Friday’s Endnotes – 04/12/24

How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. — “The race to lead A.I. has become a desperate hunt for the digital data needed to advance the technology. To obtain that data, tech companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta have cut corners, ignored corporate policies and debated bending the law, according to an examination by The New York Times.”

New bill would force AI companies to reveal use of copyrighted art — “Whether major artificial intelligence companies worth billions have made illegal use of copyrighted works is increasingly the source of litigation and government investigation. Schiff’s bill would not ban AI from training on copyrighted material, but would put a sizable onus on companies to list the massive swath of works that they use to build tools like ChatGPT – data that is usually kept private.”

Dueling OpenAI Copyright Cases to Remain Separate, Parallel Actions on Both Coasts — “The New York-based federal district court overseeing the New York Times v. OpenAI & Microsoft copyright infringement and trademark dilution case recently denied Silverman’s attempt to intervene in the later-filed New York Times case, throwing another wrench in her so far rocky crusade against OpenAI and setting up potentially varied rulings in separate courts over OpenAI’s use of copyrighted works to train LLMs.”

EU copyright law roundup – first trimester of 2024 — At Kluwer Copyright Blog, Alina Trapova and João Pedro Quintais provide an update on Court of Justice and General Court judgments, Advocate Generals’ opinions, and important policy developments from the EU.

Shein has copyright infringement ‘baked into’ its business model: class action lawsuit — “Attorneys allege that to distribute these items ‘at such a fever pitch,’ Shein’s algorithm-based design system outputs designs to Shein’s factories for production ‘with no human intermediary or compliance function taking care that the algorithm’s designs are not the property of others.'”