Enlarge / The Nest Audio. (credit: Google )

Google and Sonos have been volleying patent infringement lawsuits back and forth for a few years now. Sonos has been making Internet-connected speakers since 2005 and has a lot of patents, while Google only jumped into the market in 2016 with the first speaker in the Google Home lineup (now called "Nest Audio"). You may remember that in early 2022 , Google lost a Sonos patent infringement case around controlling multiple speakers together in a group. After losing, rather than just paying Sonos a licensing fee for the feature, Google instead chose to reach into customers' homes and disable the feature from devices people had already bought.

This week Google managed to convince a federal court that some of the patents from the 2022 ruling are invalid, and Google's response was to immediately ship an update re-enabling the group speaker features on customers' devices. Here's the pretty wild statement Google made to customers on the Nest Support forum:

We recently made a change to speaker groups for Nest speakers, displays, and Chromecast where certain devices can only belong to one speaker group at a time in the Google Home app. A federal judge has found that two patents that Sonos accused our devices of infringing are invalid .

In light of this legal decision we’re happy to share that we will be rolling back this change. Devices will be able to belong to multiple speaker groups and you will no longer run into an error when trying to add a device to additional groups. We’re beginning to roll out this update immediately and expect it to go live across our devices and the Home App on Android in the next 48 hours. The change will also be coming soon to the Home App on iOS.

As it says in the statement, the invalidated patents were around adding speakers to multiple speaker groups. Google Home/Nest Audio and Sonos speakers can play audio from multiple speakers in multiple rooms, using their built-in microphones to automatically juggle the surprisingly complex audio delay problems, creating a seamless whole-home audio experience. Sonos smacked down Google with five patents in 2022, with the (still valid!) headline patent allowing for the control of multiple speaker volumes at once. Sonos won $32.5 million in damages from Google.

Enlarge / George R.R. Martin at an HBO Max screening. (credit: Amy Sussman/GA / Contributor | The Hollywood Reporter )

Yesterday, popular authors including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and George Saunders joined the Authors Guild in suing OpenAI, alleging that training the company's large language models (LLMs) used to power AI tools like ChatGPT on pirated versions of their books violates copyright laws and is "systematic theft on a mass scale."

“Generative AI is a vast new field for Silicon Valley's longstanding exploitation of content providers," Franzen said in a statement provided to Ars. "Authors should have the right to decide when their works are used to ‘train’ AI. If they choose to opt in, they should be appropriately compensated.”

OpenAI has previously argued against two lawsuits filed earlier this year by authors making similar claims that authors suing "misconceive the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence."

Enlarge (credit: Maryna Terletska | Moment )

Yesterday, some of the biggest textbook publishers sued Library Genesis, an illegal shadow library that publishers accused of "extensive violations of federal copyright law."

Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. They claimed that Library Genesis (aka Libgen) is operated by unknown individuals based outside the United States, who know that the shadow library is "one of the largest, most notorious, and far-reaching infringement operations in the world" and intentionally violate copyright laws with "absolutely no legal justification for what they do."

According to publishers, Libgen offers free downloads for over 20,000 books that the publishers never authorized Libgen to distribute. They claimed that Libgen is "a massive piracy effort" and noted that their complaint may be updated if more infringed works are found. This vast infringement is causing publishers and authors serious financial and creative harm, publishers alleged.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards )

On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it will provide legal protection for customers who are sued for copyright infringement over content generated by the company's AI systems. This new policy, called the Copilot Copyright Commitment, is an expansion of Microsoft's existing intellectual property indemnification coverage, Reuters reports .

Microsoft's announcement comes as generative AI tools like ChatGPT have raised concerns about reproducing copyrighted material without proper attribution. Microsoft has heavily invested in AI through products like GitHub Copilot and Bing Chat that can generate original code, text, and images on demand. Its AI models have gained these capabilities by scraping publicly available data off of the Internet without seeking express permission from copyright holders.

By offering legal protection, Microsoft aims to give customers confidence in deploying its AI systems without worrying about potential copyright issues. The policy covers damages and legal fees, providing customers with an added layer of protection as generative AI sees rapid adoption across the tech industry.

Enlarge / Sarah Silverman attends The Bedwetter book signing at the Barnes and Noble Union Square in New York City. (credit: Lars Niki / Contributor | Corbis Entertainment )

This week, OpenAI finally responded to a pair of nearly identical class-action lawsuits from book authors —including Sarah Silverman, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Chris Golden, and Richard Kadrey—who earlier this summer alleged that ChatGPT was illegally trained on pirated copies of their books.

In OpenAI's motion to dismiss (filed in both lawsuits) , the company asked a US district court in California to toss all but one claim alleging direct copyright infringement, which OpenAI hopes to defeat at "a later stage of the case."

The authors' other claims—alleging vicarious copyright infringement, violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment—need to be "trimmed" from the lawsuits "so that these cases do not proceed to discovery and beyond with legally infirm theories of liability," OpenAI argued.

Enlarge (credit: Kinga Krzeminska | Moment )

Major record labels are suing the Internet Archive, accusing the nonprofit of "massive" and "blatant" copyright infringement "of works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century."

The lawsuit was filed Friday in a US district court in New York by UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Concord Bicycle Assets, CMGI, Sony Music Entertainment, and Arista Music. It targets the Internet Archive's "Great 78 Project," which was launched in 2006.

For the Great 78 Project, the Internet Archive partners with recording engineer George Blood— who is also a defendant in the lawsuit—to digitize sound recordings on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records. These early sound recordings are typically of poor quality and were made between 1898 and the late 1950s by using very brittle materials. The goal of the Great 78 Project was to preserve these early recordings so they would not be lost as records break and could continue to be studied as originally recorded.

Enlarge / Comedian and author Sarah Silverman. (credit: Jason Kempin / Staff | Getty Images North America )

Enlarge (credit: nicolamargaret | E+ )

On Friday, a US district judge ruled in favor of book publishers suing the Internet Archive (IA) for copyright infringement. The IA’s Open Library project —which partners with libraries to scan print books in their collections and offer them as lendable e-books—had no right to reproduce 127 of the publishers’ books named in the suit, judge John Koeltl decided.

IA's so-called "controlled digital lending" practice "merely creates derivative e-books that, when lent to the public, compete with those [e-books] authorized by the publishers,” Koeltl wrote in his opinion.

Publishers suing—Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley—had alleged that the Open Library provided a way for libraries to avoid paying e-book licensing fees that generate substantial revenue for publishers. These licensing fees are paid by aggregators like OverDrive and constitute a “thriving” market that IA “supplants,” Koeltl wrote. Penguin’s e-book licensing generates $59 million annually, for example.