copyright
Copyright Office tells Congress: ‘Urgent need’ to outlaw AI-powered impersonation
The U.S. Copyright Office has issued the first part of a report on how AI may affect its domain, and its first recommendation out of the gate is: we need…
On July 4, YouTube released an updated eraser tool for creators so they can easily remove any copyrighted music from their videos without affecting any other audio such as dialog…
Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…
The intersection of AI and copyright-protected material is a fraught place. There you can find lawsuits, deals, acrimony, and even various flavors of the personal-political…
A group of 200 musicians signed an open letter calling on tech companies and developers to not undermine human creativity with AI music generation tools. The list of undersigned artists…
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…
It’s a wonder what generative AI, particularly text-to-image AI models like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, can do. From photorealism to cubism, image-generating models can translate practically any description, short…
In late December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its close collaborator and investor, Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on the Times’ content.…
Microsoft is expanding its policy to protect commercial customers from copyright infringement lawsuits arising from the use of generative AI — but with a caveat (or several). Today during Ignite,…
OpenAI — bowing to peer pressure — today announced it’ll step in and defend businesses using OpenAI products if they face claims around copyright infringement as it pertains to OpenAI…
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Some gen AI vendors say they’ll defend customers from IP lawsuits. Others, not so much.
A person using generative AI — models that generate text, images, music and more given a prompt — could infringe on someone else’s copyright through no fault of their own. But who’s on the hook for the legal fees and damages if — or rather, when — that happens? It…
Generative AI has brought a host of copyright issues to the fore. Just this week, authors including George R.R. Martin, led by the Authors Guild, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI,…
If you ask GPT-4 to do a passage in the style of Carmen Machado or Margaret Atwood or Alexander Chee, it will do a fair job at it, and for…
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The current legal cases against generative AI are just the beginning
As generative AI enters the mainstream, each new day brings a new lawsuit. Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are currently being sued in a class action motion that accuses them of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot, a code-generating AI system trained on billions of lines of public code, to regurgitate…
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It’s paintbrushes at dawn as artists feel the pressure of AI-generated art
If you’ve been anywhere close to the interwebs recently, you’ll have heard of DALL-E and Midjourney. The types of art the neural networks can generate — and with a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the tech — means that we are facing a whole new world of…
How should AI be considered in the context of copyright protection and authorship under U.K. law as it presently stands?
This week, OpenAI granted users of its image-generating AI system, DALL-E 2, the right to use their generations for commercial projects, like illustrations for children’s books and art for newsletters.…
We are at the very beginnings of a long period of change in the interplay of technology and the law in terms of intellectual property, but it is equally clear…
Google is appealing the more than half a billion-dollar fine it got slapped with by France’s competition authority in July. The penalty relates to the adtech giant’s approach toward paying…
GitHub has restored the code of a project that the RIAA demanded it take down last month after finding that the group’s DMCA complaint was meritless. YouTube-dl, a tool that…
The European Parliament has voted to pass a controversial reform of online copyright rules that critics contend will result in big tech platforms pre-filtering user generated content uploads. The results…
Spotify has settled the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by music publisher Wixen Music Publishing in December 2017. The publisher, which represented artists like Tom Petty, Missy Elliot, Stevie Nicks and Neil Young,…
Back in May, as part of a settlement, Spotify agreed to pay more than $112 million to clean up some copyright problems. Even for a service with millions of users, that had…
You think you own your phone, but you don’t. Copyright law prohibits you from modifying its software in certain ways, opening you up to a voided warranty, cancelled service, or…
The European Parliament has just voted to back controversial proposals to reform online copyright — including supporting an extension to cover snippets of publishers content (Article 11), and to make…
The Wikimedia Foundation has sounded a stark warning against a copyright reform proposal in Europe that’s due to be voted on by the European Parliament next week. (With the mild…
According to recent reports, Facebook has updated its Commerce Policy to specifically ban the sale of Kodi boxes on its site – that is, devices that come with pre-installed Kodi software,…
Re-uploading videos on YouTube is a favorite of scammy channels that try to profit from other people’s work. Copyright owners already have a number of ways to protect their content, but…
A 318-278 majority of MEPs in the European Parliament has just voted to reopen debate around a controversial digital copyright reform proposal — meaning it will now face further debate…
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Advocacy groups knock ‘unjust’ copyright-extending CLASSICS Act
Copyright is a mess, but more of a mess in some ways than others, and one of the biggest messes right now is licensing music for digital broadcast. The Music Modernization Act aims to smooth over some of the biggest bumps, but a companion piece has aroused the ire of…
