Posts Tagged: "copyright infringement"

In an opposition brief filed Monday, The New York Times Company (The Times) told a New York district court that OpenAI’s late February claim that The Times “paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products” in order to prove OpenAI infringed its copyrights amounts to little more than “grandstanding.” In late December 2023, the Times became the latest of many complainants to accuse OpenAI’s Large Language Model, ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft’s GPT-4-powered Bing Chat, of widespread copyright infringement. The Times alleged that Microsoft and OpenAI reproduce Times content verbatim and also often attribute false information to the Times. The Times’ opposition brief filed yesterday responds to OpenAI’s recent motion to dismiss, which alleged that The Times paid someone to target and exploit “a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is global, and copyright laws are national. Thus, some countries will have strict laws on making copies of copyrighted content to “train” an AI system while others will be more relaxed. Laws are about economics, and countries with more relaxed laws are likely to be countries with smaller creative industries and which wish to use the relaxed legal regime to attract AI investment. AI companies will use these jurisdictional differences as leverage to lobby for the relaxation of legal standards in countries with stricter laws.

On January 16, the U.S. Copyright Office published a final rule in the Federal Register amending agency regulations on small infringement claims filed at the Copyright Claims Board (CCB). Responding to comments from both the legal and copyright industries, the Copyright Office’s final rule addresses disputes to the form of CCB proceeding chosen by claimants, as well as the discretion of CCB officers in penalizing evidentiary violations. As drafted, the Office’s final rule on smaller claim proceedings will become effective on February 15.

On December 27, the New York Times Company became the latest complainant to accuse OpenAI’s Large Language Model, ChatGPT, as well as Microsoft’s GPT-4-powered Bing Chat, of widespread copyright infringement. The Times alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI reproduce Times content verbatim and also often attribute false information to the Times. OpenAI has been sued by numerous creators and authors for training its chatbots on content found online, including non-public or copyright-protected content. For example, the Times included examples in its complaint in which prompts to ChatGPT asking it to reproduce paywalled content resulted in verbatim excerpts from the article in question.

A California jury on Monday awarded what is reportedly the “largest maximum statutory damages verdict for photography infringement in U.S. history,” according to a press release issued by the plaintiff’s counsel in the case. Scott Hargis is an architectural photographer who sued Pacifica Senior Living Management LLC in September 2022 for damages and injunctive relief related to infringement of 43 of Hargis’ photos that Pacifica used to advertise and market its senior living facilities.

In 2017, screenwriters Lee Alfred and Ezequiel Martinez Jr. embarked on what would be a five-year journey for their copyright infringement claim against Walt Disney Pictures over the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Now, one year after it resolved, their legacy lives on through a new era of copyright litigation in Hollywood. Courts continue to rely on the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the Pirates case to allow screenwriters and other artists to proceed past the pleading stage. With that pendulum swing, litigants in copyright cases over Hollywood films will face a range of undeveloped issues. This article provides a brief recap of the impact from the Pirates case and identifies several open issues that litigants are likely to address in future cases as a result.

Recently, Humans of Bombay (HOB), a storytelling platform, filed a suit seeking an injunction to prevent the unauthorized use of their copyrighted material by another organization, People of India (POI). This includes alleged infringement of content created by HOB, literary works, materials, films, and various creative expressions. HOB connects with individuals willing to share stories or experiences and creates audio-video content. This is subsequently shared on their website and Instagram account in various formats, such as interviews, written pieces, and posts. The current suit centers around the complaint that POI have launched a nearly identical Instagram account, featuring content that closely resembles what’s found on HOB’s account.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a number of Tony, Grammy and Peabody award winners are the latest to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement based on the way it trains its popular chatbot, ChatGPT. In July, comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey brought a similar suit against OpenAI.

Last week, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against the rapper and singer, Future. A Virigina-based rapper, Gutta, accused the rap star of copying his song “When U Think About It” when Future released “When I Think About It” on a 2018 mixtape. The district court judge ruled that none of the elements brought forward by Gutta were protectable under U.S. copyright law. The Virginia rapper argued that the two songs shared both subject matter and similar phrases.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday upheld a district court ruling that embedding images from Instagram posts in third-party websites does not constitute copyright infringement. The case has to do with two photographers’ images that were embedded and posted with articles run by Buzzfeed News and Time from the photographers’ public Instagram accounts. The district court and the Ninth Circuit both cited Perfect 10 v. Amazon as precluding relief.

Last week, comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI in a U.S. district court, alleging the company’s generative AI product, ChatGPT, infringes on their copyrighted content. In addition to copyright infringement, the trio also claimed that the AI company violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition laws and unjustly enriched the company. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of “copying massive amounts of text” used to train ChatGPT to produce new text from prompts. Language models like OpenAI rely on datasets of text or other media to train its generative capabilities.

On June 14, a series of 17 music publishers, members of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), filed a lawsuit in the Middle District of Tennessee against the social media platform, Twitter. The music publishers’ suit alleges claims of direct, vicarious and contributory copyright infringement by Twitter involving about 1,700 copyrighted songs, many of which continue to remain accessible in…

Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a ruling in a copyright dispute between Erickson Productions and Kraig Kast, ultimately reversing and remanding the case back to the district court for a jury trial. The appeals court ruled that the district court erred by not conducting a jury trial after a first appeal by Kast. The case began when Jim Erickson of Erickson Productions accused Kast of the unauthorized use of three copyrighted photos on his developmental website. The case was heard before a jury in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, which awarded Erickson $450,000 in damages after finding that Kast willfully infringed on the copyright.

The Copyright Claims Board (CCB) has issued its first final decision since it was established by law in December 2020, finding in favor of a photographer who claimed a lawyer infringed his copyright by displaying one of his photographs on his law firm website. David Oppenheimer’s case against Douglas Prutton was referred to the CCB by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in April 2022, two months before the Board opened to receive claims. Oppenheimer said he discovered his aerial photograph of the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland, California on Prutton’s website in 2018, on a page titled “Where We Work.” Oppenheimer admitted that he copied and displayed the photograph without permission, but said his adult daughter actually found the photo and placed it on his site, and also argued fair use and unclean hands in defending his use of the work.