#copyright

#copyright

On the way home, I screenshot and crop a news article and share it to one of my WhatsApp groups. In another group, a family member has posted an AI-generated video (forwarded many times) of Donald Trump getting his head shaved by Xi Jinping while Joe Biden laughs in the background. I watch the mindless slop on my phone as I walk along the main road, instinctively gripping my phone a little tighter as I do so.

Spotify and the Big 3 record labels - Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group - have filed a lawsuit against Anna's Archive, alleging the pirate platform scraped 86 million music files, and claiming an eye-popping $13 trillion in damages. Anna's Archive, formerly known as the Pirate Library Mirror, is accused of "brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world's commercial sound recordings," according to the full complaint.

There's a crisis of creativity in mainstream American culture. We have fewer and fewer studios and record labels fewer and fewer platforms online that serve independent artists and creators. At its core, copyright is a monopoly right on creative output and expression. It's intended to allow people who make things to make a living through those things, to incentivize creativity. To square the circle that is "exclusive control over expression" and "free speech," we have fair use.

Imagine every post online came with a bounty of up to $150,000 paid to anyone who finds it violates opaque government rules-all out of the pocket of the platform. Smaller sites could be snuffed out, and big platforms would avoid crippling liability by aggressively blocking, taking down, and penalizing speech that even violates these rules. In turn, users would self-censor, and opportunists would turn accusations into a profitable business.

Google's testimony to U.K. lawmakers this week did more than restate familiar arguments about fair use and training. It clarified the boundaries of what the company believes it should, and should not, pay publishers for in the AI-driven search ecosystem. For publishers trying to navigate AI licensing, the message was blunt: Google is willing to pay for access, but not for training - and it remains unwilling to define AI Overviews as a compensable use of journalism.

Musk's view is that music usage is only minor on X, as opposed to, say, TikTok or Instagram, where popular songs can become major trends.

In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and Frankenstein, in addition to thousands of words from books including The Hunger Games and The Catcher in the Rye. Varying amounts of these books were also reproduced by the other three models. Thirteen books were tested.

In this episode of The Briefing, Weintraub Tobin partners Scott Hervey and Matt Sugarman break down The New York Times v. Perplexity AI, a lawsuit that goes beyond copyright and into largely untested trademark territory. They discuss the Times' allegations that Perplexity copied its journalism at both the input and output stages and, more significantly, that the AI attributed fabricated or inaccurate content to the Times using its trademarks.

More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA-two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an "Internet Blackout" on January 18, 2012. Turns out, Americans don't like government-run internet blacklists. The bills were ultimately shelved.

Modder Froddoyo introduced Project Misriah on November 16 as "a workshop collection of Halo ported maps and assets that aims to bring a Halo 3 multiplayer-like experience to Counter-Strike 2." Far from just being inspired by Halo 3, the mod directly copied multiple sound effects, character models, maps, and even movement mechanics from Bungie and Microsoft's popular series.

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For the past two years, my colleague Alex Reisner has investigated precisely how tech companies use massive data sets to train their LLMs. He has repeatedly found that so-called architects of AI have relied heavily on enormous databases of copyrighted work to create chatbots and other programs, and has also found that this work is generally taken without the consent or awareness of its creators: musicians, filmmakers, YouTubers, podcasters, illustrators, writers.

The team behind the song have admitted using AI during its creation. Producer and songwriter Harrison Walker said the original vocals were actually his own, but were heavily manipulated using music-generation software Suno - sometimes called the "ChatGPT for music". Meanwhile, the second producer Waypoint, real name Jacob Donaghue, confirmed on social media that AI was used to "give our original vocal a female tone".

"We are being put to two extremes here... How do we announce a rule that deals with those two extremes?" - Justice Sonia Sotomayor