Friday’s Endnotes – 11/17/23

Why I Just Resigned From My Job in Generative AI — Ed Newton-Rex penned the following essay after stepping away from his post as VP of Audio at Stability AI. “Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works. I don’t see how this can be acceptable in a society that has set up the economics of the creative arts such that creators rely on copyright.”

Column: AI investors say they’ll go broke if they have to pay for copyrighted works. Don’t believe it — LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik writes, “Followers of high finance are familiar with the old principle of privatizing profits and socializing losses — that is, treating the former as the rightful property of investors and shareholders while sticking the public with the latter. It’s the principle that gave us taxpayer bailouts of big banks and the auto companies during the last recession. Investors in artificial intelligence are taking the idea one step further in fighting against lawsuits filed by artists and writers asserting that the AI development process involves copyright infringement on a massive scale.”

Tenth Circuit Contributes Clarity to Contributory Liability in Copyright Infringement — “The Tenth Circuit dismissed the district court’s limitation regarding the third factor, namely that the defendant must have caused or contributed to the ‘initial’ infringement. The Court noted that such a qualification would mean that ‘contributory infringement liability would rarely, if ever, lie for ongoing, repeated infringements.'”

No Step-Free Copyright Exceptions: The Role of the Three-step in Defining Permitted Uses of Protected Content (including TDM for AI-Training Purposes) — From Eleonara Rosati: ” A debated issue is whether a court, having established that the relevant conditions of an applicable [exception or limitation] under national law are prima facie satisfied, is also required to assess if the unauthorized act in question passes the [three-step test] to determine if that particular act is in fact outside the control of the concerned rightholder. This study addresses this question, which is ultimately answered in the affirmative.”

Copyright Exceptions and Digital Exhaustion addressed by the European Court of Human Rights (yes, the one in Strasburg!) — “Over the last decades, European lawyers got used to the – at times remarkable and even forceful – interventions of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in copyright law. But last year, one supranational interference with copyright law surprisingly did not come from Luxemburg, but from Strasbourg: the judgment in Safarov v Azerbaijan.”