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EXTRA The New York Times apparently has withdrawn its support for a nascent effort otherwise involving several leading news organizations aimed at filing one or more lawsuits against AI developers for scraping publishers’ archives without permission. Instead, the Paper of Record is reportedly considering unilateral litigation against OpenAI, after negotiations collapsed between the Times and the ChatGPT-developer over the terms of use of Times content to train the large language model (LLM) AI system.

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It took U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell all of 15 pages to dispense with AI developer Stephen Thaler’s argument that the U.S. Copyright Office and the U.S. Supreme Court have been misreading copyright law and the Constitution for the last 139 years. In granting the Copyright Office’s motion for summary judgment against Thaler last week in his lawsuit challenging the Office’s repeated refusal to accept registration for an image Thaler maintained was “autonomously created” by a generative AI system, Judge Howell reaffirmed the principle that copyright protection extends only to works created by human authors. Just as every court has done uniformly since 1884 when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of extending copyright protection to photographs in Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony.

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EXTRA With political pressure mounting over the head-snapping advances in generative artificial intelligence technology, on both sides of the Atlantic, a group of leading AI companies last week unveiled a new industry-led initiative to develop safety and transparency standards for the design and use of generative AI models.

While the new Frontier Model Forum is not primarily intended to address the controversies swirling around intellectual property and AI, some of what is expected to come out of the effort could, at least incidentally, help advance what copyright litigation and agitation have so far failed to achieve, or even articulate: a plausible means by which the the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems, and the copyrightability of their output, could be subject to workable licensing regimes. Among those is the expected introduction of a method for identifying and flagging AI-generated works for users.

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EXTRA Hollywood movies and TV shows have been brimming with computer-generated images for years, from superhero special effects to entire virtual sets digitally rendered in 3D with EPIC Games’ Unreal Engine. So it should have come as no surprise that studios would be keen to render actors digitally once the technology became available. It now has, thanks to recent advances in generative artificial technology. An actor’s likeness can be scanned or captured from existing footage, their voice taken from a recording, and fed into an AI engine to insert them into a scene or situation without the human original needed on set.

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The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union representing below-the-line workers in the entertainment business, last week issued a list of “core principles” for the use of artificial intelligence technology in stage and screen production. Among them is the need to develop “clear definitions that categorize various types of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ in order to advance enforceable legislative and collective bargaining oversight. IATSE will also urgently identify which crafts and Local Unions are most at-risk of being affected in the immediate future.”

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EXTRA Picking up where the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Google left off, USA Today-publisher Gannett Co. this week filed its own lawsuit against the search giant in U.S. district court in New York. The 80-page complaint covers much the same ground as DOJ’s filing, accusing Google of using anticompetitive tactics to achieve an illegal monopoly over the digital advertising market. But the Gannett suit seeks to make explicit what is only implicit in the DOJ action: News publishers are being directly harmed by Google’s actions.

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EXTRA Antitrust authorities in the European Union are apparently fed up with what they view as Google’s ongoing anticompetitive behavior in the online advertising business. Having levied at least three antitrust fines against the search giant in recent years totaling nearly $9 billion but doing little to alter Google’s business practices, the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, is now recommending a breakup of the Alphabet unit’s ad-tech monopoly through the forced sale of assets.

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EXTRA The timing was mere coincidence, and the context different. But the official organs or the copyright industries were quick to pounce on what is at least a colorable connection between the Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Lynn Goldsmith and the current bubbling controversy around the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models.

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EXTRA As it did with data protection and privacy with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union is again moving to establish a de facto global standard for the design and operation of generative artificial intelligence models and applications. Votes by two key committees of the European Parliament last week put the E.U.’s long-gestating AI Act on a glide path to adoption by the full legislature at a plenary session scheduled for mid-June. Once adopted, the proposed law would move to the final stage of the legislative process, involving three-way negotiations known as a trilogue among Parliament, the EU Commission and the EU Council.

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