#AI#GenerativeAI#OpenAI#Midjourney#GeneraredImages#Copyright#IP: "It seems all but certain that generative AI developers like OpenAI and Midjourney have trained their image-generation systems on copyrighted materials. Neither company has been transparent about this; Midjourney went so far as to ban us three times for investigating the nature of their training materials.
Both OpenAI and Midjourney are fully capable of producing materials that appear to infringe on copyright and trademarks. These systems do not inform users when they do so. They do not provide any information about the provenance of the images they produce. Users may not know, when they produce an image, whether they are infringing.
Unless and until someone comes up with a technical solution that will either accurately report provenance or automatically filter out the vast majority of copyright violations, the only ethical solution is for generative AI systems to limit their training to data they have properly licensed. Image-generating systems should be required to license the art used for training, just as streaming services are required to license their music and video."
#Copyright#IP#PD#PublicDomain#GettyImages: "[T]he paper explores the tension between asserting one own’s copyright and appropriating other people’s. More specifically, it investigates how this dual pull plays out in the activities of Getty Images. After a short introduction on how the author got interested in ‘the largest commercial archive in the world’ (Getty’s own words), the paper illustrates three main processes that allowed Getty to reach market dominance:
Takeovers: in the first ten years after its establishment in 1995, Getty built up its store of intellectual property by taking over several competing still and moving images archives, becoming a meta-archive (an archive of archives).
Litigation: the company aggressively protects its IP through litigation, or threat of litigation, such as the antitrust lawsuit against Google which led to the removal of the ‘View Image’ button from Google Images in 2018.
Platformisation: Getty has the largest and most efficient platform in the image economy, serving three main markets which value speed and ease of access over cost: media, creative professionals and corporate. In turn, being the default supplier for these sectors gives Getty power over its own suppliers, i.e. any creator who wants to reach those markets.
The second part of the paper focusses on legal and ethical aspects of Getty’s practices of appropriation. Richard’s work shows that Getty ‘appropriates’ and exploits public domain materials as well as many potential orphan works, meaning works whose actual copyright owner is either unknown or can’t be traced. This seems to indicate an apparently contradictory attitude towards copyright: while Getty aggressively protects its own intellectual property (or what they claim to be their own IP), they embrace the ambiguity of copyright law to reuse and exploit other people’s work."
#EU#Copyright#IP#DSM: "At the end of 2023, we organised a final salon on the implementation of the Directive on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market. Bulgaria had finally implemented the Directive, the second to last Member State to do so, and the moment seemed right to take stock of the implementation process one last time. While Poland still needs to conclude its national transposition, the comparative analysis of the laws of 26 Member States is sufficient to identify major flaws and new directions coming out of the implementation of the DSM Directive.
In this series of blog posts, we present the positive and negative trends in national copyright policy following the DSM implementation. We are focusing our analysis on those provisions that are most relevant from our perspective. In this initial article, we present the results of our analysis of the legal landscape for research."
#EU#Spain#NFTs#Copyright#IP: "A Commercial Court in Barcelona has made a ruling in a novel copyright dispute between fashion shop Mango and the Spanish collective society for artists VEGAP (text of the decision in Spanish here). The dispute involves the adaptation of a number of works by prominent Spanish artists into garments displayed on the Metaverse site, and the court ruled in favour of the defendant Mango.
The facts of the case are that in March 2022, Mango announced that it was going to display a series of unique works by artist Farkas in a virtual museum located in Decentraland. The collection was set to re-interpret several pieces by Joan Miró, Antoni Tàpies, and Miquel Barceló; the original physical artworks were owned by one of the companies in the Mango group, and they ceded them to Mango so that they could be displayed at the opening of a shop in New York; as part of this event, the metaverse versions were made, as well as NFTs of the adaptations. While Mango had permission to display the physical works, VEGAP considered that the creation of digital adaptations, the subsequent minting of NFTs based on those works, as well as display all of the above without permission was an unauthorised act, and therefore sued for copyright infringement in its role as collective manager on behalf of Spanish artists. VEGAP alleged that displaying the works and turning them into NFTs infringed the exclusive moral rights of integrity and disclosure, and also the economic rights of communication to the public, reproduction, and adaptation."
#AI#GenerativeAI#GeneratedImages#China#Copyright#IP: "On November 27, 2023, the Beijing Internet Court (BIC) ruled in an infringement lawsuit (Li v. Liu) that an AI-generated image is copyrightable and that a person who prompted the AI-generated image is entitled to the right of authorship under Chinese Copyright Law (see our bilingual version, and the later-released official translation). Plaintiff generated an image of a woman by using Stable Diffusion, an open-source generative AI model that creates images from textual prompts. After publishing the disputed image on a Chinese social media platform (Xiaohongshu), Plaintiff discovered that Defendant had used the same image to illustrate an article on a different website without permission. Plaintiff then sued Defendant in the BIC.
Specifically, BIC made the following rulings:
The disputed AI-created image constitutes a “work” pursuant to the Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China."
Wake me up when record labels and media companies learn how to build marketing platforms, besides extracting feudal rents from others who do the job they should be doing.
The move would mean the social media platform would no longer have access to songs by artists including Taylor Swift, The Weeknd and Drake.
Universal accused TikTok of "bullying" and said it wanted to pay a "fraction" of the rate other social media sites do for access to its vast catalogue.
TikTok said Universal was presenting a "false narrative and rhetoric".
Music companies earn royalty payments when their songs are played on streaming and social media platforms.
Although TikTok - which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance - has more than one billion users, it accounts for just 1% of Universal's total revenue, the label said."
#VideoGames#Nintendo#Pokemon#Palworld#Copyright#IP: "So should Nintendo sit this one out? I don’t think so. Pokémon is one of the most valuable media empires in the world, and having a game that is practically being advertised by people as “Pokémon with guns” could tarnish their reputation. But then again, it may not, Pokémon will remain a strong IP regardless of what happens with Palworld. My guess is that copyright litigation is not the way to go here, why not negotiate some sort of licensing agreement with Palworld behind the scenes? Why not even embrace the new direction presented by this game? Nintendo could become a partner, and allow Pokémon to actually exist in Palworld. I would actually start playing Palworld if I could take Pikachu on a hunting expedition with guns. Give me a playable Flareon with a flame thrower. Please take my money!"
RT @katecrawford
✨Just published: New @ISSUESinST collection of STS scholars addressing the urgent governance challenges of generative AI. This came from our year-long @ENS_ULM working group, where we each focused on one core problem:
#AI#GenerativeAI#AITraining#Copyright#FairUse#IP: "Copyright law was developed by eighteenth-century capitalists to intertwine art with commerce. In the twenty-first century, it is being used by technology companies to allow them to exploit all the works of human creativity that are digitized and online. But the destabilization around generative AI is also an opportunity for a more radical reassessment of the social, legal, and cultural frameworks underpinning creative production.
(...)
It may be time to develop concepts of intellectual property with a stronger focus on equity and creativity as opposed to economic incentives for media corporations. We are seeing early prototypes emerge from the recent collective bargaining agreements for writers, actors, and directors, many of whom lack copyrights but are nonetheless at the creative core of filmmaking. The lessons we learn from them could set a powerful precedent for how to pluralize intellectual property. Making a better world will require a deeper philosophical engagement with what it is to create, who has a say in how creations can be used, and who should profit." https://issues.org/generative-ai-copyright-law-crawford-schultz/
Pex is a tech company that tracks and analyses copyrighted content on digital services. According to their data from November 2023, there are over one million tracks that have been sped-up, slowed-down or otherwise “modified” in places like Spotify, Apple Music and TIDAL. Examples include a sped-up version of Lady Gaga‘s ‘Bloody Mary‘ (25 million streams) and Childish Gambino’s ‘Heartbeat‘ (19 million streams).
These “manipulated” tracks usually do not have legal licensing to be used, meaning they are infringing on copyright. The original artists therefore do not collect royalties on the song’s streams."
#AI#GenerativeAI#GeneratedImages#Copyright#AITraining#IP: "Since the emergence of Midjourney and other image generators, artists have been watching and wondering whether AI is a great opportunity or an existential threat. Now, after a list of 16,000 names emerged of artists whose work Midjourney had allegedly used to train its AI – including Bridget Riley, Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, David Hockney and Anish Kapoor – the art world has issued a call to arms against the technologists.
British artists have contacted US lawyers to discuss joining a class action against Midjourney and other AI firms, while others have told the Observer that they may bring their own legal action in the UK.
“What we need to do is come together,” said Tim Flach, president of the Association of Photographers and an internationally acclaimed photographer whose name is on the list.
“This public showing of this list of names is a great catalyst for artists to come together and challenge it. I personally would be up for doing that.”
The 24-page list of names forms Exhibit J in a class action brought by 10 American artists in California against Midjourney, Stability AI, Runway AI and DeviantArt. Matthew Butterick, one of the lawyers representing the artists, said: “We’ve had interest from artists around the world, including the UK.”
The tech firms have until 8 February to respond to the claim. Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment."
#AI#GenerativeAI#AITraining#Meta#LLaMA#LLMs#Copyright#IP: "We have previously analysed US class actions against Open AI (here) and Google (here) for unauthorized use of copyright works in the training of generative AI tools, respectively ChatGPT, Google Bard and Gemini. To further develop this excursus on the US case law, in this post we consider two recent class actions against Meta launched by copyright holders (mainly book authors), for alleged infringement of IP in their books and written works through use in training materials for LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI). Such case law is interesting for the reconstruction of the technology deployed by Meta and the training methodology (at least from the plaintiff’s perspective) but also because the court has had the chance to preliminarily evaluate the robustness of the claims. Given the similarity of the legal arguments and the same technology being at stake (Meta’s LLaMA), upon the request of the parties, the Court treated the two class actions jointly (here)."
#Patents#IP: "How does a patent—an abstract legal form—accrue such contradictory associations with life or death beyond its legal meaning? Such conflicting discourses cannot be adequately explained by references to legal, sociological, or economic causes alone; patents seem to have acquired meanings that exceed their legal or commercial uses.
Perhaps IP law’s rapid and extensive private enclosure of what were previously public or non-commodifiable objects may explain the migration of IP forms to other social and cultural contexts. In this vein, much of interdisciplinary scholarship of intellectual property law have adopted a critical tenor (Biagioli, Jaszi, Woodmansee 2002). They have analyzed and critiqued the expansive commodification of cultural expressions, knowledge practices, and of everyday lifeworlds (Coombes 1998; Dutfield 2000; Drahos and Braithwaite 2003; Bowrey 2005, 2020; Macmillan 2006, 2022; Bellido and Bowrey 2022). This direction of dynamics—the colonization of social and cultural domains by law driven by economic rationality—continues to remain of concern. My focus in this article is different and is on the other direction of law-society-culture dynamics: the question of how cultural forms shape and stabilize legal-economic forms and their meanings. I want to probe and examine how patents have become signs of cultural economy and how their signification shapes the ideology of intellectual property."
#BigPharma#Patents#IP: "Rather than prioritizing long-term investment in research and development, they focused on protecting their intellectual property. The pharmaceutical industry gutted research and development of new drugs. They got rid of all of many parts of that process that they could contract out or buy from others. What they were left with were drug monopolies and that really changed how they behaved.
Today, by and large, the pharmaceutical industry does little to research and develop drugs. They buy up other companies that have done that research, often with huge amounts of taxpayer funding. As a consequence, if you are a company that profits primarily from intellectual property, what’s important to you is not doctors and medical researchers but lobbyists and lawyers, because they are the people who are going to extend and deepen your patents.
You have no interest in medicines that would treat diseases primarily suffered by poor people in poor countries; you have no interest in dealing with pathogens that could cause the next pandemic, because in all likelihood, a pandemic won’t be caused by that specific pathogen. They have very little interest in curing disease, because their ultimate blockbuster is lifelong treatment for chronic disease — that’s where enormous amounts of their time and energy are spent."
The fight around IP/copyright with regard to trainingdata for AI could kill all competition for Google and Microsoft , they will probably be able to make some financial deals with publishers, also especially Google has an awful lot of data itself. For smaller players it will be even harder too compete or am i too pessimistic ? #AI#GenerativeAI#copyright#trainingdata#IP#bigtech
#PD#PublicDomain#Copyright#IP: "Everybody’s talking about Mickey. On November 18th, 1928 Steamboat Willie was published, the third Mickey Mouse film by Walt Disney and the first one to be published with sound. The prior two Mickey Mouse films, including Plane Crazy, had not been picked up for distribution so this was the public’s first introduction to the mouse. Steamboat Willie may have been named after another popular movie that came out in 1928, Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., or perhaps the Vaudeville song, “Steamboat Bill” (popularized in 1910) which was included in the soundtrack (along with the 19th century song “Turkey in the Straw”).
But there were many other movies that debuted in 1928, and here are just a few noted examples:"
#AI#GenerativeAI#Copyright#IP#OpenAI#ChatGPT#NYT#News: "Ultimately, the outcomes may also hinge on the perceived utility and prevalence of the technology. The New York Times seeks to destroy all models trained with its content, but I doubt it will come to that, though I could be wrong. As someone noted on Twitter (apologies for not having the reference), judges’ decisions are influenced by personal experience, suggesting that the widespread use of ChatGPT by judges and their families might reduce the likelihood of the technology being completely abolished.
Furthermore, even if US cases are resolved unfavourably for generative AI companies, the global landscape is vast. It’s possible that other countries might seize the opportunity to become more accommodating to AI developments."
My dream is that one day, the "public domain day" list of works entering the public domain will be completely impossible and infeasible to produce, let alone read.
Great, now we have to become digital copyright experts
the agreements and more fractious disputes between creators and the AI companies that want to ingest and use that work to build artificial intelligence models create an unhappy moment for both sides of the conflict
The Pokémon Company Announces It Will ‘Investigate’ Palworld IP And Assets (www.forbes.com)
The Pokémon Company, partially owned by Nintendo, announced it will investigate Palworld for potentially using its IP and assets.