Friday’s Endnotes – 12/01/23

Google to pay Canada’s “link tax,” drops threat of removing news from search — “Google has agreed to pay Canadian news businesses $100 million a year to comply with the country’s Online News Act, despite previously saying it would remove Canadian news links from search rather than make the required payments. … ‘Google will contribute $100 million in financial support annually, indexed to inflation, for a wide range of news businesses across the country, including independent news businesses and those from Indigenous and official-language minority communities,’ Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge said in a statement today.”

Artists take new shot at Stability, Midjourney in updated copyright lawsuit — “Illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz initially sued the companies in January, in one of the first of several lawsuits that have been filed by copyright owners against tech companies over the alleged use of their work in AI training. [Judge] Orrick found flaws with some of the artists’ arguments, including that the companies’ AI output infringes their copyrights, but he left intact their core claim that the AI training process violates their rights. The plaintiffs reasserted their claims on Wednesday, now joined by artists H. Southworth, Grzegorz Rutkowski, Gregory Manchess, Gerald Brom, Jingna Zhang, Julia Kaye and Adam Ellis.”

Beijing Internet Court Recognizes Copyright in AI-Generated Images — “The Court stated that from the time the plaintiff conceived the image involved in the case to the final selection of the image involved, the plaintiff made a certain amount of intellectual investment, such as designing the presentation of characters, selecting prompt words, arranging the order of prompt words, and setting relevant parameters and so on. The images involved in the case reflected the plaintiff’s intellectual investment, so the images involved in the case met the requirements of ‘intellectual achievements.'”

Copyright’s Lost Art of Substantial Similarity — From Sandra Aistars: “This Article comments on a trend among courts hearing visual arts cases to de-emphasize substantial similarity analyses and shift infringement determinations almost entirely to the fair use defense. The trend has troubling procedural fairness consequences. Without a full evidentiary record about the artworks they encounter in infringement cases, courts’ ability to properly evaluate whether the use of appropriated material in a second work is justified, or whether expression has been taken from the first work for some other (infringing) purpose, is compromised. If courts fail to properly understand works because they do not fully analyze basic infringement claims, it can also affect later users and owners of artworks.”

“Please regulate AI:” Artists push for U.S. copyright reforms but tech industry says not so fast — “The nation’s top copyright official hasn’t yet taken sides. She told The Associated Press she’s listening to everyone as her office weighs whether copyright reforms are needed for a new era of generative AI tools that can spit out compelling imagery, music, video and passages of text. ‘We’ve received close to 10,000 comments,’ said Shira Perlmutter, the U.S. register of copyrights, in an interview. ‘Every one of them is being read by a human being, not a computer. And I myself am reading a large part of them.'”