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."

How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct; The Verge, February 15, 2024

Nilay Patel, The Verge ; How AI copyright lawsuits could make the whole industry go extinct

"Our new Thursday episodes of Decoder are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and for the next few weeks, we’re going to stay focused on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. 

There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and Stability AI. So for this episode, we brought on Verge features editor Sarah Jeong, who’s a former lawyer just like me, and we’re going to talk about those cases and the main defense the AI companies are relying on in those copyright cases: an idea called fair use."

Kat Von D Claims Miles Davis Tattoo Is ‘Fair Use’ at Unusual Copyright Trial; Rolling Stone, January 23, 2024

 NANCY DILLON, Rolling Stone; Kat Von D Claims Miles Davis Tattoo Is ‘Fair Use’ at Unusual Copyright Trial

"Jurors now hearing the case will have to decide whether Von D’s reproduction falls under the “fair use” doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission. Artistic representations of copyrighted work can be protected by fair use if they “transform” the subject work into something new, such as a parody, critique, or news report."

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."

AI’s Billion-Dollar Copyright Battle Starts With a Font Designer; Bloomberg Law, December 18, 2023

 Isaiah Poritz, Bloomberg Law; AI’s Billion-Dollar Copyright Battle Starts With a Font Designer

"The makers of Copilot, which include OpenAI Inc., Microsoft Corp., GitHub Inc., and other top AI companies, are now facing nearly a dozen lawsuits from authors, artists, and programmers. They claim the industry has vacuumed up their creative work—without consent or compensation—to train AI chatbots and image generators that are already beginning to replace them.

At the core of these novel cases sits Butterick, a typographer and lawyer hailed by some for leading the fight to holding AI accountable, and slammed by others as a Luddite and an obstacle to transformative technological advances."

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."

Supreme Court to Clarify Copyright Infringement Limits in Case Against Warner Music; The Hollywood Reporter, September 29, 2023

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter; Supreme Court to Clarify Copyright Infringement Limits in Case Against Warner Music

"The Supreme Court will clear up how far back copyright holders can recover damages for infringement in a case involving a Florida producer who sued Warner Chappell Music after Flo Rida sampled a song he owns.

The justices agreed on Friday to review an appeal from Warner Music and Artist Publishing Group of a lower court’s ruling that recovery for damages that occurred prior to the three-year window to sue is allowed. The decision may clarify uncertainty over whether there is truly open-ended copyright liability, as two federal appeals courts have recently held."

Publishers settle copyright infringement lawsuit with ResearchGate; Chemistry World, September 18, 2023

REBECCA TRAGER, Chemistry World ; Publishers settle copyright infringement lawsuit with ResearchGate

"Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a librarian and professor of information science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says the settlement agreement ‘signals that ResearchGate has completed its journey from disrupter to partner within the scholarly communications ecosystem’. She notes that Elsevier and ACS have been using ResearchGate’s content blocking technology since at least early 2022, which indicates that ‘a more collaborative relationship’ has been in development for some time."

Franzen, Grisham and Other Prominent Authors Sue OpenAI; The New York Times, September 20, 2023

 Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris, The New York Times; Franzen, Grisham and Other Prominent Authors Sue OpenAI

"A group of prominent novelists, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand, are joining the legal battle against OpenAI over its chatbot technology, as fears about the encroachment of artificial intelligence on creative industries continue to grow.

More than a dozen authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Tuesday, accusing the company, which has been backed with billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft, of infringing on their copyrights by using their books to train its popular ChatGPT chatbot. The complaint, which was filed along with the Authors Guild, said that OpenAI’s chatbots can now produce “derivative works” that can mimic and summarize the authors’ books, potentially harming the market for authors’ work, and that the writers were neither compensated nor notified by the company."

"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%.”"

Shein Named in Copyright, Racketeering Lawsuit Over Alleged Infringement Scheme; TFL, July 12, 2023

 TFL; Shein Named in Copyright, Racketeering Lawsuit Over Alleged Infringement Scheme

"Shein is facing a new lawsuit that accuses the Chinese retail titan of not only carrying out “large-scale and systematic intellectual property theft from U.S. designers large and small,” but of also engaging in infringement-related racketeering activities in the process. According to the complaint that they filed in a California federal court on Tuesday, independent designers Krista Perry, Larissa Martinez, and Jay Baron claim that Shein and various related entities, including Roadget Business and Zoetop Business, (collectively, “Shein”) are on the hook for copyright and trademark infringement in connection with their practice of “produc[ing], distribut[ing], and selling exact copies of their creative works,” which they allege is “part and parcel of Shein’s ‘design’ process and organizational DNA.”...

For each new product sold on Shein’s website, the plaintiffs claim that the initial production run is as low as 100-200 units per SKU, compared to “the thousands of pieces typically produced by traditional peer retailers.” The purpose of this is that it enables Shein to “wait to see if anybody complains that the design was stolen,” and if they do, it can swiftly settle with the company."

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."

Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement; The Verge, July 9, 2023

Wes Davis, The Verge ; Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

"Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement. 

The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”"

The copyright battles against OpenAI have begun; Quartz, July 6. 2023

Faustine Ngila, Quartz; The copyright battles against OpenAI have begun

Let the AI copyright battles begin... 

"With this latest lawsuit from Tremblay and Awad, regulators and courts will be tasked with mulling over the rules of copyright with regards to AI. They may require generative AI companies to disclose how and where they sourced their training data, letting the world peek inside the black box of these AI systems for the very first time."

Bestselling authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay sue OpenAI over copyright infringement; The Los Angeles Times, July 1, 2023

EMILY ST. MARTIN, The Los Angeles Times; Bestselling authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay sue OpenAI over copyright infringement

"Two bestselling novelists filed a suit against OpenAI in a San Francisco federal court on Wednesday, claiming in a proposed class action that the company used copyright-protected intellectual property to “train” its artificial intelligence chatbot.

Authors Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay claim that ChatGPT was trained in part by “ingesting” their novels without their consent."

Authors Sue OpenAI Claiming Mass Copyright Infringement of Hundreds of Thousands of Novels; The Hollywood Reporter, June 29, 2023

WINSTON CHO, The Hollywood Reporter; Authors Sue OpenAI Claiming Mass Copyright Infringement of Hundreds of Thousands of Novels

"Another lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI over its unauthorized collection of information across the web to train its artificial intelligence chatbot, this time by authors who say ChatGPT infringes on copyrights to their novels.

The proposed class action filed in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday alleges that OpenAI “relied on harvesting mass quantities” of copyright-protected works “without consent, without credit, and without compensation.” It seeks a court order that the company infringed on writers’ works when it illegally downloaded copies of novels to train its AI system and that ChatGPT’s answers constitute infringement."