#copyright-infringement

#copyright-infringement

It was exciting. But then once I found it was because of some version that was basically stolen and generated in one click, I mean, it's saddening. Right now, four different versions are going viral. He's getting royalties for none of them.

The Tokyo District Court ruled that 39-year-old Wataru Takeuchi was guilty of violating Japanese law that prohibits the creation of 'a new work by making creative modifications to the original while preserving its essential characteristics.'

The default judgement, issued on Tuesday by Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York, awards Spotify $300 million in damages, with UMG, WMG, and Sony Music awarded $22.2 million collectively.

CoStar claims that Zillow's unauthorized use of its images is a deliberate part of the company's business strategy, using them to build listing pages and train algorithms.

Justice Clarence Thomas stated that a provider is not liable 'for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.' Liability arises only if the provider intended or actively encouraged the infringement.

BMG accuses Anthropic of raiding licensed music libraries MusicMatch, LyricFind, and torrent sites which themselves might be illegal containers of music.

The plain language of the DPLA governs because it is clear and explicit: Apple may "cease marketing, offering, and allowing download by end-users of the [Musi app] at any time, with or without cause, by providing notice of termination." Based on this language, Apple had the right to cease offering the Musi app without cause if Apple provided notice to Musi.

The Ninth Circuit's two-part substantial similarity test works by evaluating whether works share similarities that would be apparent to ordinary observers and whether those similarities stem from protected expression rather than unprotected elements like ideas or facts.

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."

The Tribune alleges that its lawyers contacted Perplexity in mid-October asking if the AI search engine was using its content, according to the complaint. Perplexity's lawyers replied it did not train models with the Tribune's work, but that it "may receive non-verbatim factual summaries," the lawsuit claims. The Tribune's lawyers, however, argue that Perplexity is delivering Tribune content verbatim. Interestingly, the newspaper's lawyers are also calling out Perplexity's Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as a culprit.

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.