Enlarge / Microsoft is named in the suit for allegedly building the system that allowed GPT derivatives to be trained using infringing material. (credit: Just_Super )

In August, word leaked out that The New York Times was considering joining the growing legion of creators that are suing AI companies for misappropriating their content. The Times had reportedly been negotiating with OpenAI regarding the potential to license its material, but those talks had not gone smoothly. So, eight months after the company was reportedly considering suing, the suit has now been filed .

The Times is targeting various companies under the OpenAI umbrella, as well as Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that both uses it to power its Copilot service and helped provide the infrastructure for training the GPT Large Language Model. But the suit goes well beyond the use of copyrighted material in training, alleging that OpenAI-powered software will happily circumvent the Times' paywall and ascribe hallucinated misinformation to the Times.

Journalism is expensive

The suit notes that The Times maintains a large staff that allows it to do things like dedicate reporters to a huge range of beats and engage in important investigative journalism, among other things. Because of those investments, the newspaper is often considered an authoritative source on many matters.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Google yesterday sued a group of people accused of weaponizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get competitors' websites removed from search results. Over the past few years, the foreign defendants "created at least 65 Google accounts so they could submit thousands of fraudulent notices of copyright infringement against more than 117,000 third-party website URLs," said Google's lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Another 500,000 URLs were also targeted, according to Google. "To date, Defendants' scheme has forced Google to investigate and respond to fraudulent takedown requests targeting more than 117,000 third-party website URLs, as well as takedown requests targeting more than half a million additional third-party URLs that are likely fraudulent based on preliminary investigation," the lawsuit said.

Google filed the lawsuit against Nguyen Van Duc and Pham Van Thien, who are both said to live in Vietnam, and 20 defendants whose identities are unknown. Google alleged that the defendants "appear to be connected with websites selling printed t-shirts, and their unlawful conduct aims to remove competing third-party sellers from Google Search results."

Enlarge

Artists suing Stability AI, Deviant Art, and Midjourney hit a roadblock this week in their quest to prove allegations that AI image generators illegally use copyrighted works to mimic unique artistic styles without compensation or consent.

On Monday, US district judge William H. Orrick dismissed many of the artists' claims after finding that the proposed class-action complaint "is defective in numerous respects." Perhaps most notably, two of the three named plaintiffs—independent artist Kelly McKernan and concept artist/professional illustrator Karla Ortiz—had apparently never registered any of their disputed works with the Copyright Office. Orrick dismissed their claims with prejudice, dropping them from the suit.

But while McKernan and Ortiz can no longer advance their claims, the lawsuit is far from over. Lead plaintiff, cartoonist, and illustrator Sarah Andersen will have the next 30 days to amend her complaint and keep the copyright dispute alive.

Enlarge (credit: Nodar Chernishev/Getty)

As the generative artificial intelligence gold rush intensifies, concerns about the data used to train machine learning tools have grown. Artists and writers are fighting for a say in how AI companies use their work, filing lawsuits and publicly agitating against the way these models scrape the internet and incorporate their art without consent.

Some companies have responded to this pushback with “opt-out” programs that give people a choice to remove their work from future models. OpenAI, for example, debuted an opt-out feature with its latest version of the image-to-text generator Dall-E. This August, when Meta began allowing people to submit requests to delete personal data from third parties used to train Meta’s generative AI models, many artists and journalists interpreted this new process as Meta’s very limited version of an opt-out program. CNBC explicitly referred to the request form as an “ opt-out tool .”

Enlarge / Universal Music artist Billie Eilish performing at Glastonbury last year. (credit: Getty Images)

Universal Music has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic, as the world’s largest music group battles against chatbots that churn out its artists’ lyrics.

Universal and two other music companies allege that Anthropic scrapes their songs without permission and uses them to generate “identical or nearly identical copies of those lyrics” via Claude, its rival to ChatGPT.

When Claude is asked for lyrics to the song “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor, for example, it responds with “a nearly word-for-word copy of those lyrics,” Universal, Concord, and ABKCO said in a filing with a US court in Nashville, Tennessee.

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Westend61 )

Kiwi Farms—a website credited with launching a range of targeted harassment campaigns, which Cloudflare considers its most dangerous customer ever —has remained online despite immense pressure to dismantle the website. But now it looks like Kiwi Farms may be facing its biggest threat yet. This week, an unexpected court ruling has shown "how copyright law could be a Kiwi Farms killer," tech law expert Eric Goldman wrote in his blog.

Goldman's blog analyzed a judgment issued Monday by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which reversed a lower court's decision to dismiss a copyright lawsuit filed by Russell Greer. According to Greer, Kiwi Farms targeted him with a harassment campaign so extreme that he wrote a book to explain why the harassment should stop. Kiwi Farms then uploaded the book and a song that Greer wrote, allegedly sharing his copyrighted materials to encourage users to continue mocking Greer.

Greer's troubles with Kiwi Farms started when he sued pop star Taylor Swift in 2016. That's when Kiwi Farms users "began 'a relentless harassment campaign,'" Greer alleged, including “direct harassment via phone, email, and social media." Kiwi Farms' “schemes" allegedly "successfully got him fired from his workplace and evicted” and led to "the creation of 'false social media profiles that impersonate him with names ... that mock his physical and developmental disabilities.'” Kiwi Farms frequently targets people with physical and mental disabilities, Greer told the court.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Benj Edwards )

On Thursday, Google announced that it plans to defend users of its generative AI systems on Google Cloud and Workspace platforms against intellectual property violation claims, reports Reuters . The move follows similar commitments by Microsoft and Adobe , but Google claims its approach is more comprehensive, covering both the use of copyrighted works for training AI and the output generated by the systems.

" The generated output indemnity means that you can use content generated with a range of our products knowing Google will indemnify you for third-party IP claims, including copyright," Google writes in its announcement post.

Specifically, the new policy will cover software like its Vertex AI development platform and Duet AI system, which are used for generating text and images in Google Workspace and Cloud programs. Notably, the Google announcement did not mention Bard , Google's more well-known generative AI chatbot.

Enlarge

Two weeks ago, the US Copyright Office refused to register a copyright for Théâtre D'opéra Spatial , an AI-generated image that got widespread media attention last year after it won an art competition. It’s at least the third time the Copyright Office has ruled that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted.

The Copyright Office first ruled on this issue in 2019. Artist Stephen Thaler tried to register an image that he said had been created entirely by a computer program. The Copyright Office rejected the application because copyright protection is only available for works created by human beings—not supernatural beings (like the Holy Spirit ), not animals (like this now-famous monkey ), and not computer programs.

The ruling raised an important question: Was the issue just that Thaler should have listed himself, rather than his AI system, as the image's creator? Or is AI-generated art categorically excluded from copyright protection?