Court cases around AI and copyright are most definitely back in the news following a brief hiatus whilst the courts issued a pummeling to social media firms last week. First up this week we have a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in the US in the case of Sony against Cox. Sony was suing the internet service provider Cox for $1 billion, alleging that it was complicit in copyright infringement.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The Supreme Court ruling overturns an earlier ruling that would have held Cox liable for the activities of its users in infringing copyright.
This is, of course, another industry, but as Publishers Weekly points out, the potential for the ripples to be felt in our part of the creative world is massive. It boils down to the statement of Justice Clarence Thomas in giving the ruling:
“A company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.”
Implications for AI Copyright Cases
We don't, of course, yet know how wide the parameters of that statement will turn out to be. Interestingly, before I read this I was already looking back through the archives to see if Sony had sued Napster (they don't seem to be cited, though they did sue the company now operating under the name Napster last year). I can imagine a world in which these words could have turned the Napster ruling, and with it a quarter of a century of music history, on its head.
Of course, this isn't an AI lawsuit, but Publishers Weekly's point is that tech firms running large language models may well read the statement with interest as their own copyright infringement cases loom.
Anthropic Settlement: Bigger Author Payouts?
Talking of which, the Anthropic settlement is back in the news. And it's back because of that most literary (think Bleak House) of topics: legal fees. It seems that the lawyers in the case have reduced their fee claim from an eye-watering and positively Jarndycian $187.5 million from an even more Dickensian $300 million. This follows pushback from the judge in the case.
In practical terms what it means is that authors could be entitled to a bigger payout than the expected $3,000 per title. This is because, like Kindle Unlimited and other schemes you will be familiar with, the payout comes from a fixed pool of $1.5 billion. This amount accounts for everything. The less the lawyers get, the more there is to be split among rights holders. Jane Friedman's latest newsletter suggested a possible $3,700 per title.
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