Copyrights

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.

The Second Circuit’s decision may have significant downstream implications for other digital lending services, making it more difficult to operate absent licensing agreements with copyright holders of the various works they seek to distribute. With Internet Archive deciding against petitioning the Supreme Court, we may well see similar litigation pop up in other jurisdictions outside the Second Circuit until the issue is more widely settled.

More than 1,000 artists are credited on a “silent” record released on February 25 in protest over changes that the UK government is considering to its copyright law, changes which critics say will make it easier for AI models to use copyrighted material without securing a license.

Federal Circuit: PTAB Jurisdiction Exists Over Expired PatentsFederal Circuit: No Estoppel on Unadjudicated Claims

Music publishers have reached a partial agreement with Anthropic that requires the Amazon-backed artificial intelligence company to implement “guardrails” around its use of copyrighted song lyrics to train its flagship product, Claude.