Posts Tagged: "copyright infringement"

The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and copyright law pits an irresistible force against an evolving and uncertain legal framework. The latest case making waves in this struggle is Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, in which Concord Music Group and other publishers alleged copyright infringement by the AI company Anthropic. One of the major issues in the case revolves around whether Anthropic’s AI models, specifically its large language models (LLMs), are generating infringing content because the results were derived from copyrighted works.

Yesterday, Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting by designation in the District of Delaware, issued a ruling updating a previous summary judgment decision dismissing copyright infringement allegations made by Westlaw legal research service provider Thomson Reuters against a competing artificial intelligence (AI) search tool developed by Ross Intelligence. Among the top reconsiderations in Judge Bibas’ recent decision is his fair use analysis, which now recognizes the non-transformative nature of Ross’ use of copyrighted headnotes that summarize legal decisions.

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, November 7, dismissed a copyright infringement complaint filed by Raw Story Media and Alternet Media against OpenAI, holding that the news outlets lacked Article III standing to bring their claims. However, the court left open the possibility for the sites to file an amended complaint.

On October 21, Los Angeles-based film production company Alcon Entertainment filed a lawsuit in the Central District of California alleging copyright infringement and false endorsement against automaker Tesla, its CEO Elon Musk and media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery. The suit claims that these parties are responsible for the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) generated image of Tesla’s Cybercab using iconic imagery from Alcon’s 2017 theatrical release Blade Runner 2049. Alcon alleges that the image was displayed during a presentation given by Musk at a Cybercab launch event recently staged at Warner Bros. Burbank studios despite Alcon’s refusal to license film photography for Tesla’s event.

Cox Communications is the latest to file a brief in the battle between it and Sony Music Entertainment over whether an internet service provider (ISP) should be liable for infringement by its subscribers. According to Cox’s brief in opposition to Sony’s petition for certiorari, “[p]etitioners want to make a terrible situation even worse.” Music publishers including Sony, Arista Records, Warner Music and Universal Music Group filed copyright claims against Cox in July 2018, alleging that Cox was liable for the infringement of 10,017 musical works that were illegally distributed by the ISP’s subscribers. A 2020 jury verdict found that Cox liable for both vicarious and contributory infringement, leading to a $1 billion damages verdict against Cox after damages were increased for the jury’s willfulness finding.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on Tuesday, October 15, ruled that a district court applied the wrong test for assessing personal jurisdiction in a case involving alleged counterfeit dolls being sold on Amazon. The U.S. District Court for the District of Utah denied a motion for default judgment filed by Utah-based Bountiful Baby, a maker of kits for creating “reborn dolls,” against two Chinese companies— Adolly US (AUS) and Reborn Doll Gallery (RDG)—that it claimed were selling counterfeit versions of the dolls on Amazon.com.

In a landmark judgment with far reaching ramifications, a German court recently held that the copying of images by Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) – a nonprofit organization that provides datasets, tools and models to liberate machine learning research – did not infringe copyright law. The Kneschke v. LAION case, heard by the Hamburg Regional Court, centered on LAION’s automatic downloading of images, including a copyrighted work by photographer Robert Kneschke, for AI training purposes. In 2021, LAION, based in Hamburg, automatically downloaded images from the internet, including Kneschke’s photo from Bigstock, to create a dataset (LAION 5B) containing image-text pairs for training AI. Kneschke claimed LAION infringed his copyright by copying his image without permission to create a dataset that linked images with descriptive text. LAION had downloaded the photo from a licensed website to check if it matched the description using its software.

In the latest of a slew of lawsuits by musicians against the Presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, the White Stripes band members on Monday filed a complaint with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging “flagrant misappropriation” of their popular song, Seven Nation Army. Last month, White Stripes lead singer and guitarist Jack White threatened to sue the campaign over a video posted to at least Instagram and X by a staff member showing Trump boarding a plane for Michigan and Wisconsin campaign events. “Oh….Don’t even think about using my music you fascists,” said White’s post. “Law suit coming from my lawyers about this (to add to your 5 thousand others.)”

On August 29, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina issued an order addressing several motions in Allen v. Cooper, a case that mirrors the back-and-forth nature of an epic maritime battle—this time, between a government and an individual. The case began with an alleged copyright infringement, but has blossomed into a larger suit, alleging multiple constitutional violations.

According to media reports, Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled from the bench Tuesday that the estate of Isaac Hayes is entitled to a preliminary injunction to stop the Donald J. Trump campaign from using Hayes’ song, “Hold On, I’m Coming” during campaign events. The family of singer-songwriter Hayes, who died in 2008, and Isaac Hayes Enterprises, became the latest in a growing list of artists who have threatened to sue Trump when it published a letter last month claiming unauthorized use of the song at Trump’s rallies.

Journalists and book authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson have filed suit against generative artificial intelligence (AI) company, Anthropic, on behalf of a class of plaintiffs in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California – San Francisco Division, alleging widespread copyright infringement of “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” Anthropic’s core product is the AI ChatBot, Claude, which the complaint claims was fed “known pirated versions of Plaintiffs’ works” in order to train the Chatbot to generate human-like responses. “An essential component of Anthropic’s business model—and its flagship ‘Claude’ family of large language models (or “LLMs”)—is the largescale theft of copyrighted works,” said the complaint.

On Thursday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit published an opinion in Compulife Software, Inc., v. Newman, a copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation case that has been winding through the courts for some time. The original claim alleged that the defendants, consisting of multiple individuals, obtained access through improper means to the data used by Compulife in its software. The software in question allowed users the ability to calculate an individualized quote for life insurance policies using publicly and privately obtained data from different providers. Through various means, including a supervised scraping attack of Compulife’s website, the complaint alleged the defendants gained access to millions of quotes generated by its software and implemented the quotes into their own websites, decreasing Compulife’s sales.

The U.S. Supreme Court today issued its decision in Warner Chappell Music v. Nealy, a case that asks whether a copyright plaintiff can recover damages for acts that allegedly occurred more than three years before the filing of a lawsuit. The Justices ruled 6-3 that “the Copyright Act entitles a copyright owner to recover damages for any timely claim,” with no limit preventing recovery for infringement that happened beyond three years. As to the issue of when a claim for infringement “accrues,” the Court said it “assumes without deciding” that accrual occurs upon discovery of the infringement.

Picture this: You own a women’s swimwear business. You engage your customers by curating eye-popping images on social media that exude athleticism and style. While browsing online, you find a photo posted by someone else of a woman in one of your pink swimsuits diving into a pool. You instantly know that this woman is exactly who your customers want to be! You share it on your profile with the caption, “Making waves wherever I go” and link to your swimsuit for purchase. Within hours the post racks up 50,000 likes and 2,000 swimsuit orders. But the excitement quickly wears off when you receive an email from a law firm representing the photographer, claiming you infringed her copyright.

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled on Friday that Shosh Yonay and Yuval Yonay, the widow and son of Ehud Yonay, who authored a 1983 magazine article that inspired the renowned film, Top Gun, were not entitled to damages for copyright infringement related to the 2022 sequel to the film. Yonay authored a magazine article titled “Top Guns,” published in California Magazine on April 21, 1983, that was an account of the experiences of F-14 pilots in training at Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, known as “Top Gun.”