Friday’s Endnotes – 06/30/23

Authors Sue OpenAI Claiming Mass Copyright Infringement of Hundreds of Thousands of Novels — “Later versions of OpenAI’s large language models were trained on larger quantities of copyright-protected works, according to the complaint. In a 2020 paper introducing GPT-3, the company disclosed that 15 percent of its training dataset came from ‘two internet-based books corpora’ that it simply called ‘Books1’ and ‘Books2.’ While it never revealed what works were part of those datasets, the authors claim they came from ‘notorious shadow library websites,’ like Library Genesis, Z-Library, Sci-Hub and Bibliotik.”

Genius’s Attempts to Sue Google Over Song Lyrics Are Basically Dead — This week, the Supreme Court denied cert in ML Genius Holdings v. Google, consistent with the position argued by the US Solicitor General. The petition had asked the Court to review whether the Copyright Act preempted Genius’s breach of contract claims against Google, based on Genius’s allegations that Google copied lyric transcriptions for millions of songs from the Genius site.

The Copyright Claims Board Celebrates Its First Year — The US Copyright Office’s own Holland Gormley reviews some of the milestones reached by the small copyright claims tribunal after one year of operations.

U.S. Copyright Office Generative AI Event: Three Key Takeaways — Franklin Graves reviews the three key takeaways from a US Copyright Office webinar held earlier this week regarding how to register works containing material generated by artificial intelligence.