Stability AI, Midjourney should face artists' copyright case, judge says; Reuters, May 8, 2024

 Blake Brittain, Reuters; Stability AI, Midjourney should face artists' copyright case, judge says

"A California federal judge said he was inclined to green-light a copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and other companies accused of misusing visual artists' work to train their artificial intelligence-based image generation systems.

U.S. District Judge William Orrick said on Tuesday that the ten artists behind the lawsuit had plausibly argued that Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI copied and stored their work on company servers and could be liable for using it without permission...

Orrick also said that he was likely to dismiss some of the artists' related claims but allow their allegations that the companies violated their trademark rights and falsely implied that they endorsed the systems.

The case is Andersen v. Stability AI, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-00201."

Reddit shares jump after OpenAI ChatGPT deal; BBC, May 17, 2024

  João da Silva, BBC; Reddit shares jump after OpenAI ChatGPT deal

"Shares in Reddit have jumped more than 10% after the firm said it had struck a partnership deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up OpenAI.

Under the agreement, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot will get access to Reddit content, while it will also bring AI-powered features to the social media platform...

Meanwhile, Google announced a partnership in February which allows the technology giant to access Reddit data to train its AI models.

Both in the European Union and US, there are questions around whether it is copyright infringement to train AI tools on such content, or whether it falls under fair use and "temporary copying" exceptions."

The Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024: Balancing Innovation and IP Rights; The National Law Review, May 13, 2024

  Danner Kline of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP, The National Law Review; The Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024: Balancing Innovation and IP Rights

"As generative AI systems become increasingly sophisticated and widespread, concerns around the use of copyrighted works in their training data continue to intensify. The proposed Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024 attempts to address this unease by introducing new transparency requirements for AI developers.

The Bill’s Purpose and Requirements

The primary goal of the bill is to ensure that copyright owners have visibility into whether their intellectual property is being used to train generative AI models. If enacted, the law would require companies to submit notices to the U.S. Copyright Office detailing the copyrighted works used in their AI training datasets. These notices would need to be filed within 30 days before or after the public release of a generative AI system.

The Copyright Office would then maintain a public database of these notices, allowing creators to search and see if their works have been included. The hope is that this transparency will help copyright holders make more informed decisions about licensing their IP and seeking compensation where appropriate."

AI Challenges, Freedom to Read Top AAP Annual Meeting Discussions; Publishers Weekly, May 13, 2024

Jim Milliot , Publishers Weekly; AI Challenges, Freedom to Read Top AAP Annual Meeting Discussions

"The search for methods of reining in technology companies’ unauthorized copying of copyrighted materials to build generative AI models was the primary theme of this year's annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers, held May 9 over Zoom...

“To protect society, we will need a forward-thinking scheme of legal rules and enforcement authority across numerous jurisdictions and disciplines—not only intellectual property, but also national security, trade, privacy, consumer protection, and human rights, to name a few,” Pallante said. “And we will need ethical conduct.”...

Newton-Rex began in the generative AI space in 2010, and now leads the Fairly Trained, which launched in January as a nonprofit that seeks to certify AI companies that don't train models on copyrighted work without creators’ consent (Pallante is an advisor for the company.) He founded the nonprofit after leaving a tech company, Stability, that declined to use a licensing model to get permission to use copyrighted materials in training. Stability, Newton-Rex said, “argues that you can train on whatever you want. And it's a fair use in the United States, and I think this is not only incorrect, but I think it's ethically unforgivable. And I think we have to fight it with everything we have.”

“The old rules of copyright are gone,” said Maria Ressa, cofounder of the online news company Rappler and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, in her keynote. “We are literally standing on the rubble of the world that was. If we don’t recognize it, we can’t rebuild it.”

Ressa added that, in a social media world drowning in misinformation and manipulation, “it is crucial that we get back to facts.” Messa advised publishers to “hold the line” in protecting their IP, and to continue to defend the importance of truth: “You cannot have rule of law if you do not have integrity of facts.”"

How One Author Pushed the Limits of AI Copyright; Wired, April 17, 2024

  KATE KNIBBS, Wired; How One Author Pushed the Limits of AI Copyright

"The novel draws from Shupe’s eventful life, including her advocacy for more inclusive gender recognition. Its registration provides a glimpse of how the USCO is grappling with artificial intelligence, especially as more people incorporate AI tools into creative work. It is among the first creative works to receive a copyright for the arrangement of AI-generated text.

“We’re seeing the Copyright Office struggling with where to draw the line,” intellectual property lawyer Erica Van Loon, a partner at Nixon Peabody, says. Shupe’s case highlights some of the nuances of that struggle—because the approval of her registration comes with a significant caveat.

The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This means no one can copy the book without permission, but the actual sentences and paragraphs themselves are not copyrighted and could theoretically be rearranged and republished as a different book.

The agency backdated the copyright registration to October 10, the day that Shupe originally attempted to register her work. It declined to comment on this story. “The Copyright Office does not comment on specific copyright registrations or pending applications for registration,” Nora Scheland, an agency spokesperson says. President Biden’s executive order on AI last fall asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to make recommendations on copyright and AI to the White House in consultation with the Copyright Office, including on the “scope of protection for works produced using AI.”

Where AI and property law intersect; Arizona State University (ASU) News, April 5, 2024

  Dolores Tropiano, Arizona State University (ASU) News; Where AI and property law intersect

"Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that has the potential to be used to revolutionize education, creativity, everyday life and more.

But as society begins to harness this technology and its many uses — especially in the field of generative AI — there are growing ethical and copyright concerns for both the creative industry and legal sector.

Tyson Winarski is a professor of practice with the Intellectual Property Law program in Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He teaches an AI and intellectual property module within the course Artificial Intelligence: Law, Ethics and Policy, taught by ASU Law Professor Gary Marchant.

“The course is extremely important for attorneys and law students,” Winarski said. “Generative AI is presenting huge issues in the area of intellectual property rights and copyrights, and we do not have definitive answers as Congress and the courts have not spoken on the issue yet.”"

George Carlin’s Estate Reaches Settlement After A.I. Podcast; The New York Times, April 2, 2024

 Christopher Kuo , The New York Times; George Carlin’s Estate Reaches Settlement After A.I. Podcast

"The estate of the comedian George Carlin reached a settlement on Monday with the makers of a podcast who had said they had used artificial intelligence to impersonate Mr. Carlin for a comedy special...

Mr. Carlin’s estate filed the suit in January, saying that Mr. Sasso and Mr. Kultgen, hosts of the podcast “Dudesy,” had infringed on the estate’s copyrights by training an A.I. algorithm on five decades of Mr. Carlin’s work for the special “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” which was posted on YouTube. The lawsuit also said they had illegally used Mr. Carlin’s name and likeness."

A fight to protect the dignity of Michelangelo’s David raises questions about freedom of expression; AP, March 28, 2024

Colleen Barry, AP; A fight to protect the dignity of Michelangelo’s David raises questions about freedom of expression

"The decisions challenge a widely held practice that intellectual property rights are protected for a specified period before entering the public domain — the artist’s lifetime plus 70 years, according to the Berne Convention signed by more than 180 countries including Italy.

More broadly, the decisions raise the question of whether institutions should be the arbiters of taste, and to what extent freedom of expression is being limited...

Court cases have debated whether Italy’s law violates a 2019 European Union directive stating that any artwork no longer protected by copyright falls into the public domain, meaning that “everybody should be free to make, use and share copies of that work.”

The EU Commission has not addressed the issue, but a spokesman told the AP that it is currently checking “conformity of the national laws implementing the copyright directive” and would look at whether Italy’s cultural heritage code interferes with its application."

Amicus Briefs Filed in Internet Archive Copyright Case; Publishers Weekly, March 25, 2024

 Andrew Albanese , Publishers Weekly; Amicus Briefs Filed in Internet Archive Copyright Case

"Internet Archive lawyers filed their principal appeal brief on December 15, and 11 amicus briefs were filed in support of the Internet Archive a week later, in December, representing librarians and library associations, authors, public advocacy groups, law professors, and IP scholars, although some of the IA amicus briefs are presented as neutral.

The briefs are the latest development in the long-running copyright infringement case and come a year after a ruling by judge John G. Koeltl on March 24, 2023 that emphatically rejected the IA’s fair use defense, finding the scanning and lending of print library books under a protocol known as “controlled digital lending” to be copyright infringement.

The Internet Archive’s reply brief is now due on April 19, and oral arguments are expected to be set for this fall."

Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for Gemini; TechCrunch, March 20, 2024

 Natasha Lomas, Romain Dillet , TechCrunch; Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for Gemini

"In a never-ending saga between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence announced a €250 million fine against the tech giant Wednesday (around $270 million at today’s exchange rate).

According to the competition watchdog, Google disregarded some of its previous commitments with news publishers. But the decision is especially notable because it drops something else that’s bang up-to-date — by latching onto Google’s use of news publishers’ content to train its generative AI model Bard/Gemini.

The competition authority has found fault with Google for failing to notify news publishers of this GenAI use of their copyrighted content. This is in light of earlier commitments Google made which are aimed at ensuring it undertakes fair payment talks with publishers over reuse of their content."

Introducing CopyrightCatcher, the first Copyright Detection API for LLMs; Patronus AI, March 6, 2024

 Patronus AI; Introducing CopyrightCatcher, thefirst Copyright Detection API for LLMs

"Managing risks from unintended copyright infringement in LLM outputs should be a central focus for companies deploying LLMs in production.

• On an adversarial copyright test designed by Patronus AI researchers, we found that state-of-the-art LLMs generate copyrighted content at an alarmingly high rate 😱
• OpenAI’s GPT-4 produced copyrighted content on 44% of the prompts.
• Mistral’s Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1 produced copyrighted content on 22% of the prompts.
• Anthropic’s Claude-2.1 produced copyrighted content on 8% of the prompts.
• Meta’s Llama-2-70b-chat produced copyrighted content on 10% of the prompts.
• Check out CopyrightCatcher, our solution to detect potential copyright violations in LLMs. Here’s the public demo, with open source model inference powered by Databricks Foundation Model APIs. 🔥

LLM training data often contains copyrighted works, and it is pretty easy to get an LLM to generate exact reproductions from these texts1. It is critical to catch these reproductions, since they pose significant legal and reputational risks for companies that build and use LLMs in production systems2. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft have all faced copyright lawsuits on LLM generations from authors3, music publishers4, and more recently, the New York Times5.

To check whether LLMs respond to your prompts with copyrighted text, you can use CopyrightCatcher. It detects when LLMs generate exact reproductions of content from text sources like books, and highlights any copyrighted text in LLM outputs. Check out our public CopyrightCatcher demo here!

Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst; CNBC, March 6, 2024

 Hayden Field, CNBC; Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst

"The company, founded by ex-Meta researchers, specializes in evaluation and testing for large language models — the technology behind generative AI products.

Alongside the release of its new tool, CopyrightCatcher, Patronus AI released results of an adversarial test meant to showcase how often four leading AI models respond to user queries using copyrighted text.

The four models it tested were OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2, Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral AI’s Mixtral.

“We pretty much found copyrighted content across the board, across all models that we evaluated, whether it’s open source or closed source,” Rebecca Qian, Patronus AI’s cofounder and CTO, who previously worked on responsible AI research at Meta, told CNBC in an interview.

Qian added, “Perhaps what was surprising is that we found that OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is arguably the most powerful model that’s being used by a lot of companies and also individual developers, produced copyrighted content on 44% of prompts that we constructed.”"

Public Symposium on AI and IP; United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Wednesday, March 27, 2024 10 AM - 3 PM PT/1 PM - 6 PM ET

 United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); Public Symposium on AI and IP

"The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Emerging Technologies (ET) Partnership will hold a public symposium on intellectual property (IP) and AI. The event will take place virtually and in-person at Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, California, on March 27, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. PT. 

The symposium will facilitate the USPTO’s efforts to implement its obligations under the President’s Executive Order (E.O.) 14110 “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The event will include representation from the Copyright Office, build on previous AI/Emerging Technologies (ET) partnership events, and feature panel discussions by experts in the field of patent, trademark, and copyright law that focus on:

1. A comparison of copyright and patent law approaches to the type and level of human contribution needed to satisfy authorship and inventorship requirements;
2. Ongoing copyright litigation involving generative AI; and 
3. A discussion of laws and policy considerations surrounding name, image, and likeness (NIL) issues, including the intersection of NIL and generative AI.

This event is free and open to the public, but in-person attendance is limited, so register early"

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."

How to Think About Remedies in the Generative AI Copyright Cases; LawFare, February 15, 2024

  Pamela Samuelson, LawFare; How to Think About Remedies in the Generative AI Copyright Cases

"So far, commentators have paid virtually no attention to the remedies being sought in the generative AI copyright complaints. This piece shines a light on them."

On Copyright, Creativity, and Compensation; Reason, February 12, 2024

 DAVID POST, Reason; On Copyright, Creativity, and Compensation

"Some of you may have seen the article by David Segal in the Sunday NY Times several weeks ago [available here] about a rather sordid copyright fracas in which I have been embroiled over the past few months...

What to make of all this? I am not oblivious to the irony of being confronted with this problem after having spent 30 years or so, as a lawyer and law professor, reflecting on and writing about the many mysteries of copyright policy and copyright law in the Internet Age.

Here are a few things that strike me as interesting (and possibly important) in this episode."

European Publishers Praise New EU AI Law; Publishers Weekly, February 2, 2024

Ed Nawotka, Publishers Weekly; European Publishers Praise New EU AI Law

"The Federation of European Publishers (FEP) was quick to praise the passage of new legislation by the European Union that, among its provisions, requires "general purpose AI companies" to respect copyright law and have policies in place to this effect.

FEP officials called the EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which passed on February 2, the "world’s first concrete regulation of AI," and said that the legislation seeks to "ensure the ethical and human-centric development of this technology and prevent abusive or illegal practices law, which also demands transparency about what data is being used in training the models.""

The economy and ethics of AI training data; Marketplace.org, January 31, 2024

Matt Levin, Marketplace.org;  The economy and ethics of AI training data

"Maybe the only industry hotter than artificial intelligence right now? AI litigation. 

Just a sampling: Writer Michael Chabon is suing Meta. Getty Images is suing Stability AI. And both The New York Times and The Authors Guild have filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft. 

At the heart of these cases is the allegation that tech companies illegally used copyrighted works as part of their AI training data. 

For text focused generative AI, there’s a good chance that some of that training data originated from one massive archive: Common Crawl. 

“Common Crawl is the copy of the internet. It’s a 17-year archive of the internet. We make this freely available to researchers, academics and companies,” said Rich Skrenta, who heads the nonprofit Common Crawl Foundation."

California copyright-case leaves tattoo artists in limbo; Fox26 Houston, January 29, 2024

 Tom Zizka, Fox26 Houston ; California copyright-case leaves tattoo artists in limbo

"Patent and Copyright expert Joh Rizvi, known at The Patent Professor, says the California case never got to the issue of whether images reproduced in tattoos are fair to use as art and expression. 

"What I find is the more interesting question is, 'Is a tattoo different? Is this free speech?'" he wonders.

Fair Use has been the subject of countless lawsuits, and Rizvi says this one leaves artists in a legal gray area, with no precedent."

Lawyers weigh strength of copyright suit filed against BigLaw firm; Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly, January 29, 2024

 Pat Murphy , Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly; Lawyers weigh strength of copyright suit filed against BigLaw firm

"Jerry Cohen, a Boston attorney who teaches IP law at Roger Williams University School of Law, called the suit “not so much a copyright case as it is a matter of professional responsibility and respect.”"