Shira Perlmutter, who is suing the federal government over the Trump administration’s move to dismiss her from her position as U.S. Register of Copyrights, once again asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to grant an injunction, drawing connections between the timing of her dismissal and the release of the administration’s AI Action Plan.
Source: Defiant Fired Copyright Chief Urges Federal Court to Connect the Dots
A click-to-cancel rule could have a serious downside for streaming services’ revenues – but the global momentum for such a rule is growing. A group of US House representatives have introduced the Click to Cancel Act, a two-page bill that would turn the FTC’s overturned regulation into law, in exactly the same form as the FTC set it out last fall. That would allow the rule to get past the regulatory requirements the FTC faces when it makes changes to how businesses operate.
Source: The US’s ‘click-to-cancel’ rule could soon be law. What would that mean for streaming services?
Publishers including Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023 for copyright infringement, alleging that its Claude chatbot regurgitated copyrighted lyrics, indicating the company had trained the chatbot on those lyrics without permission. Now the music publishers additionally allege that Anthropic hid the fact that it used BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted lyrics, lawyers for the publishers said in a document filed on Monday (August 11) with the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Source: Music publishers allege Anthropic used BitTorrent to pirate copyrighted lyrics
The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper by circulation, has sued the generative AI startup Perplexity for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in Tokyo District Court on August 7, marks the first copyright challenge by a major Japanese news publisher against an AI company. Yomiuri alleges the scraping has been used by Perplexity to reproduce the newspaper’s copyrighted articles in responses to user queries without authorization.
Source: Japan’s largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, sues AI startup Perplexity for copyright violations
The lawsuit filed by ex-Copyright Office head Shira Perlmutter now has a summary judgement schedule, which will run into November. Both sides just recently filed a proposed schedule for that summary judgement sub-dispute, and the presiding judge signed off on the timetable soon thereafter. Taking a step back for a moment, a reinstatement-minded Perlmutter is technically spearheading two cases: A core complaint challenging her USCO dismissal and an appeal.
Source: Shira Perlmutter USCO Suit Sets Summary Judgement Schedule
Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed SoundExchange‘s $150 million lawsuit against SiriusXM, ruling that Congress has never granted the PRO the authority to file lawsuits on behalf of recording artists and record labels. In response, SoundExchange said in a statement, “SoundExchange firmly believes Judge Buchwald’s interpretation is entirely wrong on the law.”
Source: SoundExchange slams judge’s ruling in SiriusXM case as ‘entirely wrong on the law’
Midjourney responded to a lawsuit from Disney and Universal, arguing that the studios cannot stop AI training and cannot ‘have it both ways’ on AI. “Copyright law does not confer absolute control over the use of copyrighted works,” Midjourney’s lawyers argued. “The limited monopoly granted by copyright must give way to fair use, which safeguards countervailing public interests in the free flow of ideas and information.”
Source: Midjourney Says Disney Cannot Prevent AI Training and Wants to ‘Have It Both Ways’
The commission, in its interim report into “harnessing data and the digital economy”, used copyright as a case study for how Australia’s existing regulatory framework could be adapted to manage the risks of artificial intelligence. A key recommendation was that the federal government should conduct a sweeping review of regulations to plug potential gaps that could be exploited by “bad actors” using AI.
J.B. MacKinnon of Vancouver has filed class action lawsuits against Anthropic, Databricks, Meta, and Nvidia, alleging they illegally used copyrighted works by Canadian writers to train their large language models. The lawsuit claims MacKinnon’s books were part of a 196,640-book dataset that Nvidia used without securing licensing fees or author consent. “The models were entirely built on the mining of copyrighted work,” MacKinnon told the CBC.
Source: Canadian Author Sues Four AI Companies for Copyright Infringement
President Trump waded into the complex issue of paying copyright holders whose works are used for AI training, saying it is impractical and would put the U.S. at a disadvantage to China. “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for,” Trump said. “You just can’t do it, because it’s not doable.”
Source: Trump Rejects Idea of Paying Copyright Holders for AI Training: ‘It Just Doesn’t Work That Way’