Posts Tagged: "copyright infringement"

Much of the focus on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been on training data ingestion—the moment when AI “steals” from creators. But legally, that’s not where the real fight should be. Decades of legal precedent—from search engines to image?scanning to streaming media—already give us a roadmap. No new formulation of copyright law by Congress, as suggested by some academics, is necessary. By considering these seven unique aspects of GenAI systems, copyright analysis is actually easy.

On December 5, The New York Times Company (the Times) filed a complaint for copyright and trademark infringement against Perplexity AI, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, adding another major lawsuit to the growing wave of litigation against generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies. The Times alleged in its filing that Perplexity engaged in “large-scale, unlawful copying and distribution” of millions of its articles to build its AI-powered “answer engine.” The complaint argued that Perplexity’s products directly substitute for the newspaper’s own content, thereby undermining its business and devaluing its journalism. Perplexity’s conduct “threatens this legacy and impedes the free press’s ability to continue playing its role in supporting an informed citizenry and a healthy democracy,” the Times argued.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari in Halicki v. Carroll Shelby Licensing, a case in which Denice Shakarian Halicki, widow of the creator of the “Gone in 60 Seconds” film franchise sought review of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision that held the car character “Eleanor,” a customized Ford Mustang, was not entitled to copyright protection.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday granted a motion from the U.S. Solicitor General to participate in oral argument as an amicus in the copyright case between Cox Communications and Sony Music Entertainment. The order allows the government to weigh in during the December 1 hearing on whether an internet service provider (ISP) can be held contributorily liable for copyright infringement committed by its users.

A New York judge ruled on Monday that OpenAI cannot stop a consolidated, multi-district class action brought against by dozens of authors for direct copyright infringement by the outputs of its large language model (LLM), ChatGPT. OpenAI argued that the plaintiffs had failed to allege substantial similarity between the works and ChatGPT’s outputs, but Judge Sidney Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said  that “[a] more discerning observer could reasonably conclude that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”

Taking their cue from the recent Bartz v. Anthropic saga, the authors of a neuroscience book and professors at the State University of New York filed a class action complaint on October 9 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple Inc. committed mass copyright infringement by using pirated books to train its artificial intelligence systems. Plaintiffs Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik claimed that Apple built its Apple Intelligence platform, including its OpenELM and Foundation Models, by making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works without permission or compensation.

Disney Enterprises and 11 other plaintiffs filed a complaint last week against Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) image and video generator MiniMax in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The complaint alleged direct and secondary copyright infringement by operating a commercial AI service that “pirates and plunders Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on a massive scale. MiniMax markets Hailuo AI as a ‘Hollywood studio in your pocket.’”

According to a Consent Motion filed Tuesday, August 26, with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Anthropic has requested that its petition appealing a district court ruling on class certification and its Emergency Motion to stay district court proceedings pending disposition of that petition both be held in abeyance. The request is based on the execution by both Anthropic and plaintiffs, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, of “a binding term sheet intended to memorialize the terms of a proposed class settlement.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Friday, August 15, that internet service providers (ISPs) who merely serve as a conduit for service are protected from the requirements of Section 512(h) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) under one of that section’s four safe harbors.Capstone Studios Corp. sought to subpoena Cox Communications, Inc./ CoxCom LLC to obtain the identities of 29 users it claimed to be showing pirated copies of its movie, Fall via BitTorrent. One of the users objected and the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii held that “Cox qualified for one of § 512’s four safe harbors—17 U.S.C. § 512(a)—because Cox merely provided its users with an Internet connection and played no other role in the alleged infringement.”

When the framers made provision for copyright law in the U.S. Constitution, they probably didn’t envision a system that favors the wealthy. Yet today, that’s what we’ve got. High litigation costs and slow-moving courts have turned copyright enforcement into a luxury good. Unless you’re sitting on a pile of cash, your rights are often fool’s gold.

On Monday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a mixed  order on fair use as it relates to generative AI, in part likening the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the process of human learning, in a case brought against generative AI tool Anthropic by a group of authors. The lawsuit was filed by journalists and book authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August 2024 against Anthropic on behalf of a class of plaintiffs, alleging widespread copyright infringement of “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” The suit challenged only the inputs of the LLMs, not the outputs.

Disney Enterprises, Inc. et. al. and Universal City Studios Productions LLLP, et. al. filed a complaint today with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against the AI image generator, Midjourney. The suit accuses Midjourney of being a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” According to the plaintiffs, Midjourney could have stopped the infringement and copying of their copyrighted works at any time—either by controlling the data used to train, by controlling the prompts users input, or via technological protection measures—but chose not to and failed to respond to letters informing them of the infringement prior to the lawsuit.

Late last week—one day after the Trump Administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and the day before it reportedly fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter—the U.S. Copyright Office released a pre-publication edition of the third part in the agency’s series of reports exploring issues in copyright law in light of evolving artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

AI is increasingly becoming integral to the inventive and creative process across a wide range of industries. As Generative AI (“GenAI”) tools transform our workflows, questions at the intersection of AI and copyright are requiring a reexamination of our IP system. One set of questions is whether creative works created using AI technologies in whole or in-part are eligible for copyright protection, and if so, under what conditions. Another set of questions relates to the potential copyright infringement of GenAI due to: (1) the use of potentially copyrighted material for the training of AI models and (2) the potential infringement by the output of GenAI models on copyrighted works.