Friday’s Endnotes – 07/26/24

Mid-Year Review: AI Lawsuit Developments in 2024 — The Copyright Alliance’s Kevin Madigan provides the latest on the over two dozen lawsuits where copyright questions arising from artificial intelligence are at issue.

Machine readable or not? – notes on the hearing in LAION e.v. vs Kneschke — “The case centers on LAION e.V.’s (a German non-profit organization that builds widely used training datasets) download of an image by German photographer Robert Kneschke for inclusion in the LAION 5B dataset. Neither party disputes that the image in question was downloaded, analyzed, and subsequently included in the training dataset, but LAION claims that this is legally permissible, while Kneschke disputes this. The disputed image was freely available without a paywall on the website bigstock.com.”

Court Says U.S. Copyright Termination Might Cut Off Foreign Rights — “In 2008, when the heirs of Superman’s co-creators were locked in a bruising legal battle with DC Comics, the court in Siegel v. Warner Bros. Entertainment held … that a terminating party is only entitled to recapture domestic rights to the copyright in question, leaving any grant of foreign rights intact. But now, more than fifteen years later, a new case out of Louisiana is challenging the prevailing view that copyright termination can only result in a recapture of U.S. rights, and—at least for now—the court seems to be buying the plaintiffs’ argument.”

The Push to Develop Generative A.I. Without All the Lawsuits — “Getty, along with 20 other stock image companies, is providing images for Bria AI, an Israeli start-up, to build an A.I. model. Bria will split revenue from its generator with Getty and its other partners. Yair Adato, the chief executive of Bria, said dividing revenue with all of the partners and helping to attribute work back to artists was essential to preserve the role of content creators. Without ‘value for creation, everything will be very average and very boring,’ he said.”

Canadian Legal Code? Copying Foreign Law Can’t Infringe Copyright Under US Law — “In dissent, Judge Douglas argued that the majority misapplied Veeck. He argued that the en banc court in Veeck held that law was not copyrightable subject matter in the US. Since copyrightability is determined based on the law of the foreign jurisdiction, and since the P.S. Knight copyrights were valid in Canada, Judge Douglas would have distinguished this case from Veeck and affirmed the district court.”