How are copyright holders to prove their works were used to train AI models if the details about the vast data sets used for such training are kept secret? That dilemma surfaced when a California federal judge recently dismissed a claim of direct infringement raised by a group of authors.
In late July, two important decisions came down from courts in the Northern District of California regarding the unauthorized use of copyrighted material for the training of large language models. No real consensus has emerged as to the effect they will have on the broader AI litigation landscape.
The Nashville federal court where the lawsuit was filed summarized the litigation as “concern[ing] the rights to a prolific composer’s music, a dizzying estate plan, and two descendants at odds over how to manage the royalties those compositions earn.”
While the EU AI Act certainly deserves compliments for both its pioneering nature and numerous thoughtful provisions aimed at the efficient and effective regulation of modern AI, it is not without its drawbacks.
Denmark aims to make EU history by using copyright law — not privacy rules — to crack down on deepfakes and protect personal likenesses, diverging from the approaches adopted in the U.S. and other nations.
A federal judge handed Meta a major win on June 24 in a closely watched copyright case over its use of books to train large language models, but the ruling stopped well short of giving tech companies blanket protection to scrape creative works for artificial intelligence.
A federal judge handed Meta a major win in a closely watched copyright case over the use of books to train large language models (LLMs). But the ruling stopped well short of giving tech companies blanket protection to scrape creative works for artificial intelligence.
In copyright litigation, an infringement defendant may claim fair use as an affirmative defense. But the Second Circuit recently ruled that a district court, on its own initiative, could raise a fair use defense for a defendant that hadn’t appeared in the case.
Last month, a flood of whimsical, dreamlike portraits in the style of Studio Ghibli (the Japanese animation studio) swept across social media. What began as a playful social trend quickly raised legal concerns. Within days, users began reporting that OpenAI had restricted prompts referencing specific artistic styles. This trend offers a live case study of how generative AI may implicate core doctrines of copyright law, including derivative works, substantial similarity, and fair use.
A recent AI copyright ruling out of federal court could have a sprawling impact on how companies, both big and small, use the technology responsibly.
