Friday’s Endnotes – 10/11/24

Appeal Court Affirms Piracy Liability Verdict Against ISP Grande, Vacates $47m Damages Award — “In Grande’s case, there is a direct nexus between the copyright infringements and the use of Grande’s network, as Internet access was required to share the copyright infringing music. ‘Grande provided those subscribers with the tools necessary to conduct those infringements and continued doing so after learning that those subscribers were repeatedly using those tools to infringe, in furtherance of a policy never to terminate subscribers for copyright infringement,’ the Court writes.”

Why The New York Times’ lawyers are inspecting OpenAI’s code in a secretive room — “The lawsuit argues OpenAI infringed on its intellectual property in two ways. There is the ‘input’ case — alleging that the LLM illegally hoovered up over 10 million New York Times articles to train ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot without compensation. And the ‘output’ case — arguing that when asked, ChatGPT can spit out a New York Times article that readers would otherwise pay a subscription for.”

The German LAION decision: A problematic understanding of the scope of the TDM copyright exceptions and the transition from TDM to AI training — “A fundamental aspect of the decision that deserves greater attention is that the analysis of the court is incomplete. As such, it may not represent good guidance for either concerned stakeholders or other courts in Europe faced with questions of unlicensed TDM and subsequent AI training. Specifically (and likely because of how the plaintiff photographer pleaded the case), the court failed to consider that the TDM exception for scientific research would not cover all of LAION’s activities as described in the judgment itself, notably the circumstance – following the completion of TDM activities – that LAION made the resulting dataset publicly available for anyone to use and for any purpose, including commercial AI training.”

‘Good news’ as copyright and AI stand-off to end within months — “The ongoing stand-off over the use of copyright protected materials in training AI systems will be resolved by the end of the year, according to the UK’s parliamentary under-secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, Feryal Clark. Speaking recently at the Times Tech Summit, Clark stressed that a resolution is expected in the coming months, whether that be through legislation or policy amendment.”

How pirate websites undermine research integrity — “Unlike publishers, pirate websites have no incentive to confirm the accuracy of the articles they illegally harvest or ensure the research meets ethical standards. There’s also no incentive to retract or correct an article if a problem arises. And they do arise: more than 45,000 retractions have been identified by Retraction Watch since the database launched in 2010. Publishers, working with organizations like the Committee on Publication Ethics, proactively work to correct inaccuracies and root out plagiarism or falsification of data and results.”