Friday’s Endnotes – 08/11/23

This is the last endnotes of the summer. See you all in September!

State Attempts to Sink Blackbeard Infringement Case by “Deep Sixing” the Law They Passed to Claim the Copyrights — Stephen Carlisle takes a close look at the latest developments in the long-running litigation involving videographer Rick Allen and the state of North Carolina, which has already been to the Supreme Court.

Houdini and the Magic of Copyright — Marilyn Creswell, Librarian-in-Residence at the U.S. Copyright Office, tells the story of three “playlets” that legendary magician Harry Houdini registered with the Office.

AI Trained on AI Images Produces Terrible Results, Study Finds — “If the research paper is correct, then it means that AI will not be able to develop an endless fountain of data. Instead of relying on its own output, AI will still need real, high-quality images to keep progressing. It means that generative AI will need photographers. With picture agencies and photographers now very much alive to the fact that their intellectual property assets have been used en-masse to train AI image generators, this technological quirk may force AI companies to license the training data.”

Before Generative AI, Big Tech Taught Artists to Abdicate Copyright Rights — “In the copyright world, platform operators have consistently circumvented their obligations under the DMCA with shrugging statements like We can’t police the internet, alluding to staggering volume while conjuring an association with authoritarianism. Now, the circumstances are different. It is a near certainty that every creative work made has been, or will be, ingested into one or more AI training models, and unless the courts find this to be an act of mass piracy and order disgorgement of the datasets, creators may have to accept that their work is being turned into pink slime.”

Prosecraft has infuriated authors by using their books without consent – but what does copyright law say? — “By Smith’s own admission, Prosecraft uses more than 25,000 books. None of this would be possible without a “shadow library”: the Achilles’ heel of AI technologies.A new term in the language of copyright law, “shadow library” has evolved from a growing body of legal disputes between businesses based on artificial intelligence and published human authors.”