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."

AI is learning from stolen intellectual property. It needs to stop.; The Washington Post, October 19, 2023

William D. Cohan , The Washington Post; AI is learning from stolen intellectual property. It needs to stop.

"The other day someone sent me the searchable database published by Atlantic magazine of more than 191,000 e-books that have been used to train the generative AI systems being developed by Meta, Bloomberg and others. It turns out that four of my seven books are in the data set, called Books3. Whoa.

Not only did I not give permission for my books to be used to generate AI products, but I also wasn’t even consulted about it. I had no idea this was happening. Neither did my publishers, Penguin Random House (for three of the books) and Macmillan (for the other one). Neither my publishers nor I were compensated for use of my intellectual property. Books3 just scraped the content away for free, with Meta et al. profiting merrily along the way. And Books3 is just one of many pirated collections being used for this purpose...

This is wholly unacceptable behavior. Our books are copyrighted material, not free fodder for wealthy companies to use as they see fit, without permission or compensation. Many, many hours of serious research, creative angst and plain old hard work go into writing and publishing a book, and few writers are compensated like professional athletes, Hollywood actors or Wall Street investment bankers. Stealing our intellectual property hurts."

Google promises to take the legal heat in users’ AI copyright lawsuits; The Verge, October 12, 2023

Emilia David , The Verge; Google promises to take the legal heat in users’ AI copyright lawsuits

"Google will protect customers who use some of its generative AI products if they get sued for copyright infringement, the company says.

In a blog post, Google said customers using products that are now embedded with generative AI features will be protected, attempting to assuage growing fears that generative AI could run afoul of copyright rules. It specifically mentioned seven products it would legally cover: Duet AI in Workspace (including text generated in Google Docs and Gmail and images in Google Slides and Google Meet), Duet AI in Google Cloud, Vertex AI Search, Vertex AI Conversation, Vertex AI Text Embedding API, Visual Captioning on Vertex AI, and Codey APIs. Google’s Bard search tool was not mentioned.

If you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved,” the company said."

Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright; The Verge, August 22, 2023

 Nilay Patel,, The Verge; Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright

"There’s only one name that springs to mind when you think of the cutting edge in copyright law online: Frank Sinatra. 

There’s nothing more important than making sure his estate — and his label, Universal Music Group — gets paid when people do AI versions of Ol’ Blue Eyes singing “Get Low” on YouTube, right? Even if that means creating an entirely new class of extralegal contractual royalties for big music labels just to protect the online dominance of your video platform while simultaneously insisting that training AI search results on books and news websites without paying anyone is permissible fair use? Right? Right?

This, broadly, is the position that Google is taking after announcing a deal with Universal Music Group yesterday “to develop an AI framework to help us work toward our common goals.” Google is signaling that it will pay off the music industry with special deals that create brand-new — and potentially devastating! — private intellectual property rights, while basically telling the rest of the web that the price of being indexed in Search is complete capitulation to allowing Google to scrape data for AI training."

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."

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."

YouTube and content creators clash over the platform’s automated copyright tool; Marketplace, November 4, 2022

Marketplace; YouTube and content creators clash over the platform’s automated copyright tool

"Every minute, people upload more than 500 hours of video to YouTube — cat videos, music videos, even videos of people recording their audio podcasts.

And some of those clips include content the people uploading them don’t own, like clips of music from popular songs.

YouTube, and its owner, Google, have an automated technology called Content ID that regularly scans for copyrighted material — including music — and flags it for copyright holders.

Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke about this with Marketplace’s Peter Balonon-Rosen, who explained why the system has some musicians frustrated."

AI-ethics pioneer Margaret Mitchell on her five-year plan at open-source AI startup Hugging Face; Emerging Tech Brew, October 4, 2021

 Hayden Field, Emerging Tech Brew ; AI-ethics pioneer Margaret Mitchell on her five-year plan at open-source AI startup Hugging Face

"Hugging Face wants to bring these powerful tools to more people. Its mission: Help companies build, train, and deploy AI models—specifically natural language processing (NLP) systems—via its open-source tools, like Transformers and Datasets. It also offers pretrained models available for download and customization.

So what does it mean to play a part in “democratizing” these powerful NLP tools? We chatted with Mitchell about the split from Google, her plans for her new role, and her near-future predictions for responsible AI."

Self-Driving to Federal Prison: The Trade Secret Theft Saga of Anthony Levandowski Continues; Lexology, August 13, 2020

Seyfarth Shaw LLP - Robert Milligan and Darren W. Dummit; Self-Driving to Federal Prison: The Trade Secret Theft Saga of Anthony Levandowski Continues

"Judge Aslup, while steadfastly respectful of Levandowski as a good person and as a brilliant man who the world would learn a lot listening to, nevertheless found prison time to be the best available deterrent to engineers and employees privy to trade secrets worth billions of dollars to competitors: “You’re giving the green light to every future engineer to steal trade secrets,” he told Levandowski’s attorneys. “Prison time is the answer to that.” To further underscore the importance of deterring similar behavior in the high stakes tech world, Judge Aslup required Levandowski to give the aforementioned public speeches describing how he went to prison."

How to find copyright-free images (and avoiding a stock photo subscription); TNW, April 29, 2020

MIX , TNW; How to find copyright-free images (and avoiding a stock photo subscription)

"If you search for any term and head to the Images section in Google, you’ll instantly find thousands of images. There’s one issue, though: Some of them might be copyrighted and you might be putting yourself (or your employer) at risk. Fortunately, you can filter images by usage rights, which will help you avoid that...

Here are a couple of our favorite free stock photo sites:

• Unsplash
• Pixabay
• Pexels
• StockSnap
• Burst

If you’re looking for copyright-free PNG cutouts, you should check out PNGPlay, Icon8, and PNGimg.

Even though a lot of these images are free to use without any attribution, you can support the creators by giving them credit, which in turn gives their work more exposure. You might not have the resources to purchase their images, but someone else might be interested in hiring them. Crediting them for their work helps with that.

You get to save some money by avoiding buying a Shutterstock subscription, they get free exposure. It’s a win-win."

A former Uber executive was ordered to pay Google $179 million. Then he filed for bankruptcy.; The Washington Post, March 4, 2020

Reed Albergotti , The Washington Post; A former Uber executive was ordered to pay Google $179 million. Then he filed for bankruptcy.

Anthony Levandowski was accused of stealing trade secrets on self-driving technology

"Anthony Levandowski, who once ran Uber’s self-driving car unit, was ordered Wednesday to pay $179 million to rival Google, prompting the software engineer to file for bankruptcy protection.

The enormous award, which was approved by a Superior Court judge in San Francisco and was confidential but disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, casts new light on one of Silicon Valley’s most heated dramas. It is also another blow to Levandowski, once a rising star in the tech industry who now faces criminal charges for allegedly possessing trade secrets that belong to Google."

 

Oracle Files Response To Google and API Copyright - We Are All Doomed; i-Programmer, February 17, 2020

Mike James, i-Programmer; Oracle Files Response To Google and API Copyright - We Are All Doomed

"If I invent an API, of course I want it to be copyright. If I use an API then the last thing I want is for it to be copyright."

EFF Asks Supreme Court To Reverse Dangerous Rulings About API Copyrightability and Fair Use; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), January 13, 2020

Press Release, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF);

EFF Asks Supreme Court To Reverse Dangerous Rulings About API Copyrightability and Fair Use

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that functional aspects of Oracle’s Java programming language are not copyrightable, and even if they were, employing them to create new computer code falls under fair use protections.

The court is reviewing a long-running lawsuit Oracle filed against Google, which claimed that Google’s use of certain Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in its Android operating system violated Oracle’s copyrights. The case has far-reaching implications for innovation in software development, competition, and interoperability.

In a brief filed today, EFF argues that the Federal Circuit, in ruling APIs were copyrightable, ignored clear and specific language in the copyright statute that excludes copyright protection for procedures, processes, and methods of operation."

Supreme Court will hear Google’s appeal in massive copyright suit brought by Oracle; CNBC, November 15, 2019

Tucker Higgins, CNBC; Supreme Court will hear Google’s appeal in massive copyright suit brought by Oracle

"The Supreme Court said on Friday that it will hear a dispute between tech giants Oracle and Google in a blockbuster case that could lead to billions of dollars in fines and shape copyright law in the internet era.

The case concerns 11,500 lines of code that Google was accused of copying from Oracle’s Java programming language. Google deployed the code in Android, now the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Oracle sued Google in 2010 alleging that the use of its code in Android violated copyright law...

Underlying the legal issues in the case is a technical dispute over the nature of the code that Google used. Google has said that the code was essentially functional — akin to copying the placement of keys on a QWERTY keyboard. Oracle maintains that the code, part of Java’s application programming interface, or API, is a creative product, “like the chapter headings and topic sentences of an elaborate literary work.”

Did Uber Steal Google’s Intellectual Property?; The New Yorker, October 22, 2018 Issue

Charles Duhigg, The New Yorker; Did Uber Steal Google’s Intellectual Property?

"Levandowski, for his part, has been out of work since he was fired by Uber. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for him, though. He’s still extremely wealthy. He left Google with files that nearly everyone agrees he should not have walked off with, even if there is widespread disagreement about how much they’re worth. Levandowski seemed constantly ready to abandon his teammates and threaten defection, often while working on an angle to enrich himself. He is a brilliant mercenary, a visionary opportunist, a man seemingly without loyalty. He has helped build a technology that might transform how the world functions, and he seems inclined to personally profit from that transformation as much as possible. In other words, he is an exemplar of Silicon Valley ethics.

Levandowski is upset that some people have cast him as the bad guy. “I reject the notion that I did something unethical,” he said. “Was I trying to compete with them? Sure.” But, he added, “I’m not a thief, and I’m not dishonest.” Other parents sometimes shun him when he drops his kids off at school, and he has grown tired of people taking photographs of him when he walks through airports. But he is confident that his notoriety will subside. Although he no longer owns the technology that he brought to Google and Uber, plenty of valuable information remains inside his head, and he has a lot of new ideas."

YouTube CEO asks creators to ‘take action’ against EU copyright law; CNet, October 22, 2018

Richard Nieva, CNet; YouTube CEO asks creators to ‘take action’ against EU copyright law

""This legislation poses a threat to both your livelihood and your ability to share your voice with the world," Wojcicki wrote in a blog post. "And, if implemented as proposed, Article 13 threatens hundreds of thousands of jobs, European creators, businesses, artists and everyone they employ."

She added, "Please take a moment to learn more about how it could affect your channel and take action immediately." She also asked creators to protest using the hashtag #SaveYourInternet."

Google loses Android battle and could owe Oracle billions of dollars; CNN Money, March 27, 2018

Danielle Wiener-Bronner, CNN Money; Google loses Android battle and could owe Oracle billions of dollars

"Google isn't the only company that stands to lose from this decision. Many others rely on open-source software to develop their own platforms. Tuesday's ruling means that some will either have pay to license certain software or develop their own from scratch.

"The decision is going to create a significant shift in how software is developed worldwide," Carani said. "It really means that copyright in this context has teeth."

"Sometimes free is not really free," he added."

It’s all over: Why the Waymo v. Uber self-driving settlement makes sense; Ars Technica, February 10, 2018

Cyrus Farivar, Ars Technica; It’s all over: Why the Waymo v. Uber self-driving settlement makes sense

"On Friday morning, Waymo and Uber settled their trade secrets lawsuit, setting the stage for self-driving marketplace competition rather than a legal battle.

After a drawn-out struggle both in a court of law and the court of public opinion, a settlement is the outcome that makes the most sense for both parties. To borrow a phrase that came out during trial from Uber’s ex-CEO, Travis Kalanick, the deal "minimizes risk, minimizes pain."

Waymo gets what it wants: Uber agreed to ensure that none of Waymo’s "confidential information" would end up in hardware or software produced by Uber’s self-driving division, known as the Advanced Technologies Group. Waymo also will receive a sizeable 0.34 percent equity share of Uber, worth over $244 million. No money has actually changed hands: it’s an all-equity arrangement, which means Waymo is financially invested to some degree in Uber's future. (The New York Times reported Friday that Uber's board had initially offered 0.68 percent, but that proposal was yanked prior to trial. After Thursday's fourth day of trial, settlement talks resumed.)"

Waymo Drops Most Patent Claims in Car Tech Fight With Uber; Bloomberg, July 7, 2017

Eric Newcomer, Bloomberg; Waymo Drops Most Patent Claims in Car Tech Fight With Uber

"Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s self-driving car division, dropped three of four patent-infringement claims in its lawsuit against Uber Technologies Inc. over the startup’s autonomous vehicle program.

Waymo’s decision to include patent claims in its complaint against Uber was a surprise move for Google parent Alphabet, which normally prides itself on limiting patent fights. The bulk of Waymo’s case is not over patents, but trade secrets."

Google Just Dropped Some of Its Patent Claims Against Uber; Gizmodo, May 17, 2017

Kate Conger, Gizmodo; 

Google Just Dropped Some of Its Patent Claims Against Uber

"Waymo quietly dropped several of the patent claims in its explosive lawsuit against Uber last night, admitting in a new court filing that although it stands behind its allegations of trade secret theft and may pursue new patent claims later, it isn’t moving forward with its current patent infringement claims against one of Uber’s lidar devices."