Getty Images spending millions to battle a ‘world of rhetoric’ in AI suit, CEO says — “Technology startups like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral have flourished by taking vast amounts of data from the open web and using it to train their foundational AI models, which can produce lifelike texts, images and videos. However, the strategies of these firms have raised concerns over their use of copyrighted material. Several lawsuits have targeted AI firms over alleged copyright infringements from The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI to several U.S. record labels’ claims against AI music generation services Suno and Udio.”
Generative AI’s Illusory Case for Fair Use — “Despite wide employment of anthropomorphic terms to describe their behavior, AI machines do not learn or reason as humans do. Instead, they employ an algorithmic process to store the works they are fed during the training process. They do not ‘know’ anything independently of the works on which they are trained, so their output is a function of the copied materials… The exploitation of expressive content to produce new expressive content sharply distinguishes AI copying from the copying at issue in the technological fair use cases relied upon by AI’s fair use advocates.”
Car in Gone in Sixty Seconds is not entitled to copyright protection — “Prior Ninth Circuit precedent, DC Comics v. Towle, 802 F.3d 1012 (9th Cir. 2015), establishes a test to determine whether a character is entitled to copyright protection: (1) the character must have ‘physical as well as conceptual qualities,’ (2) the character must be ‘sufficiently delineated to be recognizable as the same character whenever it appears’ and display ‘consistent, identifiable character traits and attributes,’ and (3) the character must be ‘especially distinctive’ and contain ‘some unique elements of expression.’ The Eleanor character failed all three parts of the test, the court of appeals found.”
Judge Rejects Ex-Copyright Chief’s Bid to Pause Trump Firing — “Even if Perlmutter was likely to succeed on the merits, [Judge] Kelly said his analysis was pinned on the irreparable harm threshold required to grant the order and Perlmutter did not meet that requirement. Perlmutter’s argument of irreparable harm rested on the idea that she was deprived of the statutory right to function as the register of copyrights, Kelly said. Recent court decisions from the US Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit have been ‘skeptical’ of that argument, the judge said.”
The ‘beige Amazon influencer’ lawsuit is headed for dismissal — “The lawsuit was simultaneously disconcerting and benign, eerie and borderline comical: the story of two women whose lives had begun to resemble each other’s via social media platforms made for a compelling storyline. The cream, white, and beige aesthetic of their content (and lives) meant that the essence of what was allegedly infringed was commonplace, even basic — but the similarities, documented over dozens of examples submitted to the court, were strange nonetheless”