Friday’s Endnotes – 01/12/24

Meta Admits Use of ‘Pirated’ Book Dataset to Train AI — “The Books3 dataset has a clear piracy angle. It was created by AI researcher Shawn Presser in 2020, who scraped the library of ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik…. While OpenAI and Meta are very cautious about discussing the subject in public, Meta provided more context in a California federal court this week. Responding to a lawsuit from writer/comedian Sarah Silverman, author Richard Kadrey, and other rights holders, the tech giant admits that ‘portions of Books3’ were used to train the Llama AI model before its public release.”

OpenAI’s copyright conundrum pits fair use precedent against an ‘impossible’ hurdle — “It’s unclear to what extent existing copyright law speaks to AI, and the process of ingesting existing material to train powerful models that aim to generate and capture new types of value. But in a tech industry move that by now seems familiar, AI companies are acting as if their permissive interpretation of the law is the natural mode of engagement, and that restrictions don’t apply to them until they are proven wrong.”

Shake Shack shakes off typeface breach of contract claim — Chicago lawyer Evan Brown analyzes a recent court decision involving the use by the burger chain of a proprietary font for use in its logos and signage. An interesting issue for copyright nerds.

U.S. Copyright Office Activities in 2023: A Year in Review — The Copyright Alliance summarizes the productive work of the US Copyright Office over the past 12 months, including detailed stats related to the work of the copyright small claims tribunal, the Office’s rulemaking, and policy work.

AI Image Generators Are Spitting Out Copyrighted Characters, Raising Possibility of Catastrophic Lawsuit — “Strikingly, the pair didn’t even need to directly invoke the name of a popular movie to come up with uncanny images of Nintendo’s Mario or a believable screencap of the Disney-owned Star Wars franchise’s Darth Vader. Even just entering the word ‘screencap’ came up with images that ‘closely resemble film frames’ from the Star Wars, Marvel and Frozen franchises.”