Justices Leave Door Open to Discovery Rule Copyright Damages — Bloomberg Law’s Kyle Jahner writes about yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Warner Chappell Music v. Nealy, where the Court resolved a circuit split over the question of whether a copyright plaintiff can recover damages for acts that allegedly occurred beyond the statute of limitations.
Stability AI, Midjourney should face artists’ copyright case, judge says — “A California federal judge said he was inclined to green-light a copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and other companies accused of misusing visual artists’ work to train their artificial intelligence-based image generation systems. U.S. District Judge William Orrick said on Tuesday that the ten artists behind the lawsuit had plausibly argued that Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI copied and stored their work on company servers and could be liable for using it without permission.”
Connecticut AG Members Oppose State Ebook Licensing Bill — “On April 19, 2024, more than 60 Authors Guild members from the state of Connecticut sent a letter to leaders in both houses of the Connecticut General Assembly voicing their concerns about Senate Bill 148 and House Bill 5312. These bills would create the equivalent of a compulsory license for ebooks, audiobooks, and other digital media in violation of federal law and to the detriment of authors’ incomes.”
The Economics of Copyright: Incentives and Rewards (It’s Important to Get them Right) — Hugh Stevens writes of an interview with the US Copyright Office’s first Chief Economist, Dr. Brent Lutes, “While the studies cited above highlight the economic contribution that copyright industries make to national economies in terms of jobs and wealth generation, let us not forget the key point that Dr. Lutes underlined regarding the social welfare contribution of copyright through using market-based incentives to promote and encourage creativity and investment in creative outputs. It is hard, if not impossible, to put a dollar amount on the social welfare benefits of creative expression and cultural sovereignty, but they are immense if incalculable.”
Nvidia, Databricks Sued in Latest AI Copyright Class Actions — “While works gain protection upon creation, Dubus, Olrean, Makkai and Reynolds focus on authors with registered copyrights in books in a training dataset that Nvidia and Databricks has allegedly admitted copying to train its NeMo Megatron models. One part of the dataset used to train the models comprises 108 gigabytes of data pulled from Bibliotik, a ‘shadow library’ that hosts and distributed unlicensed copyright materials, according to the complaint. Shawn Presser, creator of Bibliotik, has confirmed in public statements that it contains nearly 200,000 books.”