Copyright

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.

Go read this, and then listen to Mark Graham, director of the Archive’s Wayback Machine, on Decoder earlier this month.

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:

At the end of the day, copyright just doesn’t give a lot of people positively and negatively impacted by copyright a seat at the table. And these deals are a powerful reminder of that.

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:

... the “imitation” Udio created “doesn’t make the cut for any album of mine.”

“This is a great demonstration of the extent to which this technology is not transformative at all ... It’s stealing.”

I had similar thoughts back in March.

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 Bloomberg Law writes, the lawsuit will continue against GitHub and Microsoft (although without the Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims that the judge dismissed this month).

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.”

While the Udio-generated master recording is public domain, creator King Willonious’ lyrics are copyright protected, so he could get paid for a writer credit, as Billboard reporter Kristin Robinson explains.

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.”

Apple tried avoiding its Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 import ban late last year by arguing it would have a “detrimental” effect on users. However, the ITC denied this request, saying “public interest favors the protection of intellectual property rights by excluding infringing products.”

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.

Although Reuters doesn’t specify, the suit may be referencing the “Books3” dataset that other author lawsuits against OpenAI and Meta are based on.

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.”

Apple argues that the two names won’t be confused with the “Reality Control” and “Reality Engine” products owned by Zero Density, the Turkish company that challenged the marks.

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.”

Not backing down, Build-A-Bear countersued Jazwares, saying Skoosherz extends its existing line of cute animal toys. This is not the first time the Warren Buffet-owned Jazwares has sued for copyright infringement, it filed a lawsuit last year against Alibaba for selling fake Squishmallows.

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.