EFF Urges Third Circuit to Join the Legal Chorus: No One Owns the Law; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), March 31, 2025

  CORYNNE MCSHERRY, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); EFF Urges Third Circuit to Join the Legal Chorus: No One Owns the Law

"This case concerns UpCodes, a company that has created a database of building codes—like the National Electrical Code—that includes codes incorporated by reference into law. ASTM, a private organization that coordinated the development of some of those codes, insists that it retains copyright in them even after they have been adopted into law, and therefore has the right to control how the public accesses and shares them. Fortunately, neither the Constitution nor the Copyright Act support that theory. Faced with similar claims, some courts, including the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, have held that the codes lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law. Others, like the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case EFF defended on behalf of Public.Resource.Org, have held that, whether or not the legal status of the standards changes once they are incorporated into law, making them fully accessible and usable online is a lawful fair use. A federal court in Pennsylvania followed the latter path in this case, finding that UpCodes’ database was a protected fair use."

L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66; The New York Times, March 26, 2025

Jeré Longman, The New York Times; L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66

"L.J. Smith, an author of young adult novels best known for “The Vampire Diaries” series, which became a hit television drama, and for repossessing her characters by writing fan fiction after she was fired and replaced by a ghostwriter, died on March 8 in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 66...

Alloy Entertainment sought a young adult version of supernatural romance and signed Ms. Smith to write “The Vampire Diaries,” a series centered on a love triangle involving a popular high school girl named Elena Gilbert and a pair of vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore.

The first three books, written for HarperCollins, were published in 1991, and a fourth was released in 1992. But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters...

By 2007, sales of “The Vampire Diaries” had increased, and Ms. Smith was contracted to continue the series by writing a new trilogy for Alloy Entertainment, for which she was entitled to half the royalties.

In 2009, “The Vampire Diaries” were adapted into a dramatic television series that lasted for eight seasons on the CW Network. Popular among younger audiences, the show used various musical genres to explore topics like romance and morality and helped popularize a grunge and leather-jacket fashion look."

ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines; Axios, March 28, 2025

 Ina Fried, Axios; ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines

"AI image generators aren't new, but the one OpenAI handed to ChatGPT's legions of users this week is more powerful and has fewer guardrails than its predecessors — opening up a range of uses that are both tantalizing and terrifying."

Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward; NPR, March 27, 2025

 Bobby Allyn, NPR ; Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward

"A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI's request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper's content without permission or payment.

In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case's main copyright infringement claims to go forward.

Stein did not immediately release an opinion but promised one would come "expeditiously."

The decision is a victory for the newspaper, which has joined forces with other publishers, including The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to challenge the way that OpenAI collected vast amounts of data from the web to train its popular artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT."

Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright; The Guardian, March 25, 2025

 Ella Creamer , The Guardian; Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright

"Richard Osman has said that writers will “have a good go” at taking on Meta after it emerged that the company used a notorious database believed to contain pirated books to train artificial intelligence.

“Copyright law is not complicated at all,” the author of The Thursday Murder Club series wrote in a statement on X on Sunday evening. “If you want to use an author’s work you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission you’re breaking the law. It’s so simple.”

In January, it emerged that Mark Zuckerberg approved his company’s use of The Library Genesis dataset, a “shadow library” that originated in Russia and contains more than 7.5m books. In 2024 a New York federal court ordered LibGen’s anonymous operators to pay a group of publishers $30m (£24m) in damages for copyright infringement. Last week, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen. In response, authors and writers’ organisations have rallied against Meta’s use of copyrighted works."

Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case; Reuters, March 26, 2025

 Blake Brittain , Reuters; Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case

"Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group and other music publishers to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers' request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic's conduct caused them "irreparable harm."

Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works; Variety, March 17, 2025

 Todd Spangler , Variety; Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo and More Than 400 Hollywood Names Urge Trump to Not Let AI Companies ‘Exploit’ Copyrighted Works

"More than 400 Hollywood creative leaders signed an open letter to the Trump White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, urging the administration to not roll back copyright protections at the behest of AI companies.

The filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians and others — which included Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Erivo, Cate Blanchett, Cord Jefferson, Paul McCartney, Ron Howard and Taika Waititi — were submitting comments for the Trump administration’s U.S. AI Action Plan⁠. The letter specifically was penned in response to recent submissions to the Office of Science and Technology Policy from OpenAI and Google, which asserted that U.S. copyright law allows (or should allow) allow AI companies to train their system on copyrighted works without obtaining permission from (or compensating) rights holders."

Should AI be treated the same way as people are when it comes to copyright law? ; The Hill, March 24, 2025

  NICHOLAS CREEL, The Hill ; Should AI be treated the same way as people are when it comes to copyright law? 

"The New York Times’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft highlights an uncomfortable contradiction in how we view creativity and learning. While the Times accuses these companies of copyright infringement for training AI on their content, this ignores a fundamental truth: AI systems learn exactly as humans do, by absorbing, synthesizing and transforming existing knowledge into something new."

DC Circuit rules AI-generated work ineligible for copyright; Courthouse News Service, March 18, 2025

 MEGAN BUTLER, Courthouse News Service; DC Circuit rules AI-generated work ineligible for copyright

"In a landmark opinion over the copyrightability of works created by artificial intelligence, a D.C. Circuit panel ruled on Tuesday that human authorship is required for copyright protection.

As AI technology quickly advances and intertwines with human creations, the unanimous opinion lays down the first precedential marker over who or what is the author of work created solely by artificial intelligence under copyright law.

The case stems from Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who creates and works with artificial intelligence systems and created a generative artificial intelligence named the “Creativity Machine.”"

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use; Ars Technica, March 13, 2025

 ASHLEY BELANGER  , Ars Technica; OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use

"OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity's creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren't substitutes for original works.

So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters' legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times."

The Copyright Office takes on the sticky issue of artificial intelligence; Federal News Network, March 11, 2025

Tom Temin, Federal News Network; The Copyright Office takes on the sticky issue of artificial intelligence

"Artificial intelligence raises storms of questions in every domain it touches. Chief among them, copyright questions. Now the U.S. Copyright Office, a congressional agency, has completed the second of two studies of AI and copyrights. This one deals with whether you can copyright outputs created using AI. Emily Chapuis, the Copyright Office’s deputy general counsel, joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to discuss...

Emily Chapuis: Yeah. That’s right. So we don’t recommend in the report that Congress take any action. And the reason for this is we think that copyright law is sufficiently flexible to deal with changes in technology. And that’s not just based on AI, but on the entire history of copyright law, has had to deal with these questions, whether it’s the development of the camera or the internet. The questions about copyright ability are always on a case-by-case basis. And the technology that’s used and how it’s used and what it’s used for are important elements of that. But the sort of defining legal principles aren’t different in this context than in those other ones.

Tom Temin: Right. So the human input idea then is kind of an eternal for copyright. How do you decide that? Is it a percentage of human input? Because the machine does a lot here. But you could say, ‘Well, the camera did a lot when it opened and closed the shutter and exposed silver halide. And then there was a machine process to produce that image. But it was the selection, the timing, the decisive moment.’ To quote Henri Cartier-Bresson, another French photographer. That’s really the issue here. The human input and not the machine input.

Emily Chapuis: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s hard to parse. I mean, we’ve had people ask, so what’s the percentage that has to be human created? And there’s not a clear answer to that, again, because it’s case by case. But also the question isn’t really amount as much as it is control. So who’s controlling the expression. And so one of the things that we try to explain is that even the same technology can be used in a variety of different ways. So you can use generative AI technology as a tool assistive to enhance the human expression or you can use it as a substitute for human expression. And so control is sort of the bottom line in terms of what we’re looking at to draw that distinction."

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder; The Register, March 11, 2025

 Thomas Claburn , The Register; Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

"A judge has found Meta must answer a claim it allegedly removed so-called copyright management information from material used to train its AI models.

The Friday ruling by Judge Vince Chhabria concerned the case Kadrey et al vs Meta Platforms, filed in July 2023 in a San Francisco federal court as a proposed class action by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, who reckon the Instagram titan's use of their work to train its neural networks was illegal.

Their case burbled along until January 2025 when the plaintiffs made the explosive allegation that Meta knew it used copyrighted material for training, and that its AI models would therefore produce results that included copyright management information (CMI) – the fancy term for things like the creator of a copyrighted work, its license and terms of use, its date of creation, and so on, that accompany copyrighted material.

The miffed scribes alleged Meta therefore removed all of this copyright info from the works it used to train its models so users wouldn’t be made aware the results they saw stemmed from copyrighted stuff."

Prioritise artists over tech in AI copyright debate, MPs say; The Guardian, February 26, 2025

 Rachel Hall, The Guardian; Prioritise artists over tech in AI copyright debate, MPs say

"Two cross-party committees of MPs have urged the government to prioritise ensuring that creators are fairly remunerated for their creative work over making it easy to train artificial intelligence models.

The MPs argued there needed to be more transparency around the vast amounts of data used to train generative AI models, and urged the government not to press ahead with plans to require creators to opt out of having their data used.

The government’s preferred solution to the tension between AI and copyright law is to allow AI companies to train the models on copyrighted work by giving them an exception for “text and data mining”, while giving creatives the opportunity to opt out through a “rights reservation” system.

The chair of the culture, media and sport committee, Caroline Dinenage, said there had been a “groundswell of concern from across the creative industries” in response to the proposals, which “illustrates the scale of the threat artists face from artificial intelligence pilfering the fruits of their hard-earned success without permission”.

She added that making creative works “fair game unless creators say so” was akin to “burglars being allowed into your house unless there’s a big sign on your front door expressly telling them that thievery isn’t allowed”."

An AI Maker Was Just Found Liable for Copyright Infringement. What Does This Portend for Content Creators and AI Makers?; The Federalist Society, February 25, 2025

 John Blanton Farmer , The Federalist Society; An AI Maker Was Just Found Liable for Copyright Infringement. What Does This Portend for Content Creators and AI Makers?

"In a case decided on February 11, the makers of generative AI (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, lost the first legal battle in the war over whether they commit copyright infringement by using the material of others as training data without permission. The case is called Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc.

If other courts follow this ruling, the cost of building and selling GenAI services will dramatically increase. Such businesses are already losing money.

The ruling could also empower content creators, such as writers, to deny the use of their material to train GenAIs or to demand license fees. Some creators might be unwilling to license use of their material for training AIs due to fear that GenAI will destroy demand for their work."

UK newspapers launch campaign against AI copyright plans; Independent, February 25, 2025

 Martyn Landi, Independent; UK newspapers launch campaign against AI copyright plans

"Some of the UK’s biggest newspapers have used a coordinated campaign across their front pages to raise their concerns about AI’s impact on the creative industries.

Special wraps appeared on Tuesday’s editions of the Daily Express, Daily Mail, The Mirror, the Daily Star, The i, The Sun, and The Times – as well as a number of regional titles – criticising a Government consultation around possible exemptions being added to copyright law for training AI models.

The proposals would allow tech firms to use copyrighted material from creatives and publishers without having to pay or gain a licence, or reimbursing creatives for using their work."

Copyright 'sell-out' will silence British musicians, says BRIAN MAY; Daily Mail, February 23, 2025

 Andy Behring , Daily Mail; Copyright 'sell-out' will silence British musicians, says BRIAN MAY

"No one will make music in Britain any more if Labour's AI copyright proposal succeeds, Sir Brian May warned last night as he backed the Daily Mail's campaign against it.

The Queen guitarist said he feared it may already be 'too late' because 'monstrously arrogant' Big Tech barons have already carried out an industrial-scale 'theft' of Britain's cultural genius.

He called on the Government to apply the brakes before the next chapter of Britain's rich cultural heritage – which includes Shakespeare, Chaucer, James Bond, The Beatles and Britpop – is nipped in the bud thanks to Sir Keir Starmer's copyright 'sell-out'...

Sir Brian said: 'My fear is that it's already too late – this theft has already been performed and is unstoppable, like so many incursions that the monstrously arrogant billionaire owners of Al and social media are making into our lives. The future is already forever changed."

AI companies flaunt their theft. News media has to fight back – so we're suing. | Opinion; USA Today, February 13, 2025

Danielle Coffey, USA Today; AI companies flaunt their theft. News media has to fight back – so we're suing. | Opinion

"Danielle Coffey is president & CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which represents 2,000 news and magazine media outlets worldwide...

This is not an anti-AI lawsuit or an effort to turn back the clock. We love technology. We use it in our businesses. Artificial intelligence will help us better serve our customers, but only if it respects intellectual property. That’s the remedy we’re seeking in court.

When it suits them, the AI companies assert similar claims to ours. Meta's lawsuit accused Bright Data of scraping data in violation of its terms of use. And Sam Altman of OpenAI has complained that DeepSeek illegally copied its algorithms.

Good actors, responsible technologies and potential legislation offer some hope for improving the situation. But what is urgently needed is what every market needs: reinforcement of legal protections against theft."

News publishers sue Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement; Axios, February 13, 2025

 

• Sara Fischer, Axios; News publishers sue Cohere for copyright and trademark infringement

"More than a dozen major U.S. news organizations on Thursday said they were suing Cohere, an enterprise AI company, claiming the tech startup illegally repurposed their work and did so in a way that tarnished their brands.

Why it matters: The lawsuit represents the first official legal action against an AI company organized by the News Media Alliance — the largest news media trade group in the U.S...

• The NMA members participating in the lawsuit include Advance Local Media, Condé Nast, The Atlantic, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Business Insider, The Los Angeles Times, McClatchy Media Company, Newsday, Plain Dealer Publishing Company, Politico, The Republican Company, Toronto Star Newspapers, and Vox Media.

Between the lines: The complaint was filed shortly after the U.S. Copyright Office changed its copyright registration processes to make them faster for digital publishers.

• Previously, the process by which digital publishers had to file for copyright protections for individual works was extremely cumbersome, limiting their ability to seek protection. 

Because of those changes, Coffey explained, NMA and the publishers who are suing Cohere were able to identify thousands of specific examples of Cohere verbatim copying their copyright-protected works."

This is the First-Ever AI Image to Be Granted Copyright Protection; PetaPixel, February 12, 2025

 MATT GROWCOOT, PetaPixel; This is the First-Ever AI Image to Be Granted Copyright Protection

"A company has secured the first-ever copyright protection for an artwork entirely generated by AI from the U.S. Copyright Office.

Kent Keirsey, CEO of Invoke, demonstrated to the U.S. Copyright Office that he had inputted enough human creativity into the image to warrant protection. 

Invoke is a generative AI platform for professional studios to create visual media. Keirsey used Invoke’s inpainting features to iterate upon an AI-generated image, coordinating and arranging where to inpaint and then selecting from multiple options to create a composite work which he calls A Single Piece of American Cheese. He added roughly 35 AI edits to the AI image."

Court: Training AI Model Based on Copyrighted Data Is Not Fair Use as a Matter of Law; The National Law Review, February 11, 2025

 Joseph A. Meckes, Joseph Grasser of Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP   - Global IP and Technology Law Blog,  The National Law Review; Court: Training AI Model Based on Copyrighted Data Is Not Fair Use as a Matter of Law

"In what may turn out to be an influential decision, Judge Stephanos Bibas ruled as a matter of law in Thompson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence that creating short summaries of law to train Ross Intelligence’s artificial intelligence legal research application not only infringes Thompson Reuters’ copyrights as a matter of law but that the copying is not fair use. Judge Bibas had previously ruled that infringement and fair use were issues for the jury but changed his mind: “A smart man knows when he is right; a wise man knows when he is wrong.”

At issue in the case was whether Ross Intelligence directly infringed Thompson Reuters’ copyrights in its case law headnotes that are organized by Westlaw’s proprietary Key Number system. Thompson Reuters contended that Ross Intelligence’s contractor copied those headnotes to create “Bulk Memos.” Ross Intelligence used the Bulk Memos to train its competitive AI-powered legal research tool. Judge Bibas ruled that (i) the West headnotes were sufficiently original and creative to be copyrightable, and (ii) some of the Bulk Memos used by Ross were so similar that they infringed as a matter of law...

In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection."