Copyright

The dispute between Apple and Optis Wireless Technology is headed for its third trial after an appeals court threw out a 2021 jury verdict due to faulty jury instructions, Reuters reports. The case is based on Optis’ accusation that Apple infringed on its patents for LTE standard-essential technology. The damages award has already been retried once after a judge said the jury that awarded $506 million to Optis hadn’t considered the reasonableness of the amount.

Astute AI copyright observer Michael Weinberg raises some good questions about the Common Pile, an AI training dataset billed as being composed of only “openly licensed text”:

Shira Perlmutter, who may or may not be the head of the Copyright Office depending on how deranged the Supreme Court’s interpretation of executive power becomes, has now sued the Trump administration, including Perlmutter’s supposed replacement Paul Perkins “in his capacity as the person claiming to be the Register of Copyrights.”

But the folks behind the mid-2000s anti-piracy campaign that once compared pirating software to stealing a car might have, reports Torrent Freak. A social media investigation suggests the campaign used a knockoff of a commercial font. Its creator, Just Van Rossum, told the outlet:

Former Gizmodo EIC Dan Ackerman’s lawsuit alleging that Apple, the Tetris company, screenwriter Noah Pink and others ripped off his 2016 book, The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World, for their 2023 Apple TV Plus movie has been dismissed. Reuters reports Ackerman’s lawyer said he will appeal the decision.

The Wall Street Journal reports that The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, and other publishers like Conde Nast, Forbes Media, and Politico filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit (pdf) against the enterprise AI company Cohere. They say evidence shows Cohere uses unlicensed copies of content to directly compete with publishers, and they list 4,000 specific examples of “verbatim regurgitations and substitutional summaries of news content.”

Kate Knibbs of Wired recaps a hearing today for The New York Times’ very expensive lawsuit against OpenAI. The takeaway: everyone seems confused. Expect a decision on whether to dismiss the case “in due course.”

Microsoft is still asking a judge in its AI copyright tussle to produce discovery on how New York Times reporters use chatbots, and it introduced an interesting 2023 Slack chat in a memorandum: apparently the Times product team told developers to avoid using other LLMs because it was rolling out its own. It’s not clear if this would become one of the tools the company has since announced.

A design has been removed from Teepublic because of a copyright complaint from UnitedHealth, Gizmodo reports. The design is a drawing of Luigi Mangione in a heart, and doesn’t involve any UnitedHealth logos.

The attorneys for WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg make that very clear in a legal response to WP Engine’s lawsuit. The response also blames WP Engine for relying on WordPress.org, “a website owned and run by Defendant Matt Mullenweg individually:”

At Wired, Kate Knibbs visits the Internet Archive’s San Francisco headquarters and speaks with its founder, Brewster Kahle, about the Archive’s past, present, and its uncertain future, as it faces copyright lawsuits from print and music publishers.

Colorado tech law professor Blake Reid has a good Bluesky thread (note: requires login) on the complicated gamesmanship behind AI content deals and copyright law. His conclusion:

The internet service provider filed a petition with the highest court in its case with Sony Music and other labels, framing it as a fight for internet access. A jury sided with the labels in 2019, finding Cox liable for piracy infringement for failing to remove bad actors from its services, but an appeals court denied the $1 billion damages award.

Responding to the RIAA’s copyright lawsuit, AI songmaker sites defended their models as being like kids learning rock and roll or tools enabling creativity. Country artist Tift Merritt had a different take after being shown a song AI music generator Udio spat out when prompted to mimic her style: