up call to all technology titans, and technology industry leaders that respect, integrity and transparency on operating practices need an ethical overhauling.
One of the important leadership behaviors is risk management and looking at all stakeholder views and appreciating the risks that can be incurred. I am keen to see how Apple approaches these dynamics to build a stronger ethical brand profile."
Blake Montgomery, The Guardian; OpenAI offers to pay for ChatGPT customers’ copyright lawsuits
"Rather than remove copyrighted material from ChatGPT’s training dataset, the chatbot’s creator is offering to cover its clients’ legal costs for copyright infringement suits.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on Monday: “We can defend our customers and pay the costs incurred if you face legal claims around copyright infringement and this applies both to ChatGPT Enterprise and the API.” The compensation offer, which OpenAI is calling Copyright Shield, applies to users of the business tier, ChatGPT Enterprise, and to developers using ChatGPT’s application programming interface. Users of the free version of ChatGPT or ChatGPT+ were not included.
OpenAI is not the first to offer such legal protection, though as the creator of the wildly popular ChatGPT, which Altman said has 100 million weekly users, it is a heavyweight player in the industry. Google, Microsoft and Amazon have made similar offers to users of their generative AI software. Getty Images, Shutterstock and Adobe have extended similar financial liability protection for their image-making software."
Kevin Roose and 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."
Michelle Cheng, Quartz; "Shadow libraries" are at the heart of the mounting copyright lawsuits against OpenAI
"However, there are clues about these two data sets. “Books1” is linked to Project Gutenberg (an online e-book library with over 60,000 titles), a popular dataset for AI researchers to train their data on due to the lack of copyright, the filing states. “Books2” is estimated to contain about 294,000 titles, it notes.
Most of the “internet-based books corpora” is likely to come from shadow library websites such as Library Genesis, Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Bibliotik. The books aggregated by these sites are available in bulk via torrent websites, which are known for hosting copyrighted materials.
What exactly are shadow libraries?
Shadow libraries are online databases that provide access to millions of books and articles that are out of print, hard to obtain, and paywalled. Many of these databases, which began appearing online around 2008, originated in Russia, which has a long tradition of sharing forbidden books, according to the magazine Reason.
Soon enough, these libraries became popular with cash-strapped academics around the world thanks to the high cost of accessing scholarly journals—with some reportedly going for as much as $500 for an entirely open-access article.
These shadow libraries are also called “pirate libraries” because they often infringe on copyrighted work and cut into the publishing industry’s profits. A 2017 Nielsen and Digimarc study (pdf) found that pirated books were “depressing legitimate book sales by as much as 14%.”"
Blake Brittain, Reuters ; Google hit with class-action lawsuit over AI data scraping
"Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) was accused in a proposed class action lawsuit on Tuesday of misusing vast amounts of personal information and copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence systems.
The complaint, filed in San Francisco federal court by eight individuals seeking to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders, said Google's unauthorized scraping of data from websites violated their privacy and property rights."
