Friday’s Endnotes – 06/28/24

Major Labels Sue AI Firms Suno and Udio for Alleged Copyright Infringement — “Filed by plaintiffs that include Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that could ‘saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.'” See also RIAA Chairman Mitch Glazier’s op-ed accompanying the lawsuit filing, Generative AI Reaches Fork in the Road.

Key Copyright Decisions So Far and Cases to Watch in 2024 — “Courts have been busy with copyright cases in the first half of 2024. This article provides an overview of some of the key decisions issued in 2024, as well as important cases to watch in the remainder of the year.”

News nonprofit sues ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft for ‘exploitative’ copyright infringement — “The nonprofit, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal, said that OpenAI used its content without permission and without offering compensation, violating copyrights on the organization’s journalism. The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, describes OpenAI’s business as ‘built on the exploitation of copyrighted works’ and focuses on how AI-generated summaries of articles threaten publishers.”

The Intercept Bolsters OpenAI Copyright Suit with More Evidence — “The Intercept amended its complaint to include a 374-page exhibit listing articles it owns the copyrights to, a 225-page exhibit listing its URLS included in a data set used by OpenAI to train its models, and examples of how the Dragnet and Newspaper algorithms produced text ‘substantively identical’ to its content without copyright information. The output was at times identical except for ‘the seemingly random addition of an extra space between two words, or the exclusion of a description associated with an embedded photo,’ the updated complaint said.”

A Photographer Wins a Top Prize in an A.I. Competition for His Non-A.I. Image — It’s the John Henry story of our time.