RSS co-creator launches new protocol for AI data licensing — “On the legal side, the RSL team has established a collective licensing organization, the RSL Collective, that can negotiate terms and collect royalties, similar to ASCAP for musicians or MPLC for films. As in music and film, the goal is to give licensors a single point of contact for paying royalties and provide rights holders a way to set terms with dozens of potential licensors at once.”
Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster claim copyright infringement by AI startup Perplexity — “Filed in Manhattan federal court late Wednesday evening, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster accuse Perplexity in 55-page civil complaint of violating their copyrights both at the curation stage when it uses a software program called ‘PerplexityBot’ to crawl and scrape their websites for Perplexity’s ‘answer engine,’ and also at the input stage when it reproduces copyrighted articles that are responsive to user searches to prompt responses from its retrieval-augmented generation output of its large language model.”
The Case for using Small Language Models — “Because of their focused training data, SLMs are also faster and more cost-effective to build, fine-tune, and improve over time than LLMs. These qualities of SLMs can give businesses the agility to develop AI solutions that can quickly adapt to changing market dynamics, shifting customer expectations, or new regulatory demands without the lengthy development cycles and high sunk costs typically associated with LLMs.”
Apple Sued by Authors for Copyright Infringement — “On Friday, authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed a lawsuit in Northern California targeting Apple’s ‘OpenELM’ large language models, alleging the company ‘copied protected works without consent and without credit or compensation.’ The suit accuses Apple of using the Books3 dataset of pirated books and employing its own proprietary Applebot to scrap the web and, potentially, other online ‘shadow libraries.'”
Did Showtime make a witch’s brew out of a novelist’s copyrighted characters? — “A writer who claimed that a streaming channel ‘blended attributes of her various characters in a cauldron’ in a popular horror-fantasy TV series did not show that the overlaps between the two works were so strikingly similar as to rule out the possibility of independent creation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held.”