Copyright

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:

Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) updated their discussion draft that seeks to prevent debacles like that between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI. It’s gained the support of SAG-AFTRA and the Recording Industry Association, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which counts tech companies among its donors, previously raised concerns that the draft bill was overly broad.

Open source developers dismissed OpenAI from their 2022 lawsuit alleging that it violated copyright law by reproducing their code without attribution.

As Drake attempts to flip taunts by Kendrick Lamar, Rick Ross, and Metro Boomin on Sexyy Red’s “U My Everything,” the beat transitions into a sample of the AI-generated song “BBL Drizzy.”

The New York Times reports on the campaign pushing the US International Trade Commission “to put the public interest of a product ahead of a ban.”

The authors, Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Steward O’Nan, allege that Nvidia trained natural language aspects of its NeMo platform on a massive training dataset containing their work, according to Reuters. Their class-action suit, if certified, would cover anyone in the US with work involved in NeMo’s training.

In a lawsuit filed in a Virginia federal court, Apple pushed back on the US Patent and Trademark Office’s decision to reject its trademarks for its Vision Pro developer tools, “Reality Composer” and “Reality Converter.”

The Guardian reports that Squishmallows parent company Jazwares is suing Build-A-Bear over its new line of rotund, kawaii animals, Skoosherz, accusing it of copying their toys’ “simplified Asian-style kawaii faces.”

In light of Spec Ops: The Line getting yanked from online storefronts over music licensing issues, it’s a good time to re-read a 2019 piece from GamesIndustry.biz on why this problem seems so common. Bottom line: games spent a long time being considered more ephemeral than other media like movies, and faced with the convoluted structure of music copyright, many studios negotiated deals to match.

The Scholarly Press Backlist Revival will put out-of-print academic monographs online for free under deals with publishers like MIT Press, hoping to fix a “black hole in the cultural and scholarly record.” If it works out, it seems like a great option for a swathe of copyrighted works that aren’t seen as profitable to sell — but shouldn’t be locked away because of it.

But forget the thinkpieces about weapons of mass destruction — it’s that Kai Bird, coauthor of J. Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus, is part of a fresh group of authors joining one of the numerous copyright lawsuits against generative AI companies.

TechDirt published a helpful reminder yesterday that the 1928 “Steamboat Willie” iteration of the Disney character will become the people’s mouse on January 1st, 2024. The article also points to a Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain guide for using the early design.

Sure, it’s not as eye-catching as Musk telling Disney to go fuck itself. But Musk and The New York Times’ Sorkin had a painfully ill-informed conversation about intellectual property and AI, starting with the factually wrong statement that AI companies claim they’re not training on copyrighted works. It’s been driving me up a wall, so kudos to Mike Masnick for laying out how silly it all was.