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
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: Copyright
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
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record
Internet Archives Blogs: “In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. The rise of streaming platforms and temporary licensing agreements means that sound recordings, books, films, and other cultural artifacts that used to be owned in physical form, are now at… Continue Reading
What are the current swing states, and how have they changed over time?
USA Facts: “Swing states, also known as battleground states, are states that could “swing” to either Democratic or Republican candidates depending on the election. Because of their potential to be won by either candidate, political parties often spend a disproportionate amount of time and campaign resources on winning these states. While there is no universal… Continue Reading
Unlocking AI for All: The Case for Public Data Banks
LawFare: “The data relied on by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other artificial intelligence (AI) developers is not readily available to other AI labs. Google and Meta relied, in part, on data gathered from their own products to train and fine-tune their models. OpenAI used tactics to acquire data that now would not work or may… Continue Reading
Inside the $621 Million Legal Battle for the ‘Soul of the Internet’
RollingStone via MSN [no paywall]: “Major record labels have sued the online library Internet Archive over thousands of old recordings, raising the question: Who owns the past?Before founding the Internet Archive, Kahle worked as a computer scientist, making major contributions to personal computing and the early internet during the Eighties and Nineties. With the Archive,… Continue Reading
U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers, Issues Broad Injunction
TorrentFreak: “Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon granted the default judgment without any changes. The anonymous LibGen defendants are responsible for willful copyright infringement and their activities should be stopped. “Plaintiffs have been irreparably harmed as a result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct and will continue to be irreparably harmed should Defendants be allowed to… Continue Reading
67% of Top News Sites Block Access by AI
NewsGuard’s Reality Check Special Report: “In tech lingo, “garbage in, garbage out” means that if bad data goes into a system, expect bad results. The same holds true for the accuracy of AI chatbots. A NewsGuard analysis found that 67 percent of the news websites rated as top quality by NewsGuard block access to their… Continue Reading
“Model collapse” threatens to kill progress on generative AIs
Big Think: When AI eats its own product, it gets sick. Key Takeaways Generative AI exploded in popularity when OpenAI released ChatGPT. A paper published in Nature looked at what happens when AI is trained on “synthetic data,” or content created by an AI rather than humans. Flaws in the synthetic data led to even… Continue Reading
Generative AI, Plagiarism, and Copyright Infringement in Legal Documents
Cyphert, Amy, Generative AI, Plagiarism, and Copyright Infringement in Legal Documents (May 10, 2024). WVU College of Law Research Paper No. 2024-14, Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, Vol. 25 (2024), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4938701 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4938701 – “Lawyers are increasingly using generative AI in their legal practice, especially for drafting motions and other… Continue Reading
Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America’s libraries
MIT Technology Review – “The decision locks libraries into an ecosystem that is not in readers’ interests. Congress must act. I was raised in the 1980s and ’90s, and for my generation and generations before us, the public library was an equalizing force in every town, helping anyone move toward the American dream. In Chantilly,… Continue Reading
