Friday’s Endnotes – 02/02/24

Demand for a New Tool That Poisons Generative A.I. Models Has Been ‘Off the Charts’ — Adam Schrader reports at Artnet News, “A new, free tool designed by researchers at the University of Chicago to help artists ‘poison’ artificial intelligence models trained on their images without their consent has proved immensely popular. Less than a week after it went live, the software was downloaded more than 250,000 times.”

Meta used copyright to protect its AI model, but argues against the law for everyone else — “Meta has joined Big Tech cohorts like Google and Microsoft in arguing to the US Copyright Office that the mountain of copyrighted text, imagery, and data scraped for free and used to train AI models is not protected under copyright law. Meta thinks effectively that everything available on the internet falls under ‘fair use,’ because AI models like Llama do not exploit or reproduce copyrighted works. (Although they, in fact, very often, do). However, a few months before pushing this copyright stance, Meta attempted to argue in favor of broader copyright protections for Llama.”

Publishers Association and Publishers’ Licensing Services welcome Lords Committee AI report — “The report says the government ‘cannot sit on its hands’ while LLM developers exploit the works of rights-holders. It criticises tech firms for using data without permission or compensation, and says the government should end the copyright dispute ‘definitively’ including through legislation if necessary. It calls for greater transparency for rights-holders to see if their work has been used without consent and for investment in new datasets to encourage tech firms to pay for licensed content, noting there is ‘compelling evidence’ that the UK benefits economically, politically and societally from its ‘globally respected’ copyright framework.” Link to full report in article.

Why the Carlin Estate’s Lawsuit Over Fake Comedy Special May Be DOA — Copyright litigator Aaron Moss examines the lawsuit from Carlin’s daughter and estate over the purportedly AI-generated comedy special from the deceased comedian. Moss explains why he believes the lawsuit “faces tough challenges in court.”

US Copyright Office Launches Review of the MLC and DLC’s Designations — The Music Modernization Act overhauled licensing of musical works for use by online streaming services by requiring the Copyright Office to designate a non-profit organization to collect, administer, and distribute streaming royalties to songwriters and music publishers. The law also requires the Office to review that designation every five years; the first such review was launched by the Office this week.