Friday’s Endnotes – 05/24/24

The Resilience of Creativity — “The U.S. Copyright Office has released The Resilience of Creativity: An Examination of the COVID-19 Impact on Copyright-Reliant Industries and Their Subsequent Recovery. The study examines the impact and subsequent recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of employment, revenues, and creative outputs in copyright-reliant industries. It uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census, and U.S. Copyright Office pertaining to eighteen industries that produce the types of works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.”

NMPA Calls on Congress for Copyright Act Overhaul Amid Spotify Battle Over Bundling — “In his new letter, NMPA’s Israelite writes that doing away with the 100-year-old system of government-regulated price setting for songwriter and publisher royalties (specifically, mechanical royalties) and allowing rate negotiations to occur in a free market would prevent songwriters and publishers from being taken advantage of by ‘Big Tech’…”

US Supreme Court won’t hear Hearst copyright appeal — “The high court was considering taking up the case to clarify how long copyright owners can wait to sue for infringement after learning that their rights have been violated. Three justices advocated for hearing the case in a dissent to a separate copyright ruling earlier this month.”

Model Disgorgement: The Key to Fixing AI Bias and Copyright Infringement? — “By now, the challenges posed by generative AI are no secret. Models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama have been known to ‘hallucinate,’ inventing potentially misleading responses, as well as divulge sensitive information, like copyrighted materials. One potential solution to some of these issues is ‘model disgorgement,’ a set of techniques that force models to purge themselves of content that leads to copyright infringement or biased responses. In a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Michael Kearns, National Center Professor of Management & Technology in Computer and Information Science (CIS), and three fellow researchers at Amazon share their perspective on the potential for model disgorgement to solve some of the issues facing AI models today.”

Voice actors, tricked by LOVO into creating AI replicas, file suit. — “A class-action suit was filed last week by voice actors Paul Lehrman and Linnea Sage against AI developer LOVO, Inc. According to the complaint, LOVO induced the actors to provide recorded material under false pretenses—material which was then used to produce synthetic replicas of their voices to become part of a catalog offered to paying customers. The complaint also alleges that LOVO defrauds its customers who believe they are using voices that have been legally obtained.”