Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Category Archives: Copyright

Plagiarism doesn’t need AI to thrive online

Vox – A YouTuber’s deep dive on plagiarism tries to make viewers care when creators steal content: “Copying has always been a part of internet culture. Sometimes it’s ethical, sometimes not. It’s almost always incentivized: Once social media began reshaping online life, copying became a go-to tactic for getting views. When copying crosses an ethical… Continue Reading

Over One Million Card Catalog Records Digitized in Copyright Public Records System Pilot

Library of Congress Blogs – Copyright: “This summer, the Copyright Office reached a new milestone in our modernization efforts: surpassing one million card catalog records digitized with searchable metadata and added to the Office’s Copyright Public Records System (CPRS) pilot. As the number of card catalog entries in CPRS continues to grow, now is a… Continue Reading

AI and Law: The Next Generation

Lee, Katherine and Cooper, A. Feder and Grimmelmann, James and Grimmelmann, James and Daphne Ippolito, Daphne Ippolito, AI and Law: The Next Generation (July 6, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4580739 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4580739  – “We are in a moment of seemingly nonstop excitement (and seemingly nonstop lawsuits) about the future of AI-assisted content creation, and the… Continue Reading

AI Legal Protections May Not Save You From Getting Sued

Bloomberg – Microsoft, Adobe and OpenAI are all pledging to defend their customers against intellectual property lawsuits, but that guarantee doesn’t apply to everyone. “AI companies are pledging to defend their customers against intellectual property lawsuits. Those indemnities are narrower than the announcements suggest. But first: The fine print Last Monday, twelve minutes into his… Continue Reading

News/Media Alliance Study Finds Pervasive Unauthorized Use of Publisher Content to Power Generative AI Technologies

“On October 31, 2023 the News/Media Alliance published a White Paper and a technical analysis and submitted comments to the U.S. Copyright Office on the use of publisher content to power generative artificial intelligence technologies (GAI). Together, the three publications document the pervasive, unauthorized use of publisher content by GAI developers, the impact this may… Continue Reading

Artists Lose First Round of Copyright Infringement Case Against AI Art Generators

Hollywood Reporter: “Artists suing generative artificial intelligence art generators have hit a stumbling block in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit over the uncompensated and unauthorized use of billions of images downloaded from the internet to train AI systems, with a federal judge’s dismissal of most claims. U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Monday found that copyright infringement… Continue Reading

The Creepy New Digital Afterlife Industry

IEEE Spectrum – These companies could use your data to bring you back—without your consent…As humans, we all have to confront our own mortality. The datafication of our lives means that we now must confront the fact that data about us will very likely outlive our physical selves. The discussion about the digital afterlife thus… Continue Reading

Lessig on why AI and social media are causing a free speech crisis for the internet

The Verge: Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig – After 30 years teaching law, the internet policy legend is as worried as you’d think about AI and TikTok — and he has surprising thoughts about balancing free speech with protecting democracy. Nilay Patel: “…Larry and I talked about the current and recurring controversy around react videos on… Continue Reading

Public Case Access

“This new Public Case Access site was created as a result of a collaboration between the Harvard Law School Library and Ravel Law. The company supported the library in its work to digitize 40,000 printed volumes of cases, comprised of over forty million pages of court decisions, including original materials from cases that predate the… Continue Reading

AI is learning from stolen intellectual property. It needs to stop.

Washington Post – William D. Cohan is a best-selling author and a founding partner of Puck News: “The other day someone sent me the searchable database published by The Atlantic that have been used to train the generative AI systems being developed by Meta, Bloomberg and others. It turns out that four of my seven… Continue Reading

These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech

The Atlantic – Editor’s note: This searchable database is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can read about the origins of the database here, and an analysis of what’s in it here. “This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems… Continue Reading

Your Personal Information Is Probably Being Used to Train Generative AI Models

Scientific American: “Artists and writers are up in arms about generative artificial intelligence systems—understandably so. These machine learning models are only capable of pumping out images and text because they’ve been trained on mountains of real people’s creative work, much of it copyrighted. Major AI developers including OpenAI, Meta and Stability AI now face multiple… Continue Reading