UK Government Report: Unleash AI by Reining In IP

EXTRA One of the questions hanging over calls to require generative AI developers to obtain licenses for copyrighted works used in training their models, such as we saw last week from the Human Artistry Campaign coalition of rights owners, is whether legal foundation for that demand exists in current copyright law, or would require new action by legislatures to create that foundation. It’s a political question as much as a legal one. And while its legal colorings may favor the pro-licensing position, the political ones may not. Just how much they may not can be glimpsed in a new U.K. government report issued this month that illustrates how difficult it could be to persuade policymakers to provide any such new statutory authority.

Generative AI Scales Up

EXTRA The Ides of March this year fell in the middle of what turned out to be another busy week on the generative AI front. And, while perhaps not holding quite the same dire portent as for Caesar, the fallout from the events around that date could prove dramatic nonetheless. On Tuesday, OpenAI released its Generative Pre-trained Transformer version four (GPT-4) and an enhanced, GPT-4-powered edition of its ChatGPT bot. On Wednesday, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a new policy statement regarding the registration of works created in whole or in part by generative AI tools and announced plans to launch a formal inquiry into “a wide range” of issues arising from generative AI.

Picture This: With Copyright, Everything New is Old Again

EXTRA: Oscar Wilde once famously quipped, “The only duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” So it is somehow fitting that a historic Supreme Court case involving a photograph of Wilde would become a fulcrum point in the latest legal dustup over the proper historic reading of the Copyright Act. The historic case in question is Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, decided in 1884. It features prominently in the lawsuit filed by Dr. Stephen Thaler against the U.S. Copyright Office over the office’s refusal to register a piece of art Thaler claims was “created autonomously” by an AI engine of Thaler’s own design.

Generative AI: Beyond Copyright?

EXTRA From the days of player pianos if not earlier, new technologies have often discomfited creators and copyright owners, at least when the technology is first introduced. Radio was initially seen as a mortal threat to songwriters and music publishers fearful of its effect on sheet music sales. The VCR, in the immortal words of then-Motion Picture Assn. of America CEO Jack Valenti, was to the Hollywood studios “like the Boston Strangler to a woman home alone.” The MP3 compression format was the bane of the recorded music business.

Un-Googling the News

EXTRA It has long been the case that many of the conflicts between rights owners and online platform operators that play out as copyright disputes have as much to do with the mechanics of value capture in online markets as with any of the exclusive rights of copyright owners. There are a number of reasons for that conflation, many beyond the scope of this blog. But one big reason is that copyright law does in fact endow authors and their assignees with explicitly defined exclusive rights, the infringement of any one of which can trigger potentially ruinous statutory damages. It’s the biggest hammer in rights owners’ legal toolkit and in many ways the easiest to wield.

The Ins and Outs of AI Art and Copyright

EXTRA A trio of artists last week filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco against the developers of Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DeviantArt, charging them with copyright infringement for scraping millions of images from the internet and using them without permission to train their artificial intelligence-based image-generating software. The complaint, which asks the court to certify it as a class action, also charges the defendants with unfair competition and violating the plaintiffs’ right of publicity under California law for advertising their AI’s ability to create works “in the style of” named artists.

Reading Up on Digital Disruption

EXTRA Apropos our previous post on the continued vitality of used hardcover and paperback book sales in this otherwise digital age, the folks at OverDrive are out with some data on the flip side of that story. Among the 88,000 schools and libraries worldwide for which OverDrive provides licensed access to e-books, audiobooks, magazines and other print material in digital formats, readers borrowed 555 million digital items in 2022, up a healthy 10% over 2021. The amount and scope of material in circulation also expanded, as OverDrive added 1 million titles to its digital collections from 73 new content partners.

Second Hand Education

EXTRA All of us here at the RightsTech Project wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2023.

Looking back at 2022 one of the more interesting, if unexpected, rights-related sectors to prosper during the year was used-book sales. According to the international research outfit WordsRated, sales of used books rose 5.5% over 2021, to reach $24.03 billion worldwide, or roughly 15% of total global book sales. The group further expects that growth to continue, or even accelerate, over the next decade at a compound annual rate of 6.6%, with sales reaching $45.53 billion by 2032.

Patent, Copyright Offices Open Public Comments on Joint NFT Study

The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, and the U.S. Copyright Office, this week formally solicited public comments for their joint study on matters related to intellectual property and non-fungible tokens, as requested in June by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Written comments are due January 9, 2023.The offices also announced a series of three public roundtables on the study to be held on January 10, 12 and 18.

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