Friday’s Endnotes – 03/07/25

How the Emerging Market for AI Training Data is Eroding Big Tech’s ‘Fair Use’ Copyright Defense — “Around this time last year, news headlines and court documents were full of grand proclamations from AI tech corporations using pirated content to train their artificial intelligence models. Ripping off writers, musicians, and artists in order to build billion-dollar companies amounted to ‘fair use’ of their material, said the fast movers and thing-breakers. Fair use—a concept heretofore applied largely to the quotation of a few lines in a book review—was cited as legal cover for the most brazen and massive theft of intellectual property in history.”

A Global Phenomenon: The Creative Community’s Viral Outrage Against AI Theft — “The creative communities’ outrage against AI companies stealing their intellectual property is a global phenomenon. More and more, we are seeing creators and creative industries not just in the United States but throughout the world stepping up to voice their disapproval of government actions intended to kowtow to AI companies at the expense of culture, creativity, and the careers of creators.”

Hollywood Studios Sue Pirate IPTV Services in U.S. Court — “The Internet is littered with cheap IPTV services that offer access to a lot of content, for very little money. These deals often seem too good to be true and in most cases they are; at least for those who prefer to stay on the right side of the law. Yesterday, members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) filed two lawsuits against alleged operators of pirate IPTV services in the United States. Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Paramount, and other major Hollywood studios, accuse the defendants of widespread copyright infringement.”

Key ex-OpenAI researcher subpoenaed in AI copyright case — “The copyright case, ‘re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,’ was brought by book authors, including Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon, who alleged that OpenAI infringed their copyrights by using their work to train its AI models. The plaintiffs also argued that ChatGPT infringed their works by liberally quoting those works sans attribution.”