Friday’s Endnotes – 09/27/24

OpenAI Training Data to Be Inspected in Authors’ Copyright Cases — “In a Tuesday filing, authors suing the Sam Altman-led firm and OpenAI indicated that they came to terms on protocols for inspection of the information. They’ll seek details related to the incorporation of their works in training datasets, which could be a battleground in the case that may help establish guardrails for the creation of automated chatbots.”

U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers, Issues Broad Injunction — “A New York federal court has ordered the operators of shadow library LibGen to pay $30 million in copyright infringement damages. The default judgment comes with a broad injunction that affects third-party services including domain registries, browser extensions, CDN providers, IPFS gateways, advertisers, and more. These parties should stop facilitating access to the pirate site.”

How A Strong Copyright System Benefits the United States — “It is copyright that provides an established legal framework relied upon for the production of informational writing required by democratic societies. As the Supreme Court explained, ‘[i]n our haste to disseminate news, it should not be forgotten that the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing a marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies the economic incentive to create and disseminate ideas.” And by creating a marketable right for authors, copyright established an alternative to patronage systems that can reduce the diversity of voices, chill speech, or even encourage propaganda.'”

Technological Innovations do not Negate the Fundamental Principles of Copyright Law and the Fair Use Doctrine — “Whether or not this decision will impact a ‘transformativeness’ analysis with respect to the swathe of generative artificial intelligence cases popping up within the Second and Ninth Circuits remains to be seen, although the secondary use argument in this case seems analogous to the training argument proffered by AI companies.”

Author of AI-Generated Work Rejected by Copyright Office Says Lack of Protection Has Crushed Him — Jason Allen, who garnered national attention after a work he created using Midjourney won an award at the 2022 Colorado State Fair, filed a declaratory judgment action this week challenging the U.S. Copyright Office’s decision to reject his application for copyright registration in the work.