SHEEMA KHAN , The Globe and Mail; Will the rise of AI spell the end of intellectual property rights?
"AI’s first challenge to IP is in the inputs...
Perhaps the question will become: Will IP be the death of AI?...
The second challenge relates to who owns the AI-generated products...
Yet IP rights are key to innovation, as they provide a limited monopoly to monetize investments in research and development. AI represents an existential threat in this regard.
Clearly, the law has not caught up. But sitting idly by is not an option, as there are too many important policy issues at play."
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."
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."
Emily Maxim Lamm , American Bar Association (ABA); Navigating the Patchwork of AI Laws, Standards, and Guidance
"The opening weeks of 2024 have seen a record number of state legislative proposals seeking to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) across different sectors in the United States...
With this type of rapid-fire start to the 2024 legislative season, the AI legal landscape will likely continue evolving across the board. As a result, organizations today are facing a complex and dizzying web of proposed and existing AI laws, standards, and guidance.
This article aims to provide a cohesive overview of this AI patchwork and to help organizations navigate this increasingly intricate terrain. The focus here will be on the implications of the White House AI Executive Order, existing state and local laws in the United States, the European Union’s AI Act, and, finally, governance standards to help bring these diverse elements together within a framework."
Stefano Montali, The New York Times ; ‘The Hunt for Gollum’ Was Just Announced. It Was on YouTube in 2009.
"Early on, he had reached an agreement with the Tolkien estate ensuring that his project would respect its intellectual property, and that it would be freely available and noncommercial. “We were lucky that they looked kindly on it as something that was for the fan community,” Bouchard said.
But YouTube denied the appeal. So, like eagles over Mordor, the Ringers, as the fans are known, swooped in. They wrote articles and posted heated comments on Reddit and other sites, calling the removal “deplorable” and “despicable.” Bouchard noted his disappointment on X.
Bouchard quickly received a follow-up email from YouTube: The movie had been reinstated. In an email, Warner Bros. said it had no official comment. YouTube did not reply to requests for comment."
JESSICA MATHEWS, Fortune ; Copyright issues at OpenAI and other AI startups are ramping up
"Last week, Sony Music Group sent out a letter to more than 700 companies building out or using generative AI models with a clear warning: If you’re going to use Sony’s content, you better have explicit permission."
Anna Tumadóttir, Creative Commons (CC) ; TIME FOR A REFRESH
"The CC team has been evaluating our progress toward our 2021-2025 strategy. Through that process, we have noticed the ways we have been organically adjusting to the social and technical shifts around us, as well as the ebbs and flows of funding availability. It would be an understatement to say that much has changed since we developed the strategy in 2020 and launched it in 2021. Turns out that our predictions and plans set forth in 2020 are not as helpful in the reality of 2024 and likely even less so for 2025 and beyond.
Rather than continuing to progress through the existing strategy, we have determined that the stronger, and dare we say more strategic, approach is to conduct a strategy refresh.
Refreshing Our Strategy
Organizational strategies are meant to be living documents that guide the efforts of the organization towards its north star—the mission and vision. What we thought would be a strategy that would guide us into 2025 has actually been the foundation of us better understanding CC’s role in a post-pandemic time of significant technological development with generative AI, a much needed social and racial justice reckoning globally, and a rapidly shifting socio-economic environment, all affecting our team and our community.
This strategic refresh process will build on past strategies, leveraging what has worked and learning from what hasn’t. Rather than a strategic shift for CC, we are steering this process with the goal of returning to the core of CC, as a movement, as a community, and as legal and technical infrastructure. Our goal is to emerge with an updated strategy that takes into account generative AI alongside the human act of creating and sharing; paired with a sound operational and sustainable organizational layer.
Intentional Engagement with our Community
Community involvement and engagement with this process will be critical for its success. As the CC team and Board grapple with the directions that this strategic refresh will take, we want to hear from you. What role do you see for CC in the future? How can CC support you and your community in stewarding openness practices and making available the knowledge that will help to solve the greatest challenges of our time? What are the elements that make a strong and effective CC, today, tomorrow, and into the future?
In June, we will begin scheduling a series of open community and stakeholder sessions to be held throughout July and August. Participation information will be shared on our blog and via social media. If you wish to indicate your early interest in participating, please sign up to our mailing list. We are looking forward to connecting with you on this process and we can’t wait to hear your insights on the future of CC."
FRANK BAJAK , Associated Press; US intelligence agencies’ embrace of generative AI is at once wary and urgent
"The CIA’s inaugural chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani, thinks that because gen AI models “hallucinate” they are best treated as a “crazy, drunk friend” — capable of great insight and creativity but also bias-prone fibbers. There are also security and privacy issues: adversaries could steal and poison them, and they may contain sensitive personal data that officers aren’t authorized to see.
That’s not stopping the experimentation, though, which is mostly happening in secret.
An exception: Thousands of analysts across the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies now use a CIA-developed gen AI called Osiris. It runs on unclassified and publicly or commercially available data — what’s known as open-source. It writes annotated summaries and its chatbot function lets analysts go deeper with queries...
Another worry: Ensuring the privacy of “U.S. persons” whose data may be embedded in a large-language model.
“If you speak to any researcher or developer that is training a large-language model, and ask them if it is possible to basically kind of delete one individual piece of information from an LLM and make it forget that -- and have a robust empirical guarantee of that forgetting -- that is not a thing that is possible,” John Beieler, AI lead at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview.
It’s one reason the intelligence community is not in “move-fast-and-break-things” mode on gen AI adoption."
Katie Robertson , The New York Times; OpenAI Strikes a Deal to License News Corp Content
"News Corp, the Murdoch-owned empire of publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, announced on Wednesday that it had agreed to a deal with OpenAI to share its content to train and service artificial intelligence chatbots.
News Corp said the multiyear agreement would allow OpenAI to use current and archived news content from News Corp’s major news outlets, including brands in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia as well as MarketWatch and Barron’s. The agreement does not include content from News Corp’s other businesses, such as its digital real estate services or HarperCollins...
Many publishers have worried about the threat to their business posed by generative A.I., which uses copyrighted content to train its models and service its chatbots."
UT News, The University of Texas at Austin ; Machine ‘Unlearning’ Helps Generative AI ‘Forget’ Copyright-Protected and Violent Content
"When people learn things they should not know, getting them to forget that information can be tough. This is also true of rapidly growing artificial intelligence programs that are trained to think as we do, and it has become a problem as they run into challenges based on the use of copyright-protected material and privacy issues.
To respond to this challenge, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed what they believe is the first “machine unlearning” method applied to image-based generative AI. This method offers the ability to look under the hood and actively block and remove any violent images or copyrighted works without losing the rest of the information in the model.
“When you train these models on such massive data sets, you’re bound to include some data that is undesirable,” said Radu Marculescu, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the leaders on the project. “Previously, the only way to remove problematic content was to scrap everything, start anew, manually take out all that data and retrain the model. Our approach offers the opportunity to do this without having to retrain the model from scratch.”"
Baek Byung-yeul , The Korea Times; Korea to establish AI copyright system by year-end
"Among the eight key policy tasks, the government plans to reform by the end of this year the copyright system over content created by generative AI.
“The government will promptly revise the AI copyright system to bolster the development of the AI-based creative industry,” the ministry said."
Blake Brittain, Reuters; Stability AI, Midjourney should face artists' copyright case, judge says
"A California federal judge said he was inclined to green-light a copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and other companies accused of misusing visual artists' work to train their artificial intelligence-based image generation systems.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick said on Tuesday that the ten artists behind the lawsuit had plausibly argued that Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI copied and stored their work on company servers and could be liable for using it without permission...
Orrick also said that he was likely to dismiss some of the artists' related claims but allow their allegations that the companies violated their trademark rights and falsely implied that they endorsed the systems.
The case is Andersen v. Stability AI, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 3:23-cv-00201."
LexisNexis ; AI/IP Issues Part 2: What Current Litigation Can Tell Us About Where IP in AI Is Heading
"Recent litigation involving generative artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property highlights emerging issues that companies need to understand. This webcast explores the litigation trends around patent eligibility and novelty issues, copyright and the fair use defense, and trade secret misappropriation to understand how these cases can help in-house counsel develop internal policies to best protect the company’s intellectual property. Additionally, these current cases can help corporate counsel anticipate challenges and make informed decisions when adopting AI.
Attend to discover insights into the following trends:
João da Silva, BBC; Reddit shares jump after OpenAI ChatGPT deal
"Shares in Reddit have jumped more than 10% after the firm said it had struck a partnership deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up OpenAI.
Under the agreement, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot will get access to Reddit content, while it will also bring AI-powered features to the social media platform...
Meanwhile, Google announced a partnership in February which allows the technology giant to access Reddit data to train its AI models.
Both in the European Union and US, there are questions around whether it is copyright infringement to train AI tools on such content, or whether it falls under fair use and "temporary copying" exceptions."
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.)"
Roy Strom, Bloomberg Law; Reed Smith Names AI Chief, Plans for Faster Deals and IP Work
"Richard Robbins is about a week into his role as Reed Smith’s first director of applied artificial intelligence, but—in a sign of how quickly the area is developing—there’s already a lot on his plate.
The law firm is working on at least eight generative artificial intelligence projects, ranging from testing new products to developing AI-fueled workflows for entire practice areas. Robbins, who joined the firm from legal tech company Epiq, will help usher those projects from the test phase to broader rollouts.
“It has been everybody’s part-time work, but we knew that this is so serious,” David Cunningham, Reed Smith’s chief innovation officer, said in an interview. “Just like we have heads of our data insights, our product design team, and our lab, we really needed to have an equal if not greater focus on how we apply AI and data science to the firm."
Law firms have been trying to develop strategies for how to invest in AI and where to deploy it to make their work more efficient."
Blake Brittain, Reuters; Internet Archive must face record label copyright claims, judge rules
"A California federal court has denied the Internet Archive's bid to dismiss part of a copyright case brought by a group of major record labels including Universal Music Group and Sony Music over its program for digitizing and streaming vintage vinyl records."
News4; Troy professor copyrights creative writing style
"Business professor Dr. Rodger Morrison now has a copyright for a tokenization regarding artificial intelligence."
Danner Kline of Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP, The National Law Review; The Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024: Balancing Innovation and IP Rights
"As generative AI systems become increasingly sophisticated and widespread, concerns around the use of copyrighted works in their training data continue to intensify. The proposed Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act of 2024 attempts to address this unease by introducing new transparency requirements for AI developers.
The primary goal of the bill is to ensure that copyright owners have visibility into whether their intellectual property is being used to train generative AI models. If enacted, the law would require companies to submit notices to the U.S. Copyright Office detailing the copyrighted works used in their AI training datasets. These notices would need to be filed within 30 days before or after the public release of a generative AI system.
The Copyright Office would then maintain a public database of these notices, allowing creators to search and see if their works have been included. The hope is that this transparency will help copyright holders make more informed decisions about licensing their IP and seeking compensation where appropriate."
DEUTSCHE WELLE, Frontline; Intellectual property: Protecting traditional knowledge from Western plunder
"Stopping the loss of heritage and knowledge
Jim Milliot , Publishers Weekly; AI Challenges, Freedom to Read Top AAP Annual Meeting Discussions
"The search for methods of reining in technology companies’ unauthorized copying of copyrighted materials to build generative AI models was the primary theme of this year's annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers, held May 9 over Zoom...
“To protect society, we will need a forward-thinking scheme of legal rules and enforcement authority across numerous jurisdictions and disciplines—not only intellectual property, but also national security, trade, privacy, consumer protection, and human rights, to name a few,” Pallante said. “And we will need ethical conduct.”...
Newton-Rex began in the generative AI space in 2010, and now leads the Fairly Trained, which launched in January as a nonprofit that seeks to certify AI companies that don't train models on copyrighted work without creators’ consent (Pallante is an advisor for the company.) He founded the nonprofit after leaving a tech company, Stability, that declined to use a licensing model to get permission to use copyrighted materials in training. Stability, Newton-Rex said, “argues that you can train on whatever you want. And it's a fair use in the United States, and I think this is not only incorrect, but I think it's ethically unforgivable. And I think we have to fight it with everything we have.”
“The old rules of copyright are gone,” said Maria Ressa, cofounder of the online news company Rappler and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, in her keynote. “We are literally standing on the rubble of the world that was. If we don’t recognize it, we can’t rebuild it.”
Ressa added that, in a social media world drowning in misinformation and manipulation, “it is crucial that we get back to facts.” Messa advised publishers to “hold the line” in protecting their IP, and to continue to defend the importance of truth: “You cannot have rule of law if you do not have integrity of facts.”"
ROB BESCHIZZA , Boing Boing; Supreme Court rules for producer against music giant Warner in copyright case
"The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there is no time limit for recovering monetary damages in copyright cases filed before the statue of limitations. The case "turned on whether copyright damages are limited to the period of infringement that occurred during the statute of limitations or whether it could also include instances of infringement from before the statute of limitations period."
The 6-3 ruling, authored by liberal Justice Elena Kagan, affirmed a lower court's decision that favored producer Sherman Nealy, who sued a Warner subsidiary and others in Florida federal court in 2018."
KATE KNIBBS, Wired; How One Author Pushed the Limits of AI Copyright
"The novel draws from Shupe’s eventful life, including her advocacy for more inclusive gender recognition. Its registration provides a glimpse of how the USCO is grappling with artificial intelligence, especially as more people incorporate AI tools into creative work. It is among the first creative works to receive a copyright for the arrangement of AI-generated text.
“We’re seeing the Copyright Office struggling with where to draw the line,” intellectual property lawyer Erica Van Loon, a partner at Nixon Peabody, says. Shupe’s case highlights some of the nuances of that struggle—because the approval of her registration comes with a significant caveat.
The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This means no one can copy the book without permission, but the actual sentences and paragraphs themselves are not copyrighted and could theoretically be rearranged and republished as a different book.
The agency backdated the copyright registration to October 10, the day that Shupe originally attempted to register her work. It declined to comment on this story. “The Copyright Office does not comment on specific copyright registrations or pending applications for registration,” Nora Scheland, an agency spokesperson says. President Biden’s executive order on AI last fall asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to make recommendations on copyright and AI to the White House in consultation with the Copyright Office, including on the “scope of protection for works produced using AI.”
Annika Kim Constantino, CNBC; FTC Challenenges ‘junk’ patents held by 10 drugmakers, including for Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic
"Most top-selling medications are protected by dozens of patents covering various ingredients, manufacturing processes, and intellectual property. Generic drugmakers can only launch cheaper versions of a branded drug if the patents have expired or are successfully challenged in court.
“By filing bogus patent listings, pharma companies block competition and inflate the cost of prescription drugs, forcing Americans to pay sky-high prices for medicines they rely on,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a release. “By challenging junk patent filings, the FTC is fighting these illegal tactics and making sure that Americans can get timely access to innovative and affordable versions of the medicines they need.”
The FTC also notified the Food and Drug Administration about the challenges. The FDA manages patent listings for approved drugs on a document called the Orange Book.
The FTC first challenged dozens of branded drug patents last fall, leading three drugmakers to comply and delist their patents with the FDA. Five other companies did not.
The Tuesday announcement expands the Biden administration’s effort to crack down on alleged patent abuses by the pharmaceutical industry. The FTC has argued that drugmakers are needlessly listing dozens of extra patents for branded medications to keep their drug prices high and stall generic competitors from entering the U.S. market."
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."
Ashley Tucker, Library of Congress Blogs: Copyright Creativity at Work; World IP Day: How the Copyright System Builds Our Common Future
"The following is a guest blog post by Miriam Lord, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Public Information and Education.
Each year on April 26, the U.S. Copyright Office joins intellectual property organizations around the world in celebrating World Intellectual Property Day. This year’s theme, set by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), is “IP and the Sustainable Development Goals: Building Our Common Future with Innovation and Creativity.” Established by the United Nations, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) serve as a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future.”
The copyright system is a powerful mechanism for ensuring society’s wealth of culture and knowledge. The system also helps creators sustain themselves by granting them certain exclusive rights over their works. In the United States, this concept is so central that it is enshrined in our Constitution.
“Congress shall have Power . . . To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
-United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8"
ANIKA COLLIER NAVAROLI, Columbia Journalism Review; Op-Ed: AI’s Most Pressing Ethics Problem
"I believe that, now more than ever, it’s time for people to organize and demand that AI companies pause their advance toward deploying more powerful systems and work to fix the technology’s current failures. While it may seem like a far-fetched idea, in February, Google decided to suspend its AI chatbot after it was enveloped in a public scandal. And just last month, in the wake of reporting about a rise in scams using the cloned voices of loved ones to solicit ransom, OpenAI announced it would not be releasing its new AI voice generator, citing its “potential for synthetic voice misuse.”
But I believe that society can’t just rely on the promises of American tech companies that have a history of putting profits and power above people. That’s why I argue that Congress needs to create an agency to regulate the industry. In the realm of AI, this agency should address potential harms by prohibiting the use of synthetic data and by requiring companies to audit and clean the original training data being used by their systems.
AI is now an omnipresent part of our lives. If we pause to fix the mistakes of the past and create new ethical guidelines and guardrails, it doesn’t have to become an existential threat to our future."
Andrea Hsu , NPR; U.S. bans noncompete agreements for nearly all jobs
"The Federal Trade Commission narrowly voted Tuesday to ban nearly all noncompetes, employment agreements that typically prevent workers from joining competing businesses or launching ones of their own...
"For more than a year, the group has vigorously opposed the ban, saying that noncompetes are vital to companies, by allowing them to better guard trade secrets, and employees, by giving employers greater incentive to invest in workforce training and development."
Blake Brittain , Reuters; LeBron James tattoo artist loses trial against 'NBA 2K' maker Take-Two
"Take-Two Interactive's 2K Games, the maker of the popular 'NBA 2K' basketball video-game series, convinced an Ohio federal jury on Friday to reject allegations that its use of LeBron James' tattoos in its games violated the rights of the Cleveland-based artist who inked them.
The jury determined that Take-Two had an implied license to depict the tattoos based on its agreement to use James' likeness in the games and found that tattoo artist Jimmy Hayden's copyrights had not been infringed."
Lynn White, The Federalist Society; Congress Explores AI and Copyright Law
"Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) has surged in the 118th Congress. There have been several hearings on a range of topics related to AI, including how federal agencies are using it and general principles for regulating its use. The House Committee on Judiciary, Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, has held a series of hearings related to AI and Intellectual Property...
Members of the committee seemed interested in the content of the hearing and expressed appreciation for the bi-partisan approach used to explore the issue of AI and intellectual property. Chairman Issa noted that this hearing was just the first of many. He further stated that he believes that Congress will find some middle ground that respects existing copyright law but allows generative AI to continue to grow. Over the next few blog posts, we will summarize this series of hearings and highlight the issues the witnesses and members of Congress discussed."
Lee Cowan , CBS News, Sunday Morning; Public domain, where there is life after copyright
"Jenkins said, "The public domain doesn't represent the death of copyright. It's just the second part of copyright's life cycle."
The concept of putting an expiration date on intellectual property was something the founding fathers actually put in the U.S. Constitution, "...to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." They left it to Congress, however, to decide just how long copyright terms should last...
Duke University's Jennifer Jenkins said, "Copyright gives rights to creators and their descendants that provide incentives to create. But the public domain really is the soil for future creativity."
There are surely more copyright clashes ahead. Characters like Bugs Bunny, Superman and Batman will all find themselves out of copyright protection soon enough.
Even Luke Skywalker will eventually find himself in the public domain, too, sometime around 2073. That sure seems like a galaxy far, far way."
Nick Robins-Early, The Guardian ; New bill would force AI companies to reveal use of copyrighted art
"A bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force artificial intelligence companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software–and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content.
The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users’ prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies."
Kate Knibbs, Wired ; OpenAI’s GPT Store Is Triggering Copyright Complaints
"It is easy to find bots in the GPT Store whose descriptions suggest they might be tapping copyrighted content in some way, as Techcrunch noted in a recent article claiming OpenAI’s store was overrun with “spam.” Using copyrighted material without permission is permissable in some contexts but in others rightsholders can take legal action."
Dolores Tropiano, Arizona State University (ASU) News; Where AI and property law intersect
"Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool that has the potential to be used to revolutionize education, creativity, everyday life and more.
But as society begins to harness this technology and its many uses — especially in the field of generative AI — there are growing ethical and copyright concerns for both the creative industry and legal sector.
Tyson Winarski is a professor of practice with the Intellectual Property Law program in Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. He teaches an AI and intellectual property module within the course Artificial Intelligence: Law, Ethics and Policy, taught by ASU Law Professor Gary Marchant.
“The course is extremely important for attorneys and law students,” Winarski said. “Generative AI is presenting huge issues in the area of intellectual property rights and copyrights, and we do not have definitive answers as Congress and the courts have not spoken on the issue yet.”"
Sean Doolittle ’24, Boston College Law School Magazine Online; Swift’s Latest Hit: Copyright Law
"Greenstein described the impact that Swift’s gambit has had on the music industry: “Labels invest in artists, they hire producers, they pay for recording time, and they want to recover that investment. Recording agreements often prohibited musical artists from going out and re-recording a song for a period of five to seven years from the original release date of the record, or two years from the expiration of the contract. Now, thanks to Taylor Swift, they’re pushing that up to ten, fifteen, maybe even thirty years,” he warned. Once bitten, twice shy, as they say.
Swift has, in other words, slammed the door in the face of new artists hoping to come up through the recording industry, making it that much harder for future musicians to negotiate for ownership of their music. Now, up-and-coming musicians will be largely stripped of the ability to re-record their music and acquire the phonogram copyrights in a song for decades—well past their prime popularity, in all likelihood—instead of the traditional five- to seven-year period. Popular established musicians, on the other hand, stand to benefit, reinforcing the exclusive nature of the music industry."
Brett Milano, Harvard Law School ; Taylor’s Version of copyright
"When Taylor Swift began re-recording her old albums and releasing the new, improved “Taylor’s Version,” she did more than delight a nation of Swifties. She also opened significant questions about the role of intellectual property in contract law, and possibly tipped the balance toward artists.
According to Gary R. Greenstein, a technology transactions partner at Wilson Sonsini, the Swift affair is one of many that makes these times especially interesting for copyright law. Greenstein’s current practice focuses on intellectual property, licensing, and commercial transactions, with specialized expertise in the digital exploitation of intellectual property. He appeared at Harvard Law School on March 28 for a lunchtime talk, which was presented and introduced by Chris Bavitz, the WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law and managing director of the law school’s Cyberlaw Clinic. “I have been doing this for 28 years now and there is never a dull moment,” Greenstein said.
Greenstein placed the Swift story in the larger context of music copyrights. In music, he explained, there are always two copyrights. The first is for the musical work itself, and this is usually controlled by the composer/songwriter, or by a publishing company acting on their behalf. The second is the “master,” the recorded performance of the work, and this is usually controlled by the label."
Christopher Kuo , The New York Times; George Carlin’s Estate Reaches Settlement After A.I. Podcast
"The estate of the comedian George Carlin reached a settlement on Monday with the makers of a podcast who had said they had used artificial intelligence to impersonate Mr. Carlin for a comedy special...
Mr. Carlin’s estate filed the suit in January, saying that Mr. Sasso and Mr. Kultgen, hosts of the podcast “Dudesy,” had infringed on the estate’s copyrights by training an A.I. algorithm on five decades of Mr. Carlin’s work for the special “George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead,” which was posted on YouTube. The lawsuit also said they had illegally used Mr. Carlin’s name and likeness."
