Cade Metz, The New York Times; Former OpenAI Researcher Says the Company Broke Copyright Law
"Mr. Balaji believes the threats are more immediate. ChatGPT and other chatbots, he said, are destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the digital data used to train these A.I. systems.
“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told The Times."
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."
Lecturer in Law, University of New England , The Conversation; ; An academic publisher has struck an AI data deal with Microsoft – without their authors’ knowledge
According to reports published last week, the authors of the content do not appear to have been asked or even informed about the deal. What’s more, they say they had no opportunity to opt out of the deal, and will not see any money from it...
The types of agreements being reached between academic publishers and AI companies have sparked bigger-picture concerns for many academics. Do we want scholarly research to be reduced to content for AI knowledge mining? There are no clear answers about the ethics and morals of such practices."
Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter ; George Carlin Estate Sues Creators of AI-Generated Comedy Special in Key Lawsuit Over Stars’ Likenesses
"The complaint seeks a court order for immediate removal of the special, as well as unspecified damages. It’s among the first legal actions taken by the estate of a deceased celebrity for unlicensed use of their work and likeness to manufacture a new, AI-generated creation and was filed as Hollywood is sounding the alarm over utilization of AI to impersonate people without consent or compensation...
According to the complaint, the special was created through unauthorized use of Carlin’s copyrighted works.
At the start of the video, it’s explained that the AI program that created the special ingested five decades of Carlin’s original stand-up routines, which are owned by the comedian’s estate, as training materials, “thereby making unauthorized copies” of the copyrighted works...
If signed into law, the proposal, called the No AI Fraud Act, could curb a growing trend of individuals and businesses creating AI-recorded tracks using artists’ voices and deceptive ads in which it appears a performer is endorsing a product. In the absence of a federal right of publicity law, unions and trade groups in Hollywood have been lobbying for legislation requiring individuals’ consent to use their voice and likeness."
WILL BEDINGFIELD, Wired; The Generative AI Battle Has a Fundamental Flaw
"At the core of these cases, explains Sag, is the same general theory: that LLMs “copied” authors’ protected works. Yet, as Sag explained in testimony to a US Senate subcommittee hearing earlier this month, models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 do not “copy” work in the traditional sense. Digest would be a more appropriate verb—digesting training data to carry out their function: predicting the best next word in a sequence. “Rather than thinking of an LLM as copying the training data like a scribe in a monastery,” Sag said in his Senate testimony, “it makes more sense to think of it as learning from the training data like a student.”...
Ultimately, though, the technology is not going away, and copyright can only remedy some of its consequences. As Stephanie Bell, a research fellow at the nonprofit Partnership on AI, notes, setting a precedent where creative works can be treated like uncredited data is “very concerning.” To fully address a problem like this, the regulations AI needs aren't yet on the books."
BRIAN CRONIN, CBR; AI-Created Comic Has Been Deemed Ineligible for Copyright Protection
"The United States Copyright Office (USCO) reversed an earlier decision to grant a copyright to a comic book that was created using "A.I. art," and announced that the copyright protection on the comic book will be revoked, stating that copyrighted works must be created by humans to gain official copyright protection.
In September, Kris Kashtanova announced that they had received a U.S. copyright on his comic book, Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book inspired by their late grandmother that she created with the text-to-image engine Midjourney. Kashtanova referred to herself as a "prompt engineer" and explained at the time that she went to get the copyright so that she could “make a case that we do own copyright when we make something using AI.”"
Steve Andreadis, Library of Congress; The Seizure of Jewish Intellectual Property Ahead of World War II
"The following is a guest post by Marilyn Creswell, information resources assistant at the University of Michigan Law School. She served as Librarian-in-Residence at the U.S. Copyright Office from July 2020 to April 2021.
As the United States enters the Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, we remember the many hardships Jewish people have overcome. In this blog we specifically explore the lesser-known area of intellectual property (IP) leading up to and during World War II. Beginning in 1933, the Nazi German state began pressuring Jewish business owners to sell their businesses far below market value. By 1938, a majority of Jewish-owned businesses were already sold or out of business when this process, called Aryanization, became compulsory after Kristallnacht.1 As part of the seizure of businesses and personal property, the ability of Jewish people to benefit from their intellectual property was also severely restricted. A 1939 executive order required all Jewish men to add “Israel” as a second name and women to add “Sara.”2 This made it easier for Nazi officials to deny intellectual property registrations and renewals to Jewish applicants, cutting them off from the IP system.3 While the loss of IP rights pales in comparison to the horrific death tolls during World War II, its loss is another indignity the Jewish people suffered and source of wealth extracted at the hands of the Nazis.
In some instances, works by Jewish authors were nearly completely reproduced and distributed by others without their consent. One example of an Aryanized work is Alice Urbach’s So kocht man in Wien!, a Viennese cookbook. Urbach was forced to transfer the rights to her book, which was then republished with new authorial credit to “Rudolf Rösch.” The new work kept most of the original texts and photographs of her cooking demonstrations but removed elements celebrating Vienna’s diversity.4 In the field of medicine, Dr. Josef Löbel’s Knaurs Gesundheitslexikon was a health encyclopedia that, after the Otto Liebmann publishing house was taken over by a Nazi publisher, was republished by the author Herbert Volkmann under the pseudonym “Peter Hiron.” Volkmann even added new sections on race, homosexuality, and prison psychology. He similarly usurped authorship for Dr. Walter Guttman’s Medizinische Terminologie and its ongoing publications.5
Public domain works were revised to remove references to Jewish people and culture. For example, Fritz Stein presented a new version of Handel’s Occasional Oratorio (Gelegenheits Oratorium) in 1935 that added state-promoting verses and removed references to Jacob, Jehovah, and the full aria “When Israel, like the bounteous Nile.” In 1941, Handel’s Jephtha was renamed Das Opfer and changed so its Jewish history was reframed as a broader narrative about nationalism. The text of his Judas Maccabeus was not only rewritten to omit Jewish references, but it went so far as to make it into a “patriotic fold oratorio” and eventually transplanted Judas with a Field Marshall, a powerful military dictator analogous to the Führer.6 Also in 1941, all theatrical productions required permission from the Reich Dramaturgy, which banned Shakespeare’s historical plays but encouraged the broadcast and production of the anti-Semitic Merchant of Venice.7"
