How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin”; O'Reilly, June 18, 2024

 Tim O’Reilly, O'Reilly; How to Fix “AI’s Original Sin”

"In conversation with reporter Cade Metz, who broke the story, on the New York Times podcast The Daily, host Michael Barbaro called copyright violation “AI’s Original Sin.”

At the very least, copyright appears to be one of the major fronts so far in the war over who gets to profit from generative AI. It’s not at all clear yet who is on the right side of the law. In the remarkable essay “Talkin’ ’Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative-AI Supply Chain,” Cornell’s Katherine Lee and A. Feder Cooper and James Grimmelmann of Microsoft Research and Yale note:

Copyright law is notoriously complicated, and generative-AI systems manage to touch on a great many corners of it. They raise issues of authorship, similarity, direct and indirect liability, fair use, and licensing, among much else. These issues cannot be analyzed in isolation, because there are connections everywhere. Whether the output of a generative AI system is fair use can depend on how its training datasets were assembled. Whether the creator of a generative-AI system is secondarily liable can depend on the prompts that its users supply.

But it seems less important to get into the fine points of copyright law and arguments over liability for infringement, and instead to explore the political economy of copyrighted content in the emerging world of AI services: Who will get what, and why?"

Big Tech Launches Campaign to Defend AI Use; The Hollywood Reporter, June 6, 2024

Winston Cho , The Hollywood Reporter; Big Tech Launches Campaign to Defend AI Use

"Chamber of Progress, a tech industry coalition whose members include Amazon, Apple and Meta, is launching a campaign to defend the legality of using copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence systems.

The group says the campaign, called “Generate and Create” and unveiled on Thursday, will aim to highlight “how artists use generative AI to enhance their creative output” and “showcase how AI lowers barriers for producing art” as part of an initiative to “defend the longstanding legal principle of fair use under copyright law.”"

‘That’ll cost you, ChatGPT’ — copyright needs an update for the age of AI; The Hill, May 23, 2024

CHRISTOPHER KENNEALLY, The Hill; That’ll cost you, ChatGPT’ — copyright needs an update for the age of AI

"Beyond commercially published books, journals, and newspapers, AI databases derive from a vast online trove of publicly available social media and Wikipedia entries, as well as digitized library and museum collections, court proceedings, and government legislation and regulation.

Consumption of public and private individual data on the “open” web marks an important shift in digital evolution. No one is left out. Consequently, we have all become stakeholders.

AI is now forcing us to consider viewing copyright as a public good...

Statutory licensing schemes for copyright-protected works are already applied to cable television systems and music recordings with great success. Fees collected for AI rights-licensing of publicly available works need not be burdensome. The funds can help to underwrite essential public education in digital literacy and civil discourse online.

OpenAI, along with Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, and others who stand to benefit, must recognize the debt owed to the American people for the data that fuels their AI solutions."

Classical Musicians Victimized by Erroneous Copyright Claims; Violinist.com, December 19, 2023

Laurie Niles, Violinist.com; Classical Musicians Victimized by Erroneous Copyright Claims

""One or more actions were applied to your video because of a copyright match."

This was just one of two copyright claims that Amy Beth Horman received from Facebook Thursday, disputing ownership of videos of her daughter's violin performances. First, she received a copyright claim for a video of Ava's live performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto this week. Then, she got another for video she had posted in 2020 of then-10-year-old Ava performing "Meditation from Thais." These are both classical works that are in the public domain - not subject to copyright.

Nonetheless, classical musicians receive these kinds of dreaded messages on a regular basis if they post videos of their performances on social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram or YouTube.

Has the musician violated anyone's copyright? Almost never. These are automated copyright claims created by bots on behalf of big companies like Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group or Universal Music. If the bot finds that your performance has approximately the same notes and timing as one in their catalogue, they then claim that they own rights to your recording. But musicians have every right to perform and post a public domain work. Even so, musicians often find their recordings muted, earnings from ads on their performances given instead to the company filing the erroneous claim, and threats of having their accounts suspended or banned."

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."

'Not for Machines to Harvest’: Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I.; The New York Times, July 15, 2023

 Sheera Frenkel and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times;  'Not for Machines to Harvest’: Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I.

"At the heart of the rebellions is a newfound understanding that online information — stories, artwork, news articles, message board posts and photos — may have significant untapped value.

The new wave of A.I. — known as “generative A.I.” for the text, images and other content it generates — is built atop complex systems such as large language models, which are capable of producing humanlike prose. These models are trained on hoards of all kinds of data so they can answer people’s questions, mimic writing styles or churn out comedy and poetry...

“What’s happening here is a fundamental realignment of the value of data,” said Brandon Duderstadt, the founder and chief executive of Nomic, an A.I. company...

“The data rebellion that we’re seeing across the country is society’s way of pushing back against this idea that Big Tech is simply entitled to take any and all information from any source whatsoever, and make it their own,” said Ryan Clarkson, the founder of Clarkson...

Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, said the lawsuit’s arguments were expansive and unlikely to be accepted by the court. But the wave of litigation is just beginning, he said, with a “second and third wave” coming that would define A.I.’s future."

The AI boom is here, and so are the lawsuits; Vox, February 1, 2023

 Peter Kafka, Vox; The AI boom is here, and so are the lawsuits

What can Napster tell us about the future?

"Briefly: “File-sharing” services blew up the music industry almost overnight because they gave anyone with a broadband connection the ability to download any music they wanted, for free, instead of paying $15 for a CD. The music industry responded by suing the owners of services like Napster, as well as ordinary users like a 66-year-old grandmother. Over time, the labels won their battles against Napster and its ilk, and, in some cases, their investors. They also generated tons of opprobrium from music listeners, who continued to not buy much music, and the value of music labels plummeted. 

But after a decade of trying to will CD sales to come back, the music labels eventually made peace with the likes of Spotify, which offered users the ability to subscribe to all-you-can-listen-to service for a monthly fee. Those fees ended up eclipsing what the average listener would spend a year on CDs, and now music rights and the people who own them are worth a lot of money.

So you can imagine one outcome here: Eventually, groups of people who put things on the internet will collectively bargain with tech entities over the value of their data, and everyone wins. Of course, that scenario could also mean that individuals who put things on the internet discover that their individual photo or tweet or sketch means very little to an AI engine that uses billions of inputs for training."

Supreme Court asks for Biden administration's views in Google copyright case; December 12, 2022

Blake Brittain, Reuters ; Supreme Court asks for Biden administration's views in Google copyright case

"The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday asked the Biden administration to weigh in on song-lyric website Genius' attempt to revive a lawsuit over Google's alleged theft of its work.

The justices are considering whether to hear ML Genius Holdings LLC's bid to overturn a U.S. appeals court's ruling that its case against Google LLC was preempted by federal copyright law.

The Supreme Court often asks for the solicitor general's input on cases in which the U.S. government may have an interest."

U.S. Copyright Office Consultation Triggers Massive “Upload Filter” Opposition; TorrentFreak, February 16, 2022

Ernesto Van der Sar, TorrentFreak; U.S. Copyright Office Consultation Triggers Massive “Upload Filter” Opposition

"Late 2020, Senator Thom Tillis released a discussion draft of the “Digital Copyright Act” (DCA), which aims to be a successor to the current DMCA.

The DCA hints at far-reaching changes to the way online intermediaries approach the piracy problem. Among other things, these services would have to ensure that pirated content stays offline after it’s taken down once.

This “takedown and staydown’ approach relies on technical protection tools, which include upload filters. This is a sensitive subject that previously generated quite a bit of pushback when the EU drafted its Copyright Directive.

To gauge the various options and viewpoints, the Copyright Office launched a series of consultations on the various technical tools that can help to detect and remove pirated content from online platforms.

This effort includes a public consultation where various stakeholders and members of the public were invited to share their thoughts, which they did en masse."

Stephen G. Breyer may shape tech’s copyright battles for years to come; The Washington Post, January 27, 2022

Cristiano Lima with research by Aaron Schaffer, The Washington Post; Stephen G. Breyer may shape tech’s copyright battles for years to come

"Stephen G. Breyer may shape tech’s copyright battles for years to come

With the looming retirement of Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, tech policy wonks say the high court is losing one of the nation’s preeminent thought leaders on intellectual property and copyright.

But while Breyer may be on his way out of federal court, his influence over those standards, and how they map onto emerging technologies, is poised to live on long after.

For decades, Breyer has carved out a unique role on the bench as a copyright specialist, said Meredith Rose, senior policy counsel at consumer group Public Knowledge. And his advocacy for a more limited view of intellectual property rights than some of his colleagues, such as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, made him a “rarity” in the space, Rose said. 

“He’s definitely got the biggest depth of experience in copyright issues on the bench currently,” she said. “It was really him and Justice Ginsburg were the two titans of copyright.”

Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called Breyer “a very strong voice for a balanced intellectual property system” that ensured that copyright and patents are “encouraging innovation, encouraging new creativity … as opposed to thwarting it.”

These traits, they said, were exemplified in one of Breyer’s most recent high-profile copyright cases: the contentious, decade-long Google v. Oracle bout."

President Biden, creatives need copyright champions in the federal government ; The Hill, January 7, 2022

 

RUTH VITALE, The Hill; President Biden, creatives need copyright champions in the federal government 

"The copyright industries bring not only cultural but also economic prosperity to our country. They contribute $1.5 trillion per year of value to the U.S. GDP, accounting for 7.41 percent of the national economy. U.S. copyright products sold overseas amounted to nearly $219 billion in sales in 2019 – more than other major industries including pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and agriculture. 

President Biden has personally demonstrated long-standing support for the creative industries. As a senator 20 years ago, he convened a hearing called “Theft of American Intellectual Property: Fighting Crime Abroad and at Home.” As vice president, over 10 years ago, he helped to implement a new law that created the Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. Unequivocally, he stated, “Piracy is theft. Clean and simple.”...

Infringing content draws users to platforms, helping to fuel BigTech’s ascent to previously inconceivable heights of wealth. Meanwhile, digital pirates are stealing the rightful earnings of hard-working Americans, facilitated by Big Tech. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that digital piracy takes between $29.2 billion and $71 billion from the national economy every year. It also takes away between 230,000 and 560,000 American jobs...

I remain hopeful that President Biden’s future appointments will better reflect his lengthy and strong record in support of respect for copyright. Specifically, the position of U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) is open once again.  

As the president knows better than anyone else, the person serving in the IPEC’s role oversees Executive Office efforts to curb piracy, domestically and abroad. The previous IPEC was confirmed by the Senate in August of 2017 – today, during a critical moment for the creative communities, the position is vacant."

Copyright could be the next way for Congress to take on Big Tech; The Verge, February 13, 2020

Adi Robertson, The Verge; Copyright could be the next way for Congress to take on Big Tech

"By the end of the year, Tillis — who chairs the Senate’s intellectual property subcommittee — plans to draft changes to the DMCA. He and co-chair Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) kicked off the process this week with an introductory hearing, speaking to eight legal experts and former congressional staffers. The hearing helped set the stage to re-fight some long-running battles over the balance between protecting copyrighted content and keeping the internet open — but at a time where internet companies are already facing a large-scale backlash.

The 1998 DMCA attempted to outline how copyright should work on the then-nascent internet, where you could almost freely and infinitely copy a piece of media. But it’s been widely criticized by people with very different stances on intellectual property."

What the EU’s copyright overhaul means — and what might change for big tech; NiemanLab, Nieman Foundation at Harvard, April 22, 2019

Marcello Rossi, NiemanLab, Nieman Foundation at Harvard; What the EU’s copyright overhaul means — and what might change for big tech

"The activity indeed now moves to the member states. Each of the 28 countries in the EU now has two years to transpose it into its own national laws. Until we see how those laws shake out, especially in countries with struggles over press and internet freedom, both sides of the debate will likely have plenty of room to continue arguing their sides — that it marks a groundbreaking step toward a more balanced, fair internet, or that it will result in a set of legal ambiguities that threaten the freedom of the web."