Friday’s Endnotes – 12/13/24

Photobucket users and subjects sue to stop images from being sold as deep fake fodder — “Photobucket users filed a federal class action against the image cloud company on Wednesday to prevent the sale of their pictures to biometric and generative AI companies — technologies that were the stuff of science fiction when many first signed up for accounts more than a decade ago.”

OpenAI Bid to Centralize IP Suits Follows Discovery Setbacks — “MDL centralizes pretrial activities such as discovery in cases that involve common factual questions. Though it could be more procedurally efficient for an MDL court to handle all the pretrial proceedings for the eight lawsuits—including those brought by New York Times Co.  and authors like comedian Sarah Silverman—the MDL court could also potentially decide dispositive motions like summary judgment, Santa Clara University School of Law professor Edward Lee said. That ‘would be quite a change from the multiple judges’ in New York and California to just one judge pre-trial, he said.”

Paul McCartney warns AI ‘could take over’ as UK debates copyright laws — “He spoke out amid growing concern that the rise of AI is threatening income streams for music, news and book publishers. Next week the UK parliament will debate amendments to the data bill that could allow creators to decide whether or not their copyrighted work can be used to train generative AI models.”

Can You Copyright a Vibe? — “Professor Fromer described the lawsuit as one of the first of its kind, in which one social media user is suing another — rather than the tech company behind the platform. Despite its seeming outlandishness, this ‘kitchen sink intellectual property complaint’ could hold up in court, she said, adding that the most substantial claim was copyright infringement.”

CJEU Clarifies Copyright Protection for Software Variables — “The CJEU ruled that such modification did not constitute copyright infringement, as it did not affect the expression of the program, which is embodied in the source and object code. The CJEU explained that the content of the variables constitutes an element of the program in which users use the functionalities of the program, but not an expression of the program itself. The court noted in particular that the modification of the variables did not enable the reproduction or further execution of the program, but rather required that the program be running simultaneously.”