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Mealey's Copyright

April 02, 2024
7th Circuit Won’t Reinstate Pro Se Copyright Claims Against Amazon

CHICAGO — A federal judge in Indiana correctly rejected a copyright infringement action against Amazon.com Inc. and a company that helps authors self-publish their works, the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled, because the complained-of conduct was authorized by a license.
April 01, 2024
Collectibles Firm To 3rd Circuit: Hockey Sculpture Has No Protectable Elements

PHILADELPHIA — A Florida-based sports memorabilia company asks the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in its appellee brief to affirm a lower court’s finding that its hockey puck piece containing melted rink ice does not infringe the appellant’s puck-shaped item because the latter work has no copyrightable, nonutilitarian features.
March 29, 2024
Panel Reinstates ‘Tiger King’ Copyright Case On 1 Of 8 Videos

DENVER — Findings by a federal judge in Oklahoma that seven videos featured in “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness” are non-actionable works-made-for-hire will stand, but Netflix Inc. and the producer of the documentary series must face copyright infringement allegations with regard to an eighth video, which was wrongly declared a fair use, the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled.
March 27, 2024
Panel: Evidence Supports Finding That Copyright Action Was Retaliatory

NEW YORK — A decision by a federal judge in New York to award the author of a novella upon which “Mafietta” was based $44,496.05 in attorney fees was upheld March 26 by the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which said there was “a sufficient basis in the record to support” findings that a copyright infringement lawsuit by the producers of the film “was frivolous and retaliatory.”
March 26, 2024
AI Prompts Are Merely ‘Copyright-Laundering Facility,’ Artists Claim

SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence prompts used to create images are a “copyright-laundering facility designed to produce low-cost knockoffs of copyrighted images,” the plaintiffs argue in four wide-ranging oppositions to motions to dismiss filed in California federal court.
March 26, 2024
Rapper To 7th Circuit: Evidence Shows His Song Was Sampled, Infringed

CHICAGO — Hip-hop artist Eddie Lee Richardson, known professionally as Hotwire, tells the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in his opening appellant brief that a trial court erred in finding that he did not establish that French Montana’s hit 2012 song “Ain’t Worried About Nothin’” (AWAN) directly sampled and, therefore, infringed the copyright in his song “Hood Pushin Weight” (HPW).
March 25, 2024
Publishers Ask 2nd Circuit To Find Internet Archive’s EBook Lending Infringing

NEW YORK — The “wholly manufactured” practice of “controlled digital lending” in which Internet Archive (IA) digitizes books and lends them online “is radical and unlawful,” book publishers tell the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in their appellee brief, seeking affirmance of a trial court’s finding that the practice infringed their copyrights.
March 22, 2024
Copyright Defendants Again Awarded Fees, This Time By 7th Circuit Panel

CHICAGO — A little over two months after their successful defense on appeal of a $1.5 million attorney fee award from an Illinois federal judge, an investment banking company and its managing director won $260,219.25 in fees and costs incurred in the appeal, despite the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals finding that the factors for such an award are in “equipoise.”
March 22, 2024
New York Times: Copyright Violations, Not Hacking, At Heart Of ChatGPT Case

NEW YORK — OpenAI Inc. knew that ChatGPT would produce material protected by copyright, not only because of well-publicized incidents where artificial intelligences output protected works but because it was told as much and discussed the issue internally, the New York Times Co. (NYT) says in opposing a motion to dismiss.
March 21, 2024
Accrediting Group Certifies 1st Large Language Model Trained On ‘Clean’ Data

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Nonprofit Fairly Trained on March 20 announced certification of the first large language model (LLM) trained with a consent-based approach to data, saying the step proves that artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained while treating creators fairly and ethically.
March 20, 2024
4th Circuit Stands By Contributory Copyright Liability Findings For ISP

RICHMOND, Va. — The Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on March 19 denied dual petitions for rehearing or rehearing en banc, leaving in place a panel decision one month earlier that vacated a $1 billion award for vicarious copyright infringement by an internet service provider (ISP) while also upholding findings that the ISP is liable for contributory infringement.
March 19, 2024
Plaintiffs Fire Back In UCL, Copyright Case Involving Google AI Training Data

SAN FRANCISCO — Individuals enjoy a property right in their personal information, and a complaint alleges unlawful and unfair conduct sufficiently enough for claims under all three prongs of the California unfair competition law (UCL), plaintiffs in a copyright and privacy class action accusing Google LLC of “wide-scale data theft” in the training of its artificial intelligence tell a federal court in opposing dismissal.
March 19, 2024
MosaicML AI Model Comes Under Fire In Authors’ Lawsuit

SAN FRANCISCO — A trio of authors sued MosaicML, the provider of tools facilitating the training of artificial intelligence, and its parent company, claiming that they benefitted from the improper copying of potentially hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works.
March 15, 2024
Panel Upholds Dismissal Of Copyright Claims Per Extraterritoriality Principle

SAN FRANCISCO — A bid by the owner of a copyrighted widget for reinstatement of its infringement case against a foreign entity has failed at the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which rejected the appellant’s assertion that a California federal judge failed to consider its claims under the correct statute.
March 12, 2024
ISP Asks 4th Circuit To Rehear ‘Exceptionally Important’ Secondary Liability Suit

RICHMOND, Va. — Filing an amicus curiae brief on March 11 in support of fellow internet service provider (ISP) Cox Communications Inc.’s quest for rehearing in an appeal where it was found liable for contributory infringement for its subscribers’ file-sharing activities, Frontier Communications Parent Inc. tells the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that a panel’s holding on copyright liability for merely providing internet service that is misused by customers “drives a wrecking ball through the ordinary limits of secondary liability in direct conflict with [U.S.] Supreme Court precedent.”
March 11, 2024
Nvidia’s NeMo Megatron AI Latest LLM Targeted With Copyright Suit

SAN FRANCISCO — Nvidia Corp. trained its NeMo Megatron artificial intelligence with 20 billion “weights” derived from an enormous amount of copyrighted and otherwise protected material, a trio of authors claims in a March 8 California federal class action targeting large language model (LLM) training methods.
March 11, 2024
Copyright Office Calls Human Authorship ‘Basic Prerequisite’ In AI Copyright Suit

WASHINGTON, D.C. — An artificial intelligence developer has not established any reason why the District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals should “upend . . . well-established principles” that “nonhuman authors are not entitled to copyright protection,” the U.S. Copyright Office argues in an appellee brief, asking the court to find that a trial court properly upheld the office’s refusal to issue a copyright for a work of art to an AI machine.
March 08, 2024
Pa. Federal Judge Rejects 2nd, 9th Circuit Standard For Joint Authorship Intent

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Because it remains unclear whether a settlement agreement extends to a plaintiff’s original design for a dragon-themed boot button that, while proven to be a joint work, still may not encompass an accused “simplified, two-dimensional rendering” by an infringement defendant, a Pennsylvania federal judge largely denied summary judgment.
March 07, 2024
Fee Award Slashed, But Dismissal Of Lanham Act, Copyright Claims Upheld

SAN FRANCISCO — The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on March 6 did not reach allegations by two appellants that the “idea-expression dichotomy” under federal copyright law is unconstitutional, deeming the position waived in view of their failure to raise it before an Oregon federal magistrate judge.
March 07, 2024
X Corp. Wins Dismissal Of Most, But Not All, Copyright Claims By Music Industry

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A federal judge in Tennessee dismissed allegations that X Corp., formerly known as Twitter, directly and vicariously infringes copyrighted musical works and partly dismissed allegations of contributory infringement but said a subset of the latter claim will go forward, in view of plausible evidence that the social media giant does not go far enough to police infringement on its platform in certain situations.
March 06, 2024
Michigan Federal Judge: Fish Illustrator’s Copyright Case ‘All Bait And No Hook’

DETROIT — A federal judge in Michigan on March 5 granted dismissal of allegations that a since-shuttered, print-on-demand website incurred infringement liability when it allowed internet users to upload copyrighted illustrations of freshwater fish for printing on various merchandise.
March 04, 2024
Claimed Circuit Split Over Fee Presumption In Copyright Cases Stays In Place

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Efforts by Hasbro Inc. to obtain review of a 2023 holding by the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that affirmed a denial of its request for attorney fees in a copyright case have failed, with the U.S. Supreme Court on March 4 denying the gamemaker’s petition for writ of certiorari.
March 04, 2024
3 More Media Outlets Launch Copyright Actions Over Artificial Intelligence

NEW YORK — Three media outlets filed two new lawsuits in New York federal court targeting OpenAI Inc. and related entities associated with the use of copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence ChatGPT-4.
March 01, 2024
Denial Of Fee Request In Copyright Case Affirmed By 11th Circuit Panel

ATLANTA — “Even if” a prevailing copyright infringement defendant preserved its argument that an award of fees on its behalf was mandated under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 68 by a copyright owner’s voluntary dismissal of the case, an award is not warranted because the defendant is not a “prevailing party” under federal copyright law, the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled.
February 20, 2024
COMMENTARY: Diverging International Approaches To The Copyrightability And Authorship Of AI-Created Works

By Christopher W. Savage and James Rosenfeld