OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit; TechCrunch, November 20, 2024

 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."

News Corp Sues AI Company Perplexity Over Copyright Claims, Made Up Text; The Hollywood Reporter, October 21, 2024

 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."

Why The New York Times' lawyers are inspecting OpenAI's code in a secretive room; Business Insider, October 10, 2024

 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."

Meta Fails to Block Zuckerberg Deposition in AI Copyright Suit; Bloomberg Law, September 25, 2024

 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 Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a copyright lawsuit over the tech company’s large language model, denying the social media giant’s bid for a protective order.

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."

The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet sue OpenAI for copyright infringement; The Guardian, February 28, 2024

 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."

The New York Times’ AI copyright lawsuit shows that forgiveness might not be better than permission; The Conversation, February 13, 2024

 Peter Vaughan, 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."

Copyright law is AI's 2024 battlefield; Axios, January 2, 2023

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."

Boom in A.I. Prompts a Test of Copyright Law; The New York Times, December 30, 2023

 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."

Testing Ethical Boundaries. The New York Times Sues Microsoft And OpenAI On Copyright Concerns; Forbes, December 29, 2023

 Cindy Gordon, 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."

OpenAI offers to pay for ChatGPT customers’ copyright lawsuits; The Guardian, November 6, 2023

 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."

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."

"Shadow libraries" are at the heart of the mounting copyright lawsuits against OpenAI; Quartz, July 10, 2023

 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%.”"

Google hit with class-action lawsuit over AI data scraping; Reuters, July 11, 2023

 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."

Cassandra Clare Created a Fantasy Realm and Aims to Maintain Her Rule; New York Times, 4/23/16

Penelope Green, New York Times; Cassandra Clare Created a Fantasy Realm and Aims to Maintain Her Rule:

"The place Ms. Clare occupies in publishing — and the work she does to keep herself there — is emblematic of the burdens and boons fan culture bestows on so many fantasy authors. Deeply possessive of the characters Ms. Clare has created, the fans can turn on her for plot directions they don’t approve of, or for the ways in which the television show diverges from the books. (Ms. Clare has no role in the TV series.)

Fantitlement, as this phenomenon is known, has raised her fortunes while at times it has bedeviled her, as it has so many of her peers. Laura Miller, a books and culture columnist at Slate who has written about fan culture, likened Ms. Clare’s experiences to that of George R. R. Martin, the “Game of Thrones” author whose fans grew so angry at his publishing pace that some created a blog, “Finish the Book, George.”"