Rightsholders have waged an aggressive campaign about the alleged harmfulness of AI training. When that rhetoric is put to the test in court, however, they keep coming up short. Last year, the Southern District of New York tossed claims for removal of “copyright management information” in AI training, explaining that there was no harm alleged, so no standing to sue….

California Assembly Bill 412 Myths v Facts MYTH: This bill helps advance federal copyright law for emerging technologies.  FACT: AB 412 undermines and is preempted by federal copyright law and would be void upon enactment. The bill’s requirements would significantly disrupt the functioning of federal copyright law, particularly the fair use doctrine. As a result, it would face successful legal…

The federal government recently sought input on what should be included in a federal “AI Action Plan,” and the responses of two companies drew a series of stark headlines: “OpenAI and Google ask for a government exemption to train their AI models on copyrighted material,” “OpenAI and Google ask the government to let them train AI on content they don’t…

Statutory Damages: Copyright law provides plaintiffs that register their copyrights prior to an alleged infringement with statutory damages, meaning they can recover damages from infringers regardless of whether the rightsholders have suffered any actual injury. Statutory damages currently range between $750 and $30,000 for each work infringed and up to $150,000 in cases involving willful infringement. Statutory damages are unpredictable,…

The money and attention swirling around artificial intelligence has attracted a pitch almost as old as copyright itself: in the midst of uncertainty, precarity, and technological change, an individual author can leverage their copyrights to stop change, to cash in, or both. Among the folks dining out on this idea is Ed Newton-Rex, UK-based propagator of the “Statement on AI…

As seen in Law360. The first big artificial intelligence fair use legal opinion is out,[1] and it was a surprising loss for AI developer ROSS Intelligence,[2] whose AI training was found to infringe copyrights held by Thomson Reuters,[3] owner of legal publisher Westlaw. Attorneys and others who care about fair use and emerging technology have watched this case closely as…

What if you woke up one day to discover that a website you use almost every day seemingly no longer exists? Instead, when you enter the website’s URL, you see a splash page informing you that the site has been blocked in the U.S. pursuant to a federal court order. Or maybe you just get a 404 error. Unfortunately, if…