#copyright-infringement

#copyright-infringement

The Copyright Claims Board estimated that 'as much as three-quarters of its time is spent on the initial review of claims and amended claims and writing noncompliance orders explaining claim deficiencies,' according to the report. The U.S. Copyright Office on Friday released its report pursuant to the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act, finding that the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) is largely successful but that there is 'room for improvement in various respects.'

But when it comes to its own tech being copied, Google has no problem pointing fingers. This week, the company accused "commercially motivated" actors of trying to clone its Gemini AI. In a Thursday report, Google complained it had become under "distillation attacks," with agents querying Gemini up to 100,000 times to "extract" the underlying model - the convoluted AI industry equivalent of copying somebody's homework, basically.

In an audacious action starting to attract media attention, last month a group of piracy actors called Anna's Archive copied about 86 million music files from Spotify. The intention was to release the hoard on the BitTorrent file-sharing platform. All three of the major labels (UMG, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group), along with Spotify, launched the unsurprising lawsuit in September. The presiding judge, Jed . Rakoff, issued an injunction (HERE).

The dispute centered on the 11-page article published in California Magazine in 1983, which vividly described the experiences of Navy fighter pilots at the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School, popularly known as "Top Gun." Following the article's publication, Ehud Yonay granted Paramount all rights to the work, leading to the 1986 release of Top Gun. In 2020, the Yonays terminated the copyright grant by invoking 17 U.S.C. § 203(a)(3), which allows an author's heirs to terminate certain grants.

As reported by Deadline, the Google-owned video platform has terminated two massive YouTube channels that peddled fake, AI-generated movie trailers, in what is one of the most high profile actions it's taken against the AI spam polluting the platform. Combined, the channels - called Screen Culture, based in India, and KH Studio, based in the US - boasted over two million subscribers and more than one billion views.

A proposed class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Elizabeth Lyon, an author from Oregon, claims that Adobe used pirated versions of numerous books-including her own-to train the company's SlimLM program. Adobe describes SlimLM as a small language model series that can be "optimized for document assistance tasks on mobile devices." It states that SlimLM was pre-trained on SlimPajama-627B, a "deduplicated, multi-corpora, open-source dataset" released by Cerebras in June of 2023.

Lego A/S, Lego Systems, Inc., and Lego Juris A/S first brought claims against Zuru Inc. in 2019, alleging that Zuru's "First-Generation" toy figurines infringed on the copyright and trademark rights of Lego's Minifigure. The U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut granted Lego's motion for a preliminary injunction, which enjoined Zuru from manufacturing or selling the infringing First-Generation figurines and "any figurine or image that is substantially similar to the Minifigure Copyrights or likely to be confused with the Minifigure Trademarks."

Real estate data company Crexi has brought on celebrity lawyer Alex Spiro - known for defending billionaires, rappers, and professional athletes - in its scrap with CoStar Group. According to court filings on Wednesday, Spiro will now defend Crexi in its legal battle with the real estate data giant. The $3,000-an-hour lawyer has represented clients like Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Megan Thee Stallion, and has also worked for a variety of businesses in disputes with short-sellers, rivals, and regulators.

The case then went quiet, save for Siemens arguing that its software licenses mean it can move the matter to Germany instead of the US court for the District of Delaware in which VMware brought its case. Siemens also argued that this was a contractual matter, not a copyright claim. On Wednesday, VMware fired back with filings that argue Siemens' interpretation of its software licenses is wrong and the agreements do not allow the case to be heard in Germany, as the defendant has sought.

Robert Kyncl, the chief executive of Warner Music Group, said the deal showed that artificial intelligence could be pro-artist when it is licensed to reflect the value of music. This landmark pact with Suno is a victory for the creative community that benefits everyone, he said. With Suno rapidly scaling, both in users and monetisation, we've seized this opportunity to shape models that expand revenue and deliver new fan experiences.

According to a police document seen by BBC News, the man - who is not named in the document - shared 347 clips of nude scenes on the Reddit group he moderated, which were then viewed 4.2 million times. The Danish police say he has been given a seven month suspended sentence for copyright infringement. Experts say the man was prosecuted under a rarely-used clause in Danish copyright law.

When 73-year-old Tom Brown*, a retired police officer from Seattle, received a letter from Comcast, he might have mistaken it for a broadband bill. Instead, it was a subpoena. He had been sued in federal court for illegally downloading 80 movies. Some of the titles sounded cryptic Do Not Worry, We Are Only Friends or banal, like International Relations Part 2.

Grok Imagine, an image and video generation tool, debuted in July. Musk said earlier this month that the company plans to release a "watchable" full-length film by the end of 2026, and "really good movies" in 2027. He has hyped up the chatbot's image generation skills, from reenactments of the final scene of "King Kong" to a version of "Iron Man" in which he plays Tony Stark.

While Cox waxes poetic about the centrality of Internet access to modern life, it neglects to mention that it had no qualms about terminating 619,711 subscribers for nonpayment over the same period that it terminated just 32 for serial copyright abuse,

"Tencent remarkably contends SIE's claims are unripe because--despite having announced and continuously promoted its game for months--Tencent (purportedly) delayed Light of Motiram's release until 2027 after SIE sued," Sony said. "This is nonsense. The damage is done--and it continues. Although the public expressed confusion and outrage upon discovering Light of Motiram for the knock-off that it is, Tencent remained undeterred. Tencent continued promoting its infringing game over SIE's objection, and Tencent refused to accept any responsibility over its conduct."

CoStar adds that Zillow does not just display these images on its site, but on its branded websites like StreetEasy and sites it has syndication deals with Redfin and Realtor.com. On top of all [of] this, Zillow uses CoStar images to drive core website features: Zillow analyzes real estate photos to provide Zestimates' of sale and rental values and extracts image features to analyze user behavior and provide recommendations, the letter states.

"Character.ai is freeriding off the goodwill of Disney's famous marks and brands, and blatantly infringing Disney's copyrights," a Disney lawyer wrote in the cease-and-esist letter. "Even worse, Character.ai's infringing chatbots are known, in some cases, to be sexually exploitive and otherwise harmful and dangerous to children, offending Disney's consumers and extraordinarily damaging Disney's reputation and goodwill."

Despite being caught red-handed blatantly stealing our copyrighted work, Zillow has [doubled down] to exploit thousands of additional copyrighted images without any shame, Andy Florance, CoStar Group's CEO and founder, said in a statement. Zillow's repeated copyright infringement, combined with its lead diversion model that is the subject of a separate lawsuit accusing Zillow of deceiving homebuyers, exposes an ongoing pattern of morally questionable behavior. Zillow's free ride on the agents' listings and CoStar Group's proprietary content is over.

For several months now, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been posting ghoulish social media videos celebrating the agency's ramped-up immigration raid efforts. For its latest propaganda, ICE is appealing to a younger audience by setting a video of arrests to the Pokémon anime theme song. Not only was the clip posted to the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) X/Twitter, but it was also uploaded to the official White House TikTok account.