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      New York Times: Microsoft’s AI Tools Are Nothing Like The VCR

      news.movim.eu / TorrentFreak · Tuesday, 19 March - 15:10 · 4 minutes

    betamax “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”

    The quote above comes from the late Jack Valenti , who was the Motion Picture Association’s boss in 1982, when he warned the House of Representatives of the looming video recorder threat.

    With the benefit of hindsight, the VCR wasn’t all that scary for Hollywood. The movie industry continued to flourish in the decades that followed, while technology continued along the path of progress too. New inventions have come along and for many rightsholders, generative AI (GenAI) is today’s growing concern.

    The VCR threat cemented itself in legal history through the Betamax decision which still plays a role today, for various reasons. As reported yesterday , the decision was cited in the ongoing legal battle between book publishers and the Internet Archive. Simultaneously, the VCR is also starring in a legal dispute between the New York Times and Microsoft.

    NYT vs. OpenAI/Microsoft

    Late last year The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft , alleging that its generative AI models were trained on copyrighted news articles. The news publication also suggested that, when prompted the right way, ChatGPT could recite content from these articles.

    OpenAI previously asked the court to dismiss these claims , alleging that the New York Times ‘hacked’ its service to produce the ‘highly anomalous’ outputs. The Times’ DMCA violation claim, misappropriation claim, and contributory infringement claim either fail or fall short, OpenAI added.

    Microsoft filed a separate motion to dismiss. Instead of focusing on alleged hacking practices, the company led with Jack Valenti’s ‘Boston Strangler’ analogy, part of an all-out effort by television and movie producers to stop a groundbreaking new technology.

    Hollywood was ultimately unable to stop the VCR. The ‘scaremongering’ didn’t convince the Supreme Court in ‘Sony (Betamax) v. Universal City Studios’ and the VCR was declared legal. The rest is history.

    Microsoft Cites VCR Scaremongering

    According to Microsoft, the legal crusade against AI models should be seen similarly. Instead of alleging concrete copyright infringement by end users, the technology itself is framed as copyright-infringing. That’s incorrect, the tech giant countered in its motion to dismiss earlier this month.

    “At most, The Times’s allegations establish Microsoft’s awareness that someone could use a GPT-based product to infringe. Of course, the same was true of the VCR — as it is of word processors, hard drives, social media feeds, internet connections, and so forth.

    “Fortunately, the Supreme Court long ago rejected liability merely based on offering a multi-use product,” Microsoft added.

    Microsoft asked the court to dismiss several key claims, including contributory copyright infringement. The claim fails because there’s no evidence that the tech company knew of any third-party copyright infringements or contributed to them, Microsoft argued.

    NYT: AI is Nothing Like the VCR

    Yesterday, The Times responded to the motion to dismiss, starting with a VCR analogy. According to the news outlet, the VCR is nothing like the GenAI threat they’re facing today.

    “Defendants’ generative AI models are nothing like VCRs. Sony didn’t copy movies and television shows to build VCRs; Defendants built their AI models by copying millions of Times articles and other copyrighted works without permission or payment.”

    Unlike the VCR, GPT services are trained on copyrighted content without permission and can reproduce these in part, The Times argues.

    “Defendants are using their AI models to copy and summarize even breaking news articles that users would otherwise seek on a publisher’s website. If VCRs had been built with movies to make movies that compete with movies, or if Sony oversaw the VCR’s infringing users, Sony would have gone the other way.”

    Microsoft’s defense is largely predicated on its conclusion that the use of copyrighted content for AI training is fair use. The Times sees this as an “absurd argument” but doesn’t respond to it in detail. Instead, it mostly sticks to its original claims.

    ‘Using AI to Bypass Paywalls’

    One of the key claims in the complaint is contributory copyright infringement. According to legal precedents, a party can be found liable for copyright infringement if it induces, causes, or materially contributes to it. This is particularly true when a service has few non-infringing uses.

    This claim was also used against Sony’s VCR but that ultimately failed. The Times hasn’t listed any concrete infringements in its complaint but notes that its pleadings against Microsoft are sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss at this stage.

    “Although Microsoft argues that copyright infringement by users of its GenAI products is just a ‘theoretical possibility’, the question at this stage is whether The Times has plausibly alleged that such infringement has taken place. The answer is yes,” Microsoft notes.

    To illustrate, The Times references a Gizmodo article that suggested ChatGPT’s ‘Browse with Bing’ was paused after people used it to bypass paywalls. Microsoft wasn’t blind to these copyright infringement issues, The Times notes, stressing that it previously alerted the company to its concerns.

    All in all, the Times wants the case to move forward in its entirety while Microsoft would like it to end here. It’s now up to the court to decide if the case can go forward, and on what claims. Alternatively, the parties can choose to settle their disagreements outside of court but, thus far, there’s no evidence to show either side prefers that option.

    —-

    A copy of Microsoft’s motion to dismiss, submitted at a New York federal court, can be found here (pdf) and The Times’ response is available here (pdf)

    From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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      NYT to OpenAI: No hacking here, just ChatGPT bypassing paywalls

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 12 March - 18:05

    NYT to OpenAI: No hacking here, just ChatGPT bypassing paywalls

    Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket )

    Late Monday, The New York Times responded to OpenAI's claims that the newspaper "hacked" ChatGPT to "set up" a lawsuit against the leading AI company.

    "OpenAI is wrong," The Times repeatedly argued in a court filing opposing OpenAI's motion to dismiss the NYT's lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement. "OpenAI’s attention-grabbing claim that The Times 'hacked' its products is as irrelevant as it is false."

    OpenAI had argued that NYT allegedly made "tens of thousands of attempts to generate" supposedly "highly anomalous results" showing that ChatGPT would produce excerpts of NYT articles. The NYT's allegedly deceptive prompts—such as repeatedly asking ChatGPT, "what's the next sentence?"—targeted "two uncommon and unintended phenomena" from both its developer tools and ChatGPT: training data regurgitation and model hallucination. OpenAI considers both "a bug" that the company says it intends to fix. OpenAI claimed no ordinary user would use ChatGPT this way.

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      The Lede review: Calvin Trillin on the golden age of American reporting

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 10 March - 09:00 · 1 minute

    A collection of work by a giant of New York journalism is both a joy and a lesson, particularly on objectivity and its limits

    For decades, Calvin Trillin has been one the most celebrated journalists in New York. This splendid collection of his pieces is filled with reminders of what makes him special: he is equally good at the serious stuff and “pieces meant to amuse”.

    The press is the subject that knits these stories together. It occurred to Trillin that these articles “amounted to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like” since he entered the game. Many are from the 1960s, 70s and 80s. They provide the flavor of the glory days of print journalism, when newsstands were stuffed with magazines and papers written by giants like Murray Kempton, Molly Ivins and Edna Buchanan – and giants in their own minds, like RW Apple Jr – each of whom gets their due here, in Trillin’s 32nd book.

    A veterinarian prescribed antibiotics Monday for a camel that lives behind an Iberville Parish truck stop after a Florida woman told law officers that she bit the 600-pound animal’s genitalia after it sat on her when she and her husband entered its enclosure to retrieve their deaf dog.

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      Les clones de Wordle risquent de disparaître

      news.movim.eu / Numerama · Friday, 8 March - 10:46

    Le New York Times, qui détient les droits du très populaire Wordle, a envoyé des demandes de retrait aux développeurs de variantes du jeu. Des milliers de sites pourraient fermer.

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      Microsoft asks to dismiss New York Times’s ‘doomsday’ copyright lawsuit

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 6 March - 19:17

    The tech giant said the lawsuit was near-sighted and akin to Hollywood’s losing backlash against the VCR

    Microsoft has responded to a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the New York Times over alleged use of content to train generative artificial intelligence, calling the claim a false narrative of “doomsday futurology”. The tech giant said the lawsuit was near-sighted and akin to Hollywood’s losing backlash against the VCR.

    In a motion to dismiss part of the lawsuit filed Monday, Microsoft, which was sued in December alongside ChatGPT-maker OpenAI , scoffed at the newspaper’s claim that Times content receives “particular emphasis” and that tech companies “seek to free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism”.

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      OpenAI accuses NYT of hacking ChatGPT to set up copyright suit

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 27 February - 21:58

    OpenAI accuses NYT of hacking ChatGPT to set up copyright suit

    Enlarge (credit: Busà Photography | Moment Unreleased )

    OpenAI is now boldly claiming that The New York Times "paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products" like ChatGPT to "set up" a lawsuit against the leading AI maker.

    In a court filing Monday, OpenAI alleged that "100 examples in which some version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model supposedly generated several paragraphs of Times content as outputs in response to user prompts" do not reflect how normal people use ChatGPT.

    Instead, it allegedly took The Times "tens of thousands of attempts to generate" these supposedly "highly anomalous results" by "targeting and exploiting a bug" that OpenAI claims it is now "committed to addressing."

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      OpenAI claims New York Times ‘hacked’ ChatGPT to build copyright lawsuit

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 27 February - 19:30

    In a filing Monday, OpenAI claims a ‘hired gun’ took ‘tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results’

    OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss parts of the New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against it, arguing that the newspaper “hacked” its chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems to generate misleading evidence for the case.

    OpenAI said in a filing in Manhattan federal court on Monday that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through “deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use”.

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      Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 20 February - 14:05

    Why The New York Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI

    Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    The day after The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement, the author and systems architect Daniel Jeffries wrote an essay-length tweet arguing that the Times “has a near zero probability of winning” its lawsuit. As we write this, it has been retweeted 288 times and received 885,000 views.

    “Trying to get everyone to license training data is not going to work because that's not what copyright is about,” Jeffries wrote. “Copyright law is about preventing people from producing exact copies or near exact copies of content and posting it for commercial gain. Period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or simply does not understand how copyright works.”

    This article is written by two authors. One of us is a journalist who has been on the copyright beat for nearly 20 years. The other is a law professor who has taught dozens of courses on IP and Internet law. We’re pretty sure we understand how copyright works. And we’re here to warn the AI community that it needs to take these lawsuits seriously.

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      ‘Unlike 9/11, we’re fighting back’: Arab Americans in Dearborn are resilient in the face of Islamophobia

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 11 February - 12:00

    Lessons learned from anti-Arab attacks in the early 2000s help a new generation respond to hateful rhetoric and threats

    On the main street of Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, it’s common to see business signs in both Arabic and English script. A Lebanese grill sits across from a Yemeni coffee house, and next door a store sells hijabs. The Arab American National Museum, the only such institution in the US, is a half mile away from a playground and public elementary school in the third largest district in Michigan.

    The Arab American presence touches every corner of Dearborn – more than half of its nearly 110,000 residents are of Middle Eastern or north African origin. And that unique cultural blend is what draws many to this growing city just 10 miles west of downtown Detroit.

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