Friday’s Endnotes – 11/03/23

Judge pares down artists’ AI copyright lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI — “U.S. District Judge William Orrick dismissed some claims from the proposed class action brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, including all of the allegations against Midjourney and DeviantArt. The judge said the artists could file an amended complaint against the two companies, whose systems utilize Stability’s Stable Diffusion text-to-image technology. Orrick also dismissed McKernan and Ortiz’s copyright infringement claims entirely. The judge allowed Andersen to continue pursuing her key claim that Stability’s alleged use of her work to train Stable Diffusion infringed her copyrights.”

AI Chatbots are scraping news reporting and copyrighted content, News Media Alliance says — “In the published white paper, the trade group also rejected arguments that A.I. bots have simply ‘learned’ facts by reading various sets of data, like a human being would. The group said ‘it is inaccurate’ to form such a conclusion ‘because models retain the expressions of facts that are contained in works in their copied training materials (and which copyright protects) without ever absorbing any underlying concepts.'”

Choreography Copyright Gets Its Due in the Ninth Circuit — “On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals revived a copyright lawsuit brought by choreographer Kyle Hanagami (Blackpink, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears) against Fortnite publisher Epic Games. Hanagami first sued Epic in March 2022 over the Fortnite emote ‘It’s Complicated,’ which Hanagami claims is an unauthorized copy of the choreography he published for the 2017 song ‘How Long’ by Charlie Puth.”

Why Overbroad State Library Ebook Licensing Bills Are Unconstitutional — “This policy memo explains how federal copyright law supersedes and limits state laws that regulate the licensing of copyrighted works. While states can validly target certain abusive conduct related to the manner in which copyright licenses are negotiated, federal law is clear that states cannot cross the line by dictating the terms of such licenses when they directly implicate the exclusive rights secured by the Copyright Act.”

Entry into force of the new Copyright Law in Myanmar — “Myanmar’s Copyright Law … which was enacted on May 24, 2019, has come into effect on October 31, 2023 … thereby repealing the Myanmar Copyright Act of 1914…. Similar to copyright laws in many other countries, copyright protection in Myanmar is now granted automatically upon the creation of a work. As a result, registering copyrights in Myanmar is considered optional but recommended for enforcement purposes.”