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Home :: Copyright Law 29 Jun 2025 Have LLMs broken fair use? Copyright Law Two sets of authors sued Anthropic and Meta in San Francisco for copyright infringement, arguing that the companies had pirated their works to train their LLMs. Everyone agreed that a key question was whether fair use allowed it, and in both cases the courts looked at the fair use issue before dealing with other aspects of the cases. Even though the facts in both cases were very similar, last week two judges in the same court wrote opinions coming to very different conclusions. How can that happen? Is fair use broken? See more ...   posted at: 21:16 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/fairwhat.html 05 Sep 2024 Internet Archive loses their CDL appeal Copyright Law The Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) lends out scans of physical books, ensuring that each scan is lent to one person at a time. Publishers sued nd the Archive lost thoroughly in April 2023. The Archive appealed the decision to the Second Circuit court in New York. As I said at the time, the appeal seemed like a long shot since that is the same court that said that Google Books was OK, mostly because it didn't provide full copies of the books. Yesterday the court published its decision and unsurprisingly, the Archive still lost. See more ...   posted at: 04:35 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/archappeal.html 09 Jan 2024 Three weak copyright suits against OpenAI and one stronger one Copyright Law In the past few months there have been four similar suits filed in New York against OpenAI and Microsoft. All four look superficially similar, and all are likely to be heard by the same judge, but one of them is a lot stronger than the other three. See more ...   posted at: 11:15 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/openai3.html 18 Dec 2023 The Internet Archive defends Controlled Digital Lending again Copyright Law The Internet Archive has a program they call Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). They have scanned a whole lot of physical books, put the books in storage, and then lend out the scans, ensuring that each scan is lent to one person at a time. Publishers don't like this, sued several years ago, and the Archive lost thoroughly in April. The judge ruled on a motion for summary judgment without a trial, which means the judge believed there was no significant dispute about the facts. He found that CDL was not fair use, the scans were a substitute for the paper books, and the Archive lost. Unsurprisingly, the Archive has appealed the ruling. This looked to me to be a long shot. The appeal is to the Second Circuit which decided the Google Books case. Their decision said that Google's scanning is OK because they don't provide the full contents of the books, but do other stuff that makes it transformative. Since the Archive does provide the full contents of the books, they're out of luck. The Archive appealed in September but until recently the only activity has been routine stuff like which lawyers will be representing whom On Friday they filed their brief laying out the legal theory of the appeal, and I have to say it's surprisingly strong. They say that the judge misunderstood what CDL is, that he got all four prongs of the fair use analysis wrong, and that there are significant disagreements about facts that prevent summary judgment. See more ...   posted at: 21:26 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/pubappeal.html 20 Aug 2023 The Internet Archive hops out of the copyright frying pan into a new and different fire Copyright Law In 2020 a group of book publishers sued the Internet Archive over their Controlled Digital Lending program, which made PDF scans of books and lent them out from the Archive's web site. For books still in copyright, the Archive usually limited the number of copies of a book lent to the number of physical copies of the book they had in storage. Several publishers sued with an argument that can be summarized as "that's not how it works". In late March the judge made a ruling that can be summarized as "of course that's not how it works." (More background here.) After several months of quiet negotiations, on Friday the two parties filed a proposed consent agreement in which the Archive promised to stop it, and pay the plaintiffs an undisclosed but presumably not huge amount of money. The only disagreement was exactly what they promise to stop, with letters from each to the judge explaining their positions. See more ...   posted at: 18:03 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/fryingfire.html

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