Friday’s Endnotes – 08/23/24

Authors Sue AI Firm Anthropic for Copyright Infringement — “While the suit notes that Anthropic has not shared details about its training corpus for Claude, the complaint asserts that Anthropic has admitted to using ‘the Pile,’ which lawyers described as ‘an 800 GB+ open-source dataset created for large language model training’ and allegedly includes a controversial collection called ‘Books3,’ said to be a trove of pirated books.”

News publishers vs. generative AI: Can copyright law keep up? — “There is growing angst in the news media community about how their products ­— the journalism they create, at no small expense — are being used to train the Generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs). They wonder whether copyright law will protect them, whether they should sue over copyright violations or agree to license and compensation terms offered by AI developers. E&P sought to understand these dilemmas better, so we asked news media publishers and advocates how they think these relationships will come to pass.”

Major labels ask US Supreme Court to reconsider $1 bln Cox copyright case — “The Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in February that the award could not stand, overturning the jury’s ruling that Cox was vicariously liable for its users’ copyright infringement and remanding the case for a new trial on damages. The appeals court upheld the jury’s decision that Cox was liable for user infringement on other grounds, which Cox challenged in a separate Supreme Court petition last week. The labels said in their petition that the vicarious-liability decision should be reinstated because Cox profited from its customers’ piracy. They also said that the 4th Circuit’s decision was out of line with other circuit courts’ rulings on the issue.”

Shein is now copying Temu’s copyright lawsuit — “Shein itself is facing a class action lawsuit alleging that it’s engaged in “industrial-scale scheme of systematic, digital copyright infringement of the work of small designers and artists.” It has also been sued by For Love and Lemons, H&M, Levi Strauss, and Uniqlo, among others.”

Appeals court revives copyright lawsuit against shoe designer, rejecting ‘sophisticated plaintiff’ exception — “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated a lower court’s dismissal of a copyright lawsuit brought by Michael Grecco Productions (MGP) against shoe designer Ruthie Davis and her companies. The appeals court rejected the notion that there is a “sophisticated plaintiff” exception to the discovery rule that determines when the three-year statute of limitations begins to run on copyright claims.”