Friday’s Endnotes – 03/08/24

Publishers Target LibGen Domains, IPFS Gateways, Plus $30m in Piracy Damages — “Months have passed since the complaint was filed but LibGen’s anonymous operators did not respond. This prompted the textbook publishers to move ahead and request a default judgment in their favor. According to the rightsholders, LibGen distributes at least 20,000 of their copyrighted works without permission. The site is designed to be user-friendly while remaining resilient to enforcement measures. For example, LibGen can easily switch domain names, and relies on censorship-resistant decentralized technologies such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), the publishers write.”

Twitter Music Lawsuit: Judge Allows Publishers’ Copyright Case Against X To Move Forward — “The case was organized by the National Music Publishers’ Association, which has long argued that Twitter is the last major social media service that refuses to license music. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat have all allegedly entered into such deals with publishers, providing a library of licensed music for users to legally add to their posts. The lawsuit claimed that Twitter had, instead, effectively allowed its users to supply such music illegally.”

China court says AI broke copyright law in apparent world first — “An unnamed plaintiff in the suit who held partial copyright to Ultraman, a science fiction character created by Japanese studio Tsuburaya Productions, sued an AI company after its software created images that closely resembled the character, according to the 21st Century Business Herald. The name of the AI company involved was not disclosed. The Guangzhou Internet Court found that the images generated by the AI service were “substantially similar” to the Ultraman character – suggesting that the original had been used to train the AI – and awarded 10,000 yuan (about $1,400) in damages, the paper reported. No information about the case was available on the court’s website.”

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines: Even Bland Works Support Copyright — “Premier and Allegiance both administered car dealers’ loyalty programs. Customers enrolled in these programs were required to meet certain conditions (such as changing the car’s oil at predetermined intervals), and if a part under warranty broke, the dealer would help the car owner initiate a claim through the loyalty program administrator. In conjunction with administering these programs, Premier created a loyalty certificate. The certificate collected the customer’s personal information and provided the program’s terms and conditions. Premier registered its certificate for copyright protection in 2008.”