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Category Archives: Copyright

Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse Enter the Public Domain

Hyperallergic: “Happy Public Domain Day! Starting today, January 1, you can legally access, adapt, remix, and republish (depending on your jurisdiction) the work of Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo, and Robert Capa, as well as certain texts by William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. In the United States, the copyright term surrounding commissioned… Continue Reading

The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT

Boston Review: “Questions of AI authorship and ownership can be divided into two broad types. One concerns the vast troves of human-authored material fed into AI models as part of their “training” (the process by which their algorithms “learn” from data). The other concerns ownership of what AIs produce. Call these, respectively, the input and… Continue Reading

Every AI Copyright Lawsuit in the US, Visualized

Wired: “WIRED is following every copyright battle involving the AI industry—and we’ve created some handy visualizations that will be updated as the cases progress. In May 2020, the media and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters sued a small legal AI startup called Ross Intelligence, alleging that it had violated US copyright law by reproducing materials from… Continue Reading

Harvard Is Releasing a Massive Free AI Training Dataset Funded by OpenAI and Microsoft

Wired – “The project’s leader says that allowing everyone to access the collection of public-domain books will help “level the playing field” in the AI industry. Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI… Continue Reading

How ChatGPT Search (Mis)represents Publisher Content

Columbia Journalism Review – “ChatGPT search—which is positioned as a competitor to search engines like Google and Bing—launched with a press release from OpenAI touting claims that the company had “collaborated extensively with the news industry” and “carefully listened to feedback” from certain news organizations that have signed content licensing agreements with the company. In… Continue Reading

Canadian legal information database sues company behind AI chatbot

CBA – Lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court alleges that Caseway AI violates CanLII’s terms of service and copyrights: “The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) has taken the makers of an AI chatbot to court over what it says is a violation of its terms of service, due to the chatbot scraping CanLII’s database in… Continue Reading

Ziff Davis study says AI firms rely on publisher data to train models

Axios: “Leading AI companies such as OpenAI, Google and Meta rely more on content from premium publishers to train their large language models (LLMs) than they publicly admit, according to new research from executives at Ziff Davis, one of the largest publicly-traded digital media companies. Why it matters: Publishers believe that the more they can… Continue Reading

Google Asked to Remove 10 Billion “Pirate” Search Results

TorrentFreak – “Rightsholders have asked Google to remove more than 10 billion ‘copyright infringing’ URLs from its search results. The search engine doesn’t celebrate the milestone in any way, but the takedown notices document intriguing shifts in volume over time, as well as shifting takedown interests. While search engines are extremely helpful for the average… Continue Reading

Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Open Culture: “The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for non-commercial use. When you browse the Met collection and find an image… Continue Reading