A first look at the copyright relevant parts in the final AI Act compromise — “On Friday evening, after 38 hours of negotiations, representatives of the European Parliament, EU member states and the European Commission reached a provisional agreement on the proposed AI Act. The deal reached on Friday night now paves the way for the adoption of the AI Act in the first half of 2024, bringing to an end a legislative process that has lasted more than two and a half years and during which the scope of the Act has been significantly expanded.”
Africa IP Highlights 2023: copyright — Over at IPKat, Chijioke Okorie recaps major legislative, judicial, and governmental copyright developments from the past year in Africa.
Meta used copyrighted books for AI training despite its own lawyers’ warnings, authors allege — The allegations, concerning pirated books that make up part of the “Pile” dataset, which Meta acknowledges it used to train its first version of its LLaMa AI model, are included in an amended complaint from plaintiffs in one of the numerous lawsuits targetting the use of copyrighted works to train AI models that have been filed in the US over the past year.
Examing Copyright — Zvi Rosen’s thorough study of the US Copyright Office’s copyright examination practices has recently been published in the Journal of the Copyright Society. As the abstract explains, “This piece presents a history of copyright examination, empirical data and findings on what has been rejected over the past sixty years, and a proposal based on these findings for improving the efficiency of the copyright registration system going forward. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in the 4th Estate case there has been new concern about reducing examination times, and I propose a system which would make examination automatic for types of works with low rejection rates, upon the filing of an affidavit which would make clear that the work has no unusual features which would tend to lead to rejection.”
Copyright Office Affirms its Fourth Refusal to Register Generative AI Work — “On December 11, the Review Board of the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) released a letter affirming the USCO’s refusal to register a work created with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) software. The decision to affirm the refusal marks the fourth time a registrant has been documented as being denied the ability to obtain a copyright registration over the output of an AI system following requests for reconsideration.: