Does Generative AI Breach Copyright Law? Baer Performance Marketing

“The only internet-based books corpora that has ever offered that much material are notorious ‘shadow library’ websites like Library Genesis (aka LibGen), Z-Library (aka B-ok), Sci-Hub, and Bibliotik,” the lawsuits claim. Given the legal industry is at the dawn of potential legal claims and challenges involving generative AI, we expect the generation of legal decisions that will soon affect the application of copyright law (and other intellectual property protections) to this still-developing technology. The first shot in the AI copyright wars has already been fired, though, with the launch last week of a proposed class action lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI.

On the EP side, there have been the usual discussions on multiple committees, which are close to conclusion. A compromise version was leaked recently, which will likely form the basis for a vote on 11 May. If approved, that version will constitute the EP’s position on the AI Act that will go into interinstitutional negotiations in the trilogue stage, the EU political version of a black box. Thaler developed an AI tool called the Creativity Machine, and wanted the Creativity Machine to be the holder of the copyright. Still, creators are worried about their work or style being used to train generators without permission or compensation. From then on, photography evolved into its own art form and even sparked new abstract artistic movements.

Kluwer IP Law

Plays were the property of the theater companies (and playwrights were often members of those companies), but that property wasn’t protected; there was nothing to prevent another company from performing your play. We’ve probably lost at least one play by Shakespeare (there’s evidence he wrote a play called Love’s Labors Won); we’ve lost all but one of the plays of Thomas Kyd; and there are other playwrights known through playbills, reviews, and other references for whom there are no surviving works. Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the most important pre-Shakespearian play, Yakov Livshits is known to us through two editions, both published after Marlowe’s death, and one of those editions is roughly a third longer than the other. Without some kind of protection, authors had no interest in publishing at all, let alone publishing accurate texts. The lawsuit raises important questions about the ethics of using copyrighted material to train AI systems and the possible need for more transparency in how such technology is developed and refined. Copyright Office’s decision to deny copyright protection for artwork created by AI that does not entail any human involvement.

The office rejected the application last year and said creative works must have human authors to be copyrightable. Aug 21 (Reuters) – A work of art created by artificial intelligence without any human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law, a U.S. court in Washington, D.C., has ruled. There’s a related but separate discussion on whether the ML model itself — as opposed to its output — is a derivative work of the training material, and, as such, should be open sourced in accordance with copyleft licensing requirements. An ongoing class action lawsuit against GitHub alleges as much in its complaint, so we could get more clarity on this issue when the case is decided. In the interim, we recommend reading Kate’s blog for a full breakdown of the case and its potential impact.

What are the challenges to copyrighting AI-generated content?

The data that generative AI is trained on includes many creative works that are protected under copyright laws, and that, in most cases, were included in the training of the AI system without the creators’ knowledge or consent. In the legal sphere, one of the main points of discussion are questions of copyright when it comes to images, texts and other forms of art generated by AI models via human input. Generative AI will change the nature of content creation, enabling many to do what, until now, only a few had the skills or advanced technology to accomplish at high speed.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Stephen Thaler, CEO of neural network firm Imagination Engines, has been at the forefront of the effort to establish copyright protections for AI-generated content, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that Andy Warhol’s drawing of a photograph was not permitted by fair use.
Lommel acknowledges that “theoretically, the output is a derivative work.” But, he says, “it is derivative of many, many works, all of which contribute in an infinitesimal degree to the output.
The USCO found that while the text and “selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work’s written and visual elements” are copyrightable, the images themselves are not.
This NOI builds on the feedback and questions the Office has received so far and seeks public input from the broadest audience to date in the initiative.

Welcome to our This Week in AI roundup – this week we have stories about the implications of copyright infringement and generative AI, specifically image generators like DALLE-2 and Stable Diffusion. This week in AI we have stories about the implications of copyright infringement and generative AI, specifically image generators like DALLE-2 and Stable Diffusion. Under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports.

A sound application of state laws such as defamation law, right of publicity laws, and various privacy torts could go a long way towards mitigating these harms. Some have proposed that the U.S. implement new legislation to enact a federal right of publicity. This would represent a major change in law and the details of such a proposal would be important. Right now, we are not convinced that this would serve creators better than the existing state laws governing the right of publicity. While it may take some time for courts to figure out how to adapt legal regimes outside of copyright to questions around generative AI, adapting the law to new technologies is nothing new. Other proposals call for regulations like labeling AI-generated content, which could also be reasonable as a tool to combat disinformation and fraudulent content.

In the EU, these activities are mostly regulated by two text and data mining (TDM) exceptions in the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM) Directive, which cover TDM for scientific purposes (Article 3) and what is sometimes called “commercial” TDM (Article 4). For models like Midjourney, Dalle-E, or Firefly, the relevant provision would be the commercial TDM exception. The training activities of Stable Diffusion are trickier to qualify, since the company apparently paid a German non-profit, LAION, to inter alia produce a training dataset (LAION-5B) for its generative AI tool. Still, given the tight requirements of the scientific TDM exception in Article 3 CDSM Directive, it is more likely than not that the TDM activities of Stable Diffusion would at least partly fall under Article 4 CDSM Directive. The analysis below will focus on the EU TDM exceptions, especially Article 4 CDSM Directive.

He mainly focuses on intellectual property law, and has written extensively on how it relates to artificial intelligence. When it comes to training AI models, however, the use of copyrighted materials is fair game. That’s because of a fair use law that permits the use of copyrighted material under certain conditions without needing the permission of the owner. Whether AI-generated works are eligible for copyright protection varies from each country. However, in general, we can say that substantial human involvement is required for its eligibility. In many ways, generative AI is yet another creative tool that allows a new group of people access to image-making, just like cameras, paintbrushes or Adobe Photoshop.