Brewster Kahle, founder and director of the Internet Archive. Digital librarian and computer engineer.
James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School. Studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power."
Annelise Levy, Bloomberg Law; Anthropic Agrees to Enforce Copyright Guardrails on New AI Tools
"Anthropic PBC must apply guardrails to prevent its future AI tools from producing infringing copyrighted content, according to a Monday agreement reached with music publishers suing the company for infringing protected song lyrics.
Eight music publishers—including
Dan Jasnow of ArentFox Schiff LLP - AI Law Blog, The National Law Review; SDNY Order Renews Possibility of Digital Millenium Copyright Act as Legal Recourse for News Organizations in the Age of AI
"Key Takeaway: The Intercept’s Case Against OpenAI Will Clarify the Future of DMCA Protection Against AI Developers
Until now, other DMCA claims against AI developers have largely failed — most of these cases have not proceeded past the motion-to-dismiss stage — but the order allowing The Intercept’s claim to proceed renews the possibility that the DMCA may be a viable claim against AI developers. For rights holders, 1202(b) provides distinct causes of action against AI developers with different evidentiary requirements than traditional copyright infringement claims. For developers, 1202(b) is another legal risk to be managed, particularly in the wake of the order in The Intercept case."
Blake Brittain, Reuters ; Tech companies face tough AI copyright questions in 2025
"The new year may bring pivotal developments in a series of copyright lawsuits that could shape the future business of artificial intelligence.
Nicola Jones, Nature; The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do?
"A prominent study1 made headlines this year by putting a number on this problem: researchers at Epoch AI, a virtual research institute, projected that, by around 2028, the typical size of data set used to train an AI model will reach the same size as the total estimated stock of public online text. In other words, AI is likely to run out of training data in about four years’ time (see ‘Running out of data’). At the same time, data owners — such as newspaper publishers — are starting to crack down on how their content can be used, tightening access even more. That’s causing a crisis in the size of the ‘data commons’, says Shayne Longpre, an AI researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who leads the Data Provenance Initiative, a grass-roots organization that conducts audits of AI data sets...
Several lawsuits are now under way attempting to win compensation for the providers of data being used in AI training. In December 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft for copyright infringement; in April this year, eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital in New York City jointly filed a similar lawsuit. The counterargument is that an AI should be allowed to read and learn from online content in the same way as a person, and that this constitutes fair use of the material. OpenAI has said publicly that it thinks The New York Times lawsuit is “without merit”.
If courts uphold the idea that content providers deserve financial compensation, it will make it harder for both AI developers and researchers to get what they need — including academics, who don’t have deep pockets. “Academics will be most hit by these deals,” says Longpre. “There are many, very pro-social, pro-democratic benefits of having an open web,” he adds."
Kate Knibbs, Wired; Every AI Copyright Lawsuit in the US, Visualized
"WIRED is keeping close tabs on how each of these lawsuits unfold. We’ve created visualizations to help you track and contextualize which companies and rights holders are involved, where the cases have been filed, what they’re alleging, and everything else you need to know."
MATT GROWCOOT, PetaPixel; Getty Images Wants $1.7 Billion From its Lawsuit With Stability AI
"Getty, one of the world’s largest photo agencies, launched its lawsuit in January 2023. Getty suspects that Stability AI may have used as many as 12 million of its copyrighted photos to train the AI image generator Stable Diffusion. Getty is seeking $150,000 per infringement and 12 million photos equates to a staggering $1.8 trillion.
However, according to Stability AI’s latest company accounts as reported by Sifted, Getty is seeking damages for 11,383 works at $150,000 per infringement which comes to a total of $1.7 billion. Stability AI has previously reported that Getty was seeking damages for 7,300 images so that number has increased. But Stability AI says Getty hasn’t given an exact number it wants for the lawsuit to be settled, according to Sifted."
JON BLISTEIN, Rolling Stone; KATHLEEN HANNA, TEGAN AND SARA, MORE BACK INTERNET ARCHIVE IN $621 MILLION COPYRIGHT FIGHT
"Kathleen Hanna, Tegan and Sara, and Amanda Palmer are among the 300-plus musicians who have signed an open letter supporting the Internet Archive as it faces a $621 million copyright infringement lawsuit over its efforts to preserve 78 rpm records...
The lawsuit was brought last year by several major music rights holders, led by Universal Music Group and Sony Music. They claimed the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project — an unprecedented effort to digitize hundreds of thousands of obsolete shellac discs produced between the 1890s and early 1950s — constituted the “wholesale theft of generations of music,” with “preservation and research” used as a “smokescreen.” (The Archive has denied the claims.)
While more than 400,000 recordings have been digitized and made available to listen to on the Great 78 Project, the lawsuit focuses on about 4,000, most by recognizable legacy acts like Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Ella Fitzgerald. With the maximum penalty for statutory damages at $150,000 per infringing incident, the lawsuit has a potential price tag of over $621 million. A broad enough judgement could end the Internet Archive.
Supporters of the suit — including the estates of many of the legacy artists whose recordings are involved — claim the Archive is doing nothing more than reproducing and distributing copyrighted works, making it a clear-cut case of infringement. The Archive, meanwhile, has always billed itself as a research library (albeit a digital one), and its supporters see the suit (as well as a similar one brought by book publishers) as an attack on preservation efforts, as well as public access to the cultural record."
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Kyle Wiggers , TechCrunch; OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit
"OpenAI tried to recover the data — and was mostly successful. However, because the folder structure and file names were “irretrievably” lost, the recovered data “cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs’ copied articles were used to build [OpenAI’s] models,” per the letter.
“News plaintiffs have been forced to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time,” counsel for The Times and Daily News wrote. “The news plaintiffs learned only yesterday that the recovered data is unusable and that an entire week’s worth of its experts’ and lawyers’ work must be re-done, which is why this supplemental letter is being filed today.”
The plaintiffs’ counsel makes clear that they have no reason to believe the deletion was intentional. But they do say the incident underscores that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools."
Caitlin Huston , The Hollywood Reporter; News Corp Sues AI Company Perplexity Over Copyright Claims, Made Up Text
"Dow Jones, the parent company to the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post filed a lawsuit Monday against artificial intelligence company Perplexity, alleging that the company is illegally using copyrighted work.
The suit alleges that Perplexity, which is an AI research and conversational search engine, draws on articles and other copyrighted content from the publishers to feed into its product and then repackages the content in its responses, or sometimes uses the content verbatim, without linking back to the articles. The engine can also be used to display several paragraphs or entire articles, when asked."
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."
Aruni Soni, Bloomberg Law; Meta Fails to Block Zuckerberg Deposition in AI Copyright Suit
"A federal magistrate judge opened the door to a deposition of
Magistrate Judge Thomas S. Hixson denied the request to block the deposition because the plaintiffs supplied enough evidence that Zuckerberg is the “chief decision maker and policy setter for Meta’s Generative AI branch and the development of the large language models at issue in this action,” he said in the order filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District."
Aaron West, The Fashion Law; How OpenAI is Looking to Beat the Growing Pool of Copyright Cases
"The recent barrage of copyright infringement disputes that are being waged against OpenAI and Microsoft by major publishers, authors, and other plaintiffs continues to stack up, with various outcomes coming in early rounds from district courts. While most of the cases that the artificial intelligence (“AI”) company and its chief investor are facing are still in early stages, at least one major theme has started to emerge from the litigation: The two high-powered defendants are leaning on a defense that paints the plaintiffs’ claims as stemming from their manipulation of the AI-powered platforms at play – and thus, prompting allegedly unlikely and hypothetical outputs – and the harm they allege in their infringement cases as purely speculative."
SHERIN SHIBU EDITED BY JESSICA THOMAS , Entrepreneur; ChatGPT's Owner Asks For Proof That 'New York Times' Articles Are Original. Here's the Media Company's Response.
"The New York Times sued OpenAI in December for copyright infringement, alleging that the AI giant used millions of its articles to train ChatGPT. Now OpenAI is asking for proof that NYT articles are actually original — and the NYT is calling the request "irrelevant, improper, and harassing."
OpenAI lawyers filed the request in New York district court on Monday. The ChatGPT-maker asked that the Times bring forth documents proving which portions of the millions of articles in question in the case "are original to the Times and what are not...
The NYT submitted a filing on Wednesday asserting that OpenAI's request "serves no purpose other than harassment and retaliation for The Times's decision to file this lawsuit.""
Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter; As AI Marches on Music Industry, Record Labels Counter With $350M Lawsuits In Assertive Move
"There’ve been over 25 copyright infringement lawsuits filed against artificial intelligence companies from most corners of the creative industries. Groups that’ve sued include artists, authors and news publishers, among various others alleging mass theft of their copyrighted works to teach AI systems. Of those entities, record companies have taken the most aggressive stance thus far in trying to get out in front of the technology."
Aruni Soni , Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Asks to Merge New York Times, Daily News Copyright Suits
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Golriz Chrostowski, Bloomberg Law; Judges in Gen AI Cases Favor Summary Judgment on Copyright
"Bloomberg Law dockets research found 19 copyright lawsuits against generative AI defendants that are currently pending in federal district courts. These 19 cases are filed in four jurisdictions: the Northern District of California, the District of Delaware, the Southern District of New York, and the Middle District of Tennessee. The 11 judges overseeing these cases have varying degrees of experience deciding summary judgment motions involving copyright law, according to Bloomberg Law’s Litigation Analytics tool...
Despite their varying amounts of experience, it appears that the majority of the generative AI judges are willing to grant in whole or in part motions for summary judgment involving copyright law. However, only Judges Sidney H. Stein, Jon S. Tigar, Waverly D. Crenshaw, Jr., Rakoff, and McMahon have decided motions for summary judgment involving the affirmative defense of fair use. Only three found in favor of fair use, forecasting an uphill battle for generative AI defendants.
Armed with this kind of knowledge about a judge’s experience with copyright law, practitioners can determine how much information they may need to provide the judge presiding over their case."
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.)"
Associated Press via The Guardian; Eight US newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement
"A group of eight US newspapers is suing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the technology companies have been “purloining millions” of copyrighted news articles without permission or payment to train their artificial intelligence chatbots."
