Friday’s Endnotes – 11/22/24

Generative AI Licensing Isn’t Just Possible, It’s Essential — “When technological advancements change the way copyrighted works are reproduced or distributed, those who question whether the use is infringing are often accused of standing in the way of innovation. Similarly, the idea of licensing is dismissed as unnecessary, impossible, and something that would hinder technological progress. Now more than ever, these positions must be rejected.”

Asian News International (ANI) sues OpenAI for copyright violation — “Asian News International, one of India’s largest news agencies, sued OpenAI in a court in India alleging that the US artificial intelligence company misused its copyrighted news content.”

Computer Programmer Convicted for Helping Run One of the Biggest Illegal Television Show Streaming Services in the United States — “After a two-week trial, a federal jury in Las Vegas yesterday convicted a Cuban citizen and U.S. permanent resident for helping operate an illegal streaming service with one of the largest quantities of infringing works. The defendant, who was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement, is the eighth and final defendant to be convicted in the case.”

OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit — “In this case and others, OpenAI has maintained that training models using publicly available data — including articles from The Times and Daily News — is fair use. In other words, in creating models like GPT-4o, which ‘learn’ from billions of examples of e-books, essays, and more to generate human-sounding text, OpenAI believes that it isn’t required to license or otherwise pay for the examples — even if it makes money from those models.”

Mediaset secures copyright infringement judgement against Cloudflare — “According to a technical analysis released by Mediaset, Guardaserie used Cloudflare’s services to repeatedly change its domain name extensions over time, circumventing controls put in place by the media regulator Agcom, and making it difficult to identify the portals and the locations of pirate servers. The court found Cloudflare liable for ‘facilitating the illegal distribution of audiovisual programs’ to which Mediaset holds exclusive rights.”