As the Super Bowl approached and passed, it seemed that one faction of Americans was accusing Taylor Swift of practicing witchcraft on the NFL while another was slagging her for the carbon output of her private jet—reportedly about 8,300 tonnes of CO2e in 2022. And although it is fair to expect owners of private aircraft to fly responsibly, I must ...
Lately, we’ve seen several headlines and comments from tech giants say that AI ventures simply cannot succeed if they are forced to contend with the copyrights in the billions of works they have scraped for the purpose of machine learning (ML). When these headlines are paired with the rampant assertions that ML is inherently fair use—a subject addressed in last ...
After the Supreme Court’s decision in AWF v. Goldsmith restored what many of us view as common sense to the fair use doctrine of transformativeness, the flurry of litigation against AI developers will test the same principle in a different light. As discussed on this blog and elsewhere, caselaw has produced two frameworks for considering whether the “purpose and character” of ...
During Thanksgiving break 2013, when this blog was still new, I wrote a post in response to the techno-exceptionalism expressed by then Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and co-author Jared Cohen. Drawing parallels to the mythology of the Puritan adventure to North America, I found fault—as I still do—with the blind faith we were asked to place in the leadership of ...
On October 30, Judge Orrick of the Northern District of California largely granted the AI companies’ motions to dismiss the class-action complaints filed by Sarah Andersen, Karla Ortiz, and Kelly McKernan on behalf of all visual artists whose works have been used without permission for the purpose of “training” generative AI models. Several complaints were dismissed with leave to amend, ...
