Copyright

I wrote about Google’s essential hypocrisy when it comes to the value of AI training data this week, and now Kieran McCarthy has a good blog post outlining how incoherent and inconsistent the law around web scraping really is — in large part because the same big tech companies that scrape the entire web are quick to file lawsuits when you attempt to scrape their sites.

Programmer and writer Alex Reisner’s expansive piece for The Atlantic documents his deep dive into the dataset, identifying all but 20,000 of the 190,000 books it contains, as well as its history and controversy surrounding it.

The team behind the popular copyright framework has taken a stab at answering that question, and the short answer is “it’s complicated and depends on how courts interpret the scope of copyright protections and fair use.” Perhaps most importantly, they emphasize that copyright simply isn’t the only concern involved:

The deal follows an early defeat for the Archive in a copyright lawsuit with publishers this spring, and a judge will need to settle a dispute over its exact scope. But it’s a potential short-term resolution while the Internet Archive pursues an appeal. As the Archive explains:

There are lots of reasons platforms remove features, so I can’t confirm writer Karawynn Long’s conclusions about why lending service OverDrive nixed one of her favorite buttons. But it’s a good exploration of why the private equity-owned OverDrive’s concentrated power in the library ebook space feels so risky, especially as publishers are trying to definitively ban library-run alternatives:

Nine months after taking over the company that was once known as Twitter, Elon Musk has sued and been sued a lot. Add AFP to the long list of plaintiffs. The French press agency has filed a copyright lawsuit accusing X of ignoring its obligations stemming from the national copyright law.

Apple sued Nokia in 2009 for attempting to copy the iPhone as Nokia sued Apple for copyright violations. They settled in 2011. Then in 2016, they filed competing lawsuits again before reaching a deal that brought Withings products back to the Apple Store and included an up-front payment to Nokia of $2 billion.

The singer-songwriter defeated a lawsuit alleging “striking similarities” between his song “Thinking Out Loud” and Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” It’s certainly a better outcome than the disastrous “Blurred Lines” verdict, and we wish Sheeran all the best with his continued creative career.

Veterancheats, the Romania-based cheat selling organization, was initially sued by Bungie back in 2021, Veterancheats never responded to the suit, which is what led to this week’s default judgement against it. As TorrentFreak noted in this great piece, its part of a growing class of lawsuits where game makers claim cheats are a violation of the DMCA.

James Vincent laid out the state of the law against the tech last year — it feels like things have escalated significantly since then, but this is an excellent weekend read if you’re looking for a primer on what’s to come. And lol at anyone banking on a consistent or coherent determination of fair use in the courts.

There’s more lawyers and litigation in the music industry than ever before (because it’s so much harder to make money) but the release of De La Soul’s catalog to streaming services came with a bunch of compromises because the samples weren’t cleared. That’s a tragedy, argues Dan Charnas in Slate:

For 2023 Fair Use Week, University of Virginia professor Kevin Driscoll offers a thoughtful essay about how his students engage with an iconic piece of computing history: the screen saver collection After Dark.

In a dispute with two songwriters, Swift argued she’d never heard the song “Playas Gon’ Play” by 3LW, cited in 2015 by a judge dismissing another claim against “Shake It Off” over the same lyrics.