Alexander Hartley, Boston Review; To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT
"Who, if anyone, owns the copyright to a paragraph produced by a chatbot? As I write, nobody knows."
Issues and developments related to IP, AI, and OM, examined in the IP and tech ethics graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology", coming in Summer 2025, includes major chapters on IP, AI, OM, and other emerging technologies (IoT, drones, robots, autonomous vehicles, VR/AR). Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Alexander Hartley, Boston Review; To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT
"Who, if anyone, owns the copyright to a paragraph produced by a chatbot? As I write, nobody knows."
Manish Singh, TechCrunch; Indian news agency sues OpenAI alleging copyright infringement
"One of India’s largest news agencies, Asian News International (ANI), has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content in the world’s most populous nation.
Asian News International filed a 287-page lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on Monday, alleging the AI company illegally used its content to train its AI models and generated false information attributed to the news agency. The case marks the first time an Indian media organization has taken legal action against OpenAI over copyright claims.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Justice Amit Bansal issued a summons to OpenAI after the company confirmed it had already ensured that ChatGPT wasn’t accessing ANI’s website. The bench said that it was not inclined to grant an injunction order on Tuesday, as the case required a detailed hearing for being a “complex issue.”
The next hearing is scheduled to be held in January."
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."
John Roemer, ABA Journal; Fake Cases, Real Consequences [No digital link as of 10/1/24]
"Legal commentator Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA School of Law who tracks AI in litigation, in February reported on the 14th court case he's found in which AI-hallucinated false citations appeared. It was a Missouri Court of Appeals opinion that assessed the offending appellant $10,000 in damages for a frivolous filing.
Hallucinations aren't the only snag, Volokh says. "It's also with the output mischaracterizing the precedents or omitting key context. So one still has to check that output to make sure it's sound, rather than just including it in one's papers.
Echoing Volokh and other experts, ChatGPT itself seems clear-eyed about its limits. When asked about hallucinations in legal research, it replied in part: "Hallucinations in chatbot answers could potentially pose a problem for lawyers if they relied solely on the information provided by the chatbot without verifying its accuracy."
Michael Rosen , American Enterprise Institute; Yet Another AI Copyright Suit Against OpenAI Underscores the Autonomy-Automaton Divide
"In addition to previous litigation brought against artificial intelligence firms by the New York Times Company, an alliance of prominent authors, and a group of creative artists, eight newspapers filed a complaint in district court in New York late last month, alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft are infringing their copyrighted articles by training generative AI products on their content and by churning out text that too closely resembles the copyrighted works.
And just like in the predecessor suits, the current litigation highlights a fundamental divide over AI that we’ve explored in this space on numerous occasions: While the newspapers regard ChatGPT and its ilk as mere automatons that mindlessly perform whatever operations they’re programmed to perform, OpenAI and Microsoft present their technology as genuinely autonomous (i.e. transformative and capable of transcending their rote programming.)"
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."
ASHLEY BELANGER, Ars Technica; Judge rejects most ChatGPT copyright claims from book authors
"A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission."
Anja Karadeglija, National Post; Federal government considering copyright law changes for AI-generated work
"The Liberal government is asking for input on potential changes to copyright law to account for the emergence of generative artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT.
That includes the question of whether copyright protection should apply to AI-generated work, or whether it should be reserved exclusively for work created by humans, it outlined in a new consultation...
The National Post reported earlier this month that the federal government doesn’t know how Canadian copyright law applies to systems like ChatGPT, and is following multiple lawsuits in the United States."
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.”"
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."
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."
Kirby Ferguson, Bloomberg Law; ChatGPT and Generative AI Are Hits! Can Copyright Law Stop Them?
"Getty Images, a top supplier of visual content for license, has sued two of the leading companies offering generative AI tools. Will intellectual property laws spell doom for the burgeoning generative AI business? We explore the brewing battle over copyright and AI in this video.
Video features:
"OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Friday that last week's White House AI summit discussed laws mandating AIs reveal themselves, and added that his firm is working on new ChatGPT models that respect copyright...
On copyright, Altman positioned himself on the side of copyright systems that ensure creators are paid for the value they create: "We're trying to work on new models where if an AI system is using your content, or if it's using your style, you get paid for that," he said."
Thomas Claburn, The Register; OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books
"Tyler Ochoa, a professor in the Law department at Santa Clara University in California, told The Register he fully expects to see lawsuits against the makers of large language models that generate text, including OpenAI, Google, and others.
Ochoa said the copyright issues with AI text generation are exactly the same as the issues with AI image generation. First: is copying large amounts of text or images for training the model fair use? The answer to that, he said, is probably yes.
Second: if the model generates output that's too similar to the input – what the paper refers to as "memorization" – is that copyright infringement? The answer to that, he said, is almost certainly yes.
And third: if the output of an AI text generator is not a copy of an existing text, is it protected by copyright?
Under current law, said Ochoa, the answer is no – because US copyright law requires human creativity, though some countries will disagree and will protect AI-generated works. However, he added, activities like selecting, arranging, and modifying AI model output makes copyright protection more plausible."
Foo Yun Chee, Reuters; Exclusive: German authors, performers call for tougher ChatGPT rules amid copyright concerns
"Forty-two German associations and trade unions representing more than 140,000 authors and performers on Wednesday urged the European Union to beef up draft artificial intelligence rules as they singled out the threat to their copyright from ChatGPT...
"The unauthorised usage of protected training material, its non-transparent processing, and the foreseeable substitution of the sources by the output of generative AI raise fundamental questions of accountability, liability and remuneration, which need to be addressed before irreversible harm occurs," the letter seen by Reuters said."
Lance Eliot, Forbes ; Generative AI ChatGPT Is Going To Be Everywhere Once The API Portal Gets Soon Opened, Stupefying AI Ethics And AI Law
"Some adamantly believe that this will be akin to letting loose the Kraken, namely that all kinds of bad things are going to arise. Others see this as making available a crucial resource that can boost tons of other apps by leveraging the grand capabilities of ChatGPT. It is either the worst of times or the best of times. We will herein consider both sides of the debate and you can decide for yourself which camp you land in.
Into all of this comes a slew of AI Ethics and AI Law considerations.
Please be aware that there are ongoing efforts to imbue Ethical AI principles into the development and fielding of AI apps. A growing contingent of concerned and erstwhile AI ethicists are trying to ensure that efforts to devise and adopt AI takes into account a view of doing AI For Good and averting AI For Bad. Likewise, there are proposed new AI laws that are being bandied around as potential solutions to keep AI endeavors from going amok on human rights and the like. For my ongoing and extensive coverage of AI Ethics and AI Law, see the link here and the link here, just to name a few.
There have been growing qualms that ChatGPT and other similar AI apps have an ugly underbelly that maybe we aren’t ready to handle. For example, you might have heard that students in schools are potentially able to cheat when it comes to writing assigned essays via using ChatGPT. The AI does all the writing for them. Meanwhile, the student is able to seemingly scot-free turn in the essay as though they did the writing from their own noggin. Not what we presumably want AI to do for humankind."