A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies’ scheduled release dates.
According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole “numerous ‘pre-release’ DVDs and Blu-rays” between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly “ripped” the movies, “bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying” and shared copies widely online. He also supposedly sold the actual stolen discs on e-commerce sites, the DOJ alleged.
Hale has been charged with “two counts of criminal copyright infringement and one count of interstate transportation of stolen goods,” the DOJ said. He faces a maximum sentence of five years for the former, and 10 years for the latter.
Among blockbuster movies that Hale is accused of stealing are Dune, F9: The Fast Saga, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Godzilla v. Kong, and, perhaps most notably, Spider-Man: No Way Home.
The DOJ claimed that “copies of Spider-Man: No Way Home were downloaded tens of millions of times, with an estimated loss to the copyright owner of tens of millions of dollars.”
In 2021, when the Spider-Man movie was released in theaters only, it became the first movie during the COVID-19 pandemic to gross more than $1 billion at the box office, Forbes noted. But for those unwilling to venture out to see the movie, Forbes reported, the temptation to find leaks and torrents apparently became hard to resist. It was in this climate that Hale is accused of widely sharing copies of the movie before it was released online.
Most people think purely AI-generated works shouldn’t be copyrighted, report says.
Ars used Copilot to generate this AI image using the precise prompt the Copyright Office used to determine that prompting alone isn’t authorship. Credit: AI image generated by Copilot
The US Copyright Office issued AI guidance this week that declared no laws need to be clarified when it comes to protecting authorship rights of humans producing AI-assisted works.
“Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change,” the Copyright Office said.
More than 10,000 commenters weighed in on the guidance, with some hoping to convince the Copyright Office to guarantee more protections for artists as AI technologies advance and the line between human- and AI-created works seems to increasingly blur.
But the Copyright Office insisted that the AI copyright debate was settled in 1965 after commercial computer technology started advancing quickly and “difficult questions of authorship” were first raised. That was the first time officials had to ponder how much involvement human creators had in works created using computers.
Back then, the Register of Copyrights, Abraham Kaminstein—who was also instrumental in codifying fair use—suggested that “there is no one-size-fits-all answer” to copyright questions about computer-assisted human authorship. And the Copyright Office agrees that’s still the case today.
“Very few bright-line rules are possible,” the Copyright Office said, with one obvious exception. Because of “insufficient human control over the expressive elements” of resulting works, “if content is entirely generated by AI, it cannot be protected by copyright.”
The office further clarified that doesn’t mean that works assisted by AI can never be copyrighted.
“Where AI merely assists an author in the creative process, its use does not change the copyrightability of the output,” the Copyright Office said.
Following Kaminstein’s advice, officials plan to continue reviewing AI disclosures and weighing, on a case-by-case basis, what parts of each work are AI-authored and which parts are human-authored. Any human-authored expressive element can be copyrighted, the office said, but any aspect of the work deemed to have been generated purely by AI cannot.
After doing some testing on whether the same exact prompt can generate widely varied outputs, even from the same AI tool, the Copyright Office further concluded that “prompts do not alone provide sufficient control” over outputs to allow creators to copyright purely AI-generated works based on highly intelligent or creative prompting.
That decision could change, the Copyright Office said, if AI technologies provide more human control over outputs through prompting.
New guidance noted, for example, that some AI tools allow prompts or other inputs “to be substantially retained as part of the output.” Consider an artist uploading an original drawing, the Copyright Office suggested, and prompting AI to modify colors, or an author uploading an original piece and using AI to translate it. And “other generative AI systems also offer tools that similarly allow users to exert control over the selection, arrangement, and content of the final output.”
The Copyright Office drafted this prompt to test artists’ control over expressive inputs that are retained in AI outputs. Credit: Copyright Office
“Where a human inputs their own copyrightable work and that work is perceptible in the output, they will be the author of at least that portion of the output,” the guidelines said.
But if officials conclude that even the most iterative prompting doesn’t perfectly control the resulting outputs—even slowly, repeatedly prompting AI to produce the exact vision in an artist’s head—some artists are sure to be disappointed. One artist behind a controversial prize-winning AI-generated artwork has staunchly defended his rigorous AI prompting as authorship.
However, if “even expert researchers are limited in their ability to understand or predict the behavior of specific models,” the Copyright Office said it struggled to see how artists could. To further prove their point, officials drafted a lengthy, quirky prompt about a cat reading a Sunday newspaper to compare different outputs from the same AI image generator.
Copyright Office drafted a quirky, lengthy prompt to test creative control over AI outputs. Credit: Copyright Office
Officials apparently agreed with Adobe, which submitted a comment advising the Copyright Office that any output is “based solely on the AI’s interpretation of that prompt.” Academics further warned that copyrighting outputs based only on prompting could lead copyright law to “effectively vest” authorship adopters with “rights in ideas.”
“The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectable ideas,” the guidance said. “While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.”
Hundreds of AI artworks are copyrighted, officials say
The Copyright Office repeatedly emphasized that most commenters agreed with the majority of their conclusions. Officials also stressed that hundreds of AI artworks submitted for registration, under existing law, have been approved to copyright the human-authored elements of their works. Rejections are apparently expected to be less common.
“In most cases,” the Copyright Office said, “humans will be involved in the creation process, and the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship.”
For stakeholders who have been awaiting this guidance for months, the Copyright Office report may not change the law, but it offers some clarity.
For some artists who hoped to push the Copyright Office to adapt laws, the guidelines may disappoint, leaving many questions about a world of possible creative AI uses unanswered. But while a case-by-case approach may leave some artists unsure about which parts of their works are copyrightable, seemingly common cases are being resolved more readily. According to the Copyright Office, after each decision, it gets easier to register AI works that meet similar standards for copyrightability. Perhaps over time, artists will grow more secure in how they use AI and whether it will impact their exclusive rights to distribute works.
That’s likely cold comfort for the artist advocating for prompting alone to constitute authorship. One AI artist told Ars in October that being denied a copyright has meant suffering being mocked and watching his award-winning work freely used anywhere online without his permission and without payment. But in the end, the Copyright Office was apparently more sympathetic to other commenters who warned that humanity’s progress in the arts could be hampered if a flood of easily generated, copyrightable AI works drowned too many humans out of the market.
“We share the concerns expressed about the impact of AI-generated material on human authors and the value that their creative expression provides to society. If a flood of easily and rapidly AI-generated content drowns out human-authored works in the marketplace, additional legal protection would undermine rather than advance the goals of the copyright system. The availability of vastly more works to choose from could actually make it harder to find inspiring or enlightening content.”
New guidance likely a big yawn for AI companies
For AI companies, the copyright guidance may mean very little. According to AI company Hugging Face’s comments to the Copyright Office, no changes in the law were needed to ensure the US continued leading in AI innovation, because “very little to no innovation in generative AI is driven by the hope of obtaining copyright protection for model outputs.”
Hugging Face’s Head of ML & Society, Yacine Jernite, told Ars that the Copyright Office seemed to “take a constructive approach” to answering some of artists’ biggest questions about AI.
“We believe AI should support, not replace, artists,” Jernite told Ars. “For that to happen, the value of creative work must remain in its human contribution, regardless of the tools used.”
Although the Copyright Office suggested that this week’s report might be the most highly anticipated, Jernite said that Hugging Face is eager to see the next report, which officials said would focus on “the legal implications of training AI models on copyrighted works, including licensing considerations and the allocation of any potential liability.”
“As a platform that supports broader participation in AI, we see more value in distributing its benefits than in concentrating all control with a few large model providers,” Jernite said. “We’re looking forward to the next part of the Copyright Office’s Report, particularly on training data, licensing, and liability, key questions especially for some types of output, like code.”
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment on how guardrails currently work to prevent the alleged jailbreaks, but publishers appear satisfied by current guardrails in accepting the deal.
Whether AI training on lyrics is infringing remains unsettled
Now, the matter of whether Anthropic has strong enough guardrails to block allegedly harmful outputs is settled, Lee wrote, allowing the court to focus on arguments regarding “publishers’ request in their Motion for Preliminary Injunction that Anthropic refrain from using unauthorized copies of Publishers’ lyrics to train future AI models.”
“Whether generative AI companies can permissibly use copyrighted content to train LLMs without licenses,” Anthropic’s court filing said, “is currently being litigated in roughly two dozen copyright infringement cases around the country, none of which has sought to resolve the issue in the truncated posture of a preliminary injunction motion. It speaks volumes that no other plaintiff—including the parent company record label of one of the Plaintiffs in this case—has sought preliminary injunctive relief from this conduct.”
In a statement, Anthropic’s spokesperson told Ars that “Claude isn’t designed to be used for copyright infringement, and we have numerous processes in place designed to prevent such infringement.”
“Our decision to enter into this stipulation is consistent with those priorities,” Anthropic said. “We continue to look forward to showing that, consistent with existing copyright law, using potentially copyrighted material in the training of generative AI models is a quintessential fair use.”
This suit will likely take months to fully resolve, as the question of whether AI training is a fair use of copyrighted works is complex and remains hotly disputed in court. For Anthropic, the stakes could be high, with a loss potentially triggering more than $75 million in fines, as well as an order possibly forcing Anthropic to reveal and destroy all the copyrighted works in its training data.
“The public interest in the preservation of intellectual property rights weighs heavily against the injunction sought here, which would force Apple to distribute an app over the repeated and consistent objections of non-parties who allege their rights are infringed by the app,” Apple argued.
Unlike other free apps that continually play ads, Musi only serves ads when the app is initially opened, then allows uninterrupted listening. One Musi user also noted that Musi allows for an unlimited number of videos in a playlist, where YouTube caps playlists at 5,000 videos.
“Musi is the only playback system I have to play all 9k of my videos/songs in the same library,” the Musi fan said. “I honestly don’t just use Musi just cause it’s free. It has features no other app has, especially if you like to watch music videos while you listen to music.”
“Spotify isn’t cutting it,” one Reddit user whined.
“I hate Spotify,” another user agreed.
“I think of Musi every other day,” a third user who apparently lost the app after purchasing a new phone said. “Since I got my new iPhone, I have to settle for other music apps just to get by (not enough, of course) to listen to music in my car driving. I will be patiently waiting once Musi is available to redownload.”
Some Musi fans who still have access gloat in the threads, while others warn the litigation could soon doom the app for everyone.
Musi continues to perhaps optimistically tell users that the app is coming back, reassuring anyone whose app was accidentally offloaded that their libraries remain linked through iCloud and will be restored if it does.
Some users buy into Musi’s promises, while others seem skeptical that Musi can take on Apple. To many users still clinging to their Musi app, updating their phones has become too risky until the litigation resolves.
“Please,” one Musi fan begged. “Musi come back!!!”
“That movie sucks,” Elon Musk said in response to the lawsuit.
Credit: via Alcon Entertainment
Elon Musk may have personally used AI to rip off a Blade Runner 2049 image for a Tesla cybercab event after producers rejected any association between their iconic sci-fi movie and Musk or any of his companies.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, lawyers for Alcon Entertainment—exclusive rightsholder of the 2017 Blade Runner 2049 movie—accused Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) of conspiring with Musk and Tesla to steal the image and infringe Alcon’s copyright to benefit financially off the brand association.
According to the complaint, WBD did not approach Alcon for permission until six hours before the Tesla event when Alcon “refused all permissions and adamantly objected” to linking their movie with Musk’s cybercab.
At that point, WBD “disingenuously” downplayed the license being sought, the lawsuit said, claiming they were seeking “clip licensing” that the studio should have known would not provide rights to livestream the Tesla event globally on X (formerly Twitter).
Musk’s behavior cited
Alcon said it would never allow Tesla to exploit its Blade Runner film, so “although the information given was sparse, Alcon learned enough information for Alcon’s co-CEOs to consider the proposal and firmly reject it, which they did.” Specifically, Alcon denied any affiliation—express or implied—between Tesla’s cybercab and Blade Runner 2049.
“Musk has become an increasingly vocal, overtly political, highly polarizing figure globally, and especially in Hollywood,” Alcon’s complaint said. If Hollywood perceived an affiliation with Musk and Tesla, the complaint said, the company risked alienating not just other car brands currently weighing partnerships on the Blade Runner 2099 TV series Alcon has in the works, but also potentially losing access to top Hollywood talent for their films.
The “Hollywood talent pool market generally is less likely to deal with Alcon, or parts of the market may be, if they believe or are confused as to whether, Alcon has an affiliation with Tesla or Musk,” the complaint said.
Musk, the lawsuit said, is “problematic,” and “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
In bad faith
Because Alcon had no chance to avoid the affiliation while millions viewed the cybercab livestream on X, Alcon saw Tesla using the images over Alcon’s objections as “clearly” a “bad faith and malicious gambit… to link Tesla’s cybercab to strong Hollywood brands at a time when Tesla and Musk are on the outs with Hollywood,” the complaint said.
Alcon believes that WBD’s agreement was likely worth six or seven figures and likely stipulated that Tesla “affiliate the cybercab with one or more motion pictures from” WBD’s catalog.
While any of the Mad Max movies may have fit the bill, Musk wanted to use Blade Runner 2049, the lawsuit alleged, because that movie features an “artificially intelligent autonomously capable” flying car (known as a spinner) and is “extremely relevant” to “precisely the areas of artificial intelligence, self-driving capability, and autonomous automotive capability that Tesla and Musk are trying to market” with the cybercab.
The Blade Runner 2049 spinner is “one of the most famous vehicles in motion picture history,” the complaint alleged, recently exhibited alongside other iconic sci-fi cars like the Back to the Future time-traveling DeLorean or the light cycle from Tron: Legacy.
As Alcon sees it, Musk seized the misappropriation of the Blade Runner image to help him sell Teslas, and WBD allegedly directed Musk to use AI to skirt Alcon’s copyright to avoid a costly potential breach of contract on the day of the event.
For Alcon, brand partnerships are a lucrative business, with carmakers paying as much as $10 million to associate their vehicles with Blade Runner 2049. By seemingly using AI to generate a stylized copy of the image at the heart of the movie—which references the scene where their movie’s hero, K, meets the original 1982 Blade Runner hero, Rick Deckard—Tesla avoided paying Alcon’s typical fee, their complaint said.
Musk maybe faked the image himself, lawsuit says
During the live event, Musk introduced the cybercab on a WBD Hollywood studio lot. For about 11 seconds, the Tesla founder “awkwardly” displayed a fake, allegedly AI-generated Blade Runner 2049 film still. He used the image to make a point that apocalyptic films show a future that’s “dark and dismal,” whereas Tesla’s vision of the future is much brighter.
In Musk’s slideshow image, believed to be AI-generated, a male figure is “seen from behind, with close-cropped hair, wearing a trench coat or duster, standing in almost full silhouette as he surveys the abandoned ruins of a city, all bathed in misty orange light,” the lawsuit said. The similarity to the key image used in Blade Runner 2049 marketing is not “coincidental,” the complaint said.
If there were any doubts that this image was supposed to reference the Blade Runner movie, the lawsuit said, Musk “erased them” by directly referencing the movie in his comments.
“You know, I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future,” Musk said at the event. “I believe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.”
The producers think the image was likely generated—”even possibly by Musk himself”—by “asking an AI image generation engine to make ‘an image from the K surveying ruined Las Vegas sequence of Blade Runner2049,’ or some closely equivalent input direction,” the lawsuit said.
Alcon is not sure exactly what went down after the company rejected rights to use the film’s imagery at the event and is hoping to learn more through the litigation’s discovery phase.
Musk may try to argue that his comments at the Tesla event were “only meant to talk broadly about the general idea of science fiction films and undesirable apocalyptic futures and juxtaposing them with Musk’s ostensibly happier robot car future vision.”
But producers argued that defense is “not credible” since Tesla explicitly asked to use the Blade Runner 2049 image, and there are “better” films in WBD’s library to promote Musk’s message, like the Mad Max movies.
“But those movies don’t have massive consumer goodwill specifically around really cool-looking (Academy Award-winning) artificially intelligent, autonomous cars,” the complaint said, accusing Musk of stealing the image when it wasn’t given to him.
If Tesla and WBD are found to have violated copyright and false representation laws, that potentially puts both companies on the hook for damages that cover not just copyright fines but also Alcon’s lost profits and reputation damage after the alleged “massive economic theft.”
Musk responds to Blade Runner suit
Alcon suspects that Musk believed that Blade Runner 2049 was eligible to be used at the event under the WBD agreement, not knowing that WBD never had “any non-domestic rights or permissions for the Picture.”
Once Musk requested to use the Blade Runner imagery, Alcon alleged that WBD scrambled to secure rights by obscuring the very lucrative “larger brand affiliation proposal” by positioning their ask as a request for much less expensive “clip licensing.”
After Alcon rejected the proposal outright, WBD told Tesla that the affiliation in the event could not occur because X planned to livestream the event globally. But even though Tesla and X allegedly knew that the affiliation was rejected, Musk appears to have charged ahead with the event as planned.
“It all exuded an odor of thinly contrived excuse to link Tesla’s cybercab to strong Hollywood brands,” Alcon’s complaint said. “Which of course is exactly what it was.”
Alcon is hoping a jury will find Tesla, Musk, and WBD violated laws. Producers have asked for an injunction stopping Tesla from using any Blade Runner imagery in its promotional or advertising campaigns. They also want a disclaimer slapped on the livestreamed event video on X, noting that the Blade Runner association is “false or misleading.”
For Musk, a ban on linking Blade Runner to his car company may feel bleak. Last year, he touted the Cybertruck as an “armored personnel carrier from the future—what Bladerunner would have driven.” This amused many Blade Runner fans, as Gizmodo noted, because there never was a character named “Bladerunner,” but rather that was just a job title for the film’s hero Deckard.
In response to the lawsuit, Musk took to X to post what Blade Runner fans—who rated the 2017 movie as 88 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes—might consider a polarizing take, replying, “That movie sucks” on a post calling out Alcon’s lawsuit as “absurd.”
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
Judges for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday rejected the Internet Archive (IA) argument that its controlled digital lending—which allows only one person to borrow each scanned e-book at a time—was a transformative fair use that worked like a traditional library and did not violate copyright law.
As Judge Beth Robinson wrote in the decision, because the IA’s digital copies of books did not “provide criticism, commentary, or information about the originals” or alter the original books to add “something new,” the court concluded that the IA’s use of publishers’ books was not transformative, hobbling the organization’s fair use defense.
“IA’s digital books serve the same exact purpose as the originals: making authors’ works available to read,” Robinson said, emphasizing that although in copyright law, “[n]ot every instance will be clear cut,” “this one is.”
The appeals court ruling affirmed the lower court’s ruling, which permanently barred the IA from distributing not just the works in the suit, but all books “available for electronic licensing,” Robinson said.
“To construe IA’s use of the Works as transformative would significantly narrow―if not entirely eviscerate―copyright owners’ exclusive right to prepare (or not prepare) derivative works,” Robinson wrote.
Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, the trade organization behind the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling. She said the court upheld “the rights of authors and publishers to license and be compensated for their books and other creative works and reminds us in no uncertain terms that infringement is both costly and antithetical to the public interest.”
“If there was any doubt, the Court makes clear that under fair use jurisprudence there is nothing transformative about converting entire works into new formats without permission or appropriating the value of derivative works that are a key part of the author’s copyright bundle,” Pallante said.
The Internet Archive’s director of library services, Chris Freeland, issued a statement on the loss, which comes after four years of fighting to maintain its Open Libraries Project.
“We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere,” Freeland said. “We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books.”
IA’s lending harmed publishers, judge says
The court’s fair use analysis didn’t solely hinge on whether IA’s digital lending of e-books was “transformative.” Judges also had to consider book publishers’ claims that IA was profiting off e-book lending, in addition to factoring in whether each work was original, what amount of each work was being copied, and whether the IA’s e-books substituted original works, depriving authors of revenue in relevant markets.
Ultimately, for each factor, judges ruled in favor of publishers, which argued that granting IA was threatening to “‘destroy the value of [their] exclusive right to prepare derivative works,’ including the right to publish their authors’ works as e-books.”
While the IA tried to argue that book publishers’ surging profits suggested that its digital lending caused no market harms, Robinson disagreed with the IA’s experts’ “ill-supported” market analysis and took issue with IA advertising “its digital books as a free alternative to Publishers’ print and e-books.”
“IA offers effectively the same product as Publishers―full copies of the Works―but at no cost to consumers or libraries,” Robinson wrote. “At least in this context, it is difficult to compete with free.”
Robinson wrote that despite book publishers showing no proof of market harms, that lack of evidence did not support IA’s case, ruling that IA did not satisfy its burden to prove it had not harmed publishers. She further wrote that it’s common sense to agree with publishers’ characterization of harms because “IA’s digital books compete directly with Publishers’ e-books” and would deprive authors of revenue if left unchecked.
“We agree with Publishers’ assessment of market harm” and “are likewise convinced” that “unrestricted and widespread conduct of the sort engaged in by [IA] would result in a substantially adverse impact on the potential market” for publishers’ e-books, Robinson wrote. “Though Publishers have not provided empirical data to support this observation, we routinely rely on such logical inferences where appropriate” when determining fair use.
Judges did, however, side with IA on the matter of whether the nonprofit was profiting off loaning e-books for free, contradicting the lower court. The appeals court disagreed with book publishers’ claims that IA profited off e-books by soliciting donations or earning a small percentage from used books sold through referral links on its site.
“Of course, IA must solicit some funds to keep the lights on,” Robinson wrote. But “IA does not profit directly from its Free Digital Library,” and it would be “misleading” to characterize it that way.
“To hold otherwise would greatly restrain the ability of nonprofits to seek donations while making fair use of copyrighted works,” Robinson wrote.
Artists defending a class-action lawsuit are claiming a major win this week in their fight to stop the most sophisticated AI image generators from copying billions of artworks to train AI models and replicate their styles without compensating artists.
In an order on Monday, US district judge William Orrick denied key parts of motions to dismiss from Stability AI, Midjourney, Runway AI, and DeviantArt. The court will now allow artists to proceed with discovery on claims that AI image generators relying on Stable Diffusion violate both the Copyright Act and the Lanham Act, which protects artists from commercial misuse of their names and unique styles.
“We won BIG,” an artist plaintiff, Karla Ortiz, wrote on X (formerly Twitter), celebrating the order. “Not only do we proceed on our copyright claims,” but “this order also means companies who utilize” Stable Diffusion models and LAION-like datasets that scrape artists’ works for AI training without permission “could now be liable for copyright infringement violations, amongst other violations.”
Lawyers for the artists, Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, told Ars that artists suing “consider the Court’s order a significant step forward for the case,” as “the Court allowed Plaintiffs’ core copyright-infringement claims against all four defendants to proceed.”
Stability AI was the only company that responded to Ars’ request to comment, but it declined to comment.
Artists prepare to defend their livelihoods from AI
To get to this stage of the suit, artists had to amend their complaint to better explain exactly how AI image generators work to allegedly train on artists’ images and copy artists’ styles.
For example, they were told that if they “contend Stable Diffusion contains ‘compressed copies’ of the Training Images, they need to define ‘compressed copies’ and explain plausible facts in support. And if plaintiffs’ compressed copies theory is based on a contention that Stable Diffusion contains mathematical or statistical methods that can be carried out through algorithms or instructions in order to reconstruct the Training Images in whole or in part to create the new Output Images, they need to clarify that and provide plausible facts in support,” Orrick wrote.
To keep their fight alive, the artists pored through academic articles to support their arguments that “Stable Diffusion is built to a significant extent on copyrighted works and that the way the product operates necessarily invokes copies or protected elements of those works.” Orrick agreed that their amended complaint made plausible inferences that “at this juncture” is enough to support claims “that Stable Diffusion by operation by end users creates copyright infringement and was created to facilitate that infringement by design.”
“Specifically, the Court found Plaintiffs’ theory that image-diffusion models like Stable Diffusion contain compressed copies of their datasets to be plausible,” Saveri and Butterick’s statement to Ars said. “The Court also found it plausible that training, distributing, and copying such models constitute acts of copyright infringement.”
Not all of the artists’ claims survived, with Orrick granting motions to dismiss claims alleging that AI companies removed content management information from artworks in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Because artists failed to show evidence of defendants altering or stripping this information, they must permanently drop the DMCA claims.
Part of Orrick’s decision on the DMCA claims, however, indicates that the legal basis for dismissal is “unsettled,” with Orrick simply agreeing with Stability AI’s unsettled argument that “because the output images are admittedly not identical to the Training Images, there can be no liability for any removal of CMI that occurred during the training process.”
Ortiz wrote on X that she respectfully disagreed with that part of the decision but expressed enthusiasm that the court allowed artists to proceed with false endorsement claims, alleging that Midjourney violated the Lanham Act.
Five artists successfully argued that because “their names appeared on the list of 4,700 artists posted by Midjourney’s CEO on Discord” and that list was used to promote “the various styles of artistic works its AI product could produce,” this plausibly created confusion over whether those artists had endorsed Midjourney.
“Whether or not a reasonably prudent consumer would be confused or misled by the Names List and showcase to conclude that the included artists were endorsing the Midjourney product can be tested at summary judgment,” Orrick wrote. “Discovery may show that it is or that is it not.”
While Orrick agreed with Midjourney that “plaintiffs have no protection over ‘simple, cartoony drawings’ or ‘gritty fantasy paintings,'” artists were able to advance a “trade dress” claim under the Lanham Act, too. This is because Midjourney allegedly “allows users to create works capturing the ‘trade dress of each of the Midjourney Named Plaintiffs [that] is inherently distinctive in look and feel as used in connection with their artwork and art products.'”
As discovery proceeds in the case, artists will also have an opportunity to amend dismissed claims of unjust enrichment. According to Orrick, their next amended complaint will be their last chance to prove that AI companies have “deprived plaintiffs ‘the benefit of the value of their works.'”
Saveri and Butterick confirmed that “though the Court dismissed certain supplementary claims, Plaintiffs’ central claims will now proceed to discovery and trial.” On X, Ortiz suggested that the artists’ case is “now potentially one of THE biggest copyright infringement and trade dress cases ever!”
“Looking forward to the next stage of our fight!” Ortiz wrote.
Enlarge / Disney+ promotional art for The Fable, an anime series that triggered Animeflix takedown notices.
Disney+
Thousands of anime fans were shocked Thursday when the popular piracy site Animeflix voluntarily shut down without explaining why, TorrentFreak reported.
“It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Animeflix,” the site’s operators told users in a Discord with 35,000 members. “After careful consideration, we have decided to shut down our service effective immediately. We deeply appreciate your support and enthusiasm over the years.”
Prior to its shutdown, Animeflix attracted millions of monthly visits, TorrentFreak reported. It was preferred by some anime fans for its clean interface, with one fan on Reddit describing Animeflix as the “Netflix of anime.”
“Deadass this site was clean,” one Reddit user wrote. “The best I’ve ever seen. Sad to see it go.”
Although Animeflix operators did not connect the dots for users, TorrentFreak suggested that the piracy site chose to shut down after facing “considerable legal pressure in recent months.”
Back in December, an anti-piracy group, Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), sought to shut down Animeflix. Then in mid-May, rightsholders—including Netflix, Disney, Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros.—won an injunction through the High Court of India against several piracy sites, including Animeflix. This briefly caused Animeflix to be unavailable until Animeflix simply switched to another domain and continued serving users, TorrentFreak reported.
Although Animeflix is not telling users why it’s choosing to shut down now, TorrentFreak—which, as its name suggests, focuses much of its coverage on copyright issues impacting file sharing online—noted that “when a pirate site shuts down, voluntarily or not, copyright issues typically play a role.”
For anime fans, the abrupt closure was disappointing because of difficulty accessing the hottest new anime titles and delays as studios work to offer translations to various regions. The delays are so bad that some studios are considering combating piracy by using AI to push out translated versions more quickly. But fans fear this will only result in low-quality subtitles, CBR reported.
On Reddit, some fans also complained after relying exclusively on Animeflix to keep track of where they left off on anime shows that often span hundreds of episodes.
Others begged to be turned onto other anime piracy sites, while some speculated whether Animeflix might eventually pop up at a new domain. TorrentFreak noted that Animeflix shut down once previously several years ago but ultimately came back. One Redditor wrote, “another hero has passed away but the will, will be passed.” On another Reddit thread asking “will Animeflix be gone forever or maybe create a new site,” one commenter commiserated, writing, “We don’t know for sure. Only time will tell.”
It’s also possible that someone else may pick up the torch and operate a new piracy site under the same name. According to TorrentFreak, this is “likely.”
Animeflix did not reassure users that it may be back, instead urging them to find other sources for their favorite shows and movies.
“We hope the joy and excitement of anime continue to brighten your days through other wonderful platforms,” Animeflix’s Discord message said.
ACE did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.
In the weeks ahead of IA’s efforts to appeal that ruling, IA was forced to remove 500,000 books from its collection, shocking users. In an open letter to publishers, more than 30,000 readers, researchers, and authors begged for access to the books to be restored in the open library, claiming the takedowns dealt “a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others,” who may not have access to a local library or feel “safe accessing the information they need in public.”
During a press briefing following arguments in court Friday, IA founder Brewster Kahle said that “those voices weren’t being heard.” Judges appeared primarily focused on understanding how IA’s digital lending potentially hurts publishers’ profits in the ebook licensing market, rather than on how publishers’ costly ebook licensing potentially harms readers.
However, lawyers representing IA—Joseph C. Gratz, from the law firm Morrison Foerster, and Corynne McSherry, from the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation—confirmed that judges were highly engaged by IA’s defense. Arguments that were initially scheduled to last only 20 minutes stretched on instead for an hour and a half. Ultimately, judges decided not to rule from the bench, with a decision expected in the coming months or potentially next year. McSherry said the judges’ engagement showed that the judges “get it” and won’t make the decision without careful consideration of both sides.
“They understand this is an important decision,” McSherry said. “They understand that there are real consequences here for real people. And they are taking their job very, very seriously. And I think that’s the best that we can hope for, really.”
On the other side, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the trade organization behind the lawsuit, provided little insight into how the day went. When reached for comment, AAP simply said, “We thought it was a strong day in court, and we look forward to the opinion.”
Decision could come early fall
According to Gratz, most of the questions for IA focused on “how to think about the situation where a particular book is available” from the open library and also available as an ebook that a library can license. Judges said they did not know how to think about “a situation where the publishers just haven’t come forward with any data showing that this has an impact,” Gratz said.
One audience member at the press briefing noted that instead judges were floating hypotheticals, like “if every single person in the world made a copy of a hypothetical thing, could hypothetically this affect the publishers’ revenue.”
McSherry said this was a common tactic when judges must weigh the facts while knowing that their decision will set an important precedent. However, IA has shown evidence, Gratz said, that even if IA provided limitless loans of digitized physical copies, “CDL doesn’t cause any economic harm to publishers, or authors,” and “there was absolutely no evidence of any harm of that kind that the publishers were able to bring forward.”
McSherry said that IA pushed back on claims that IA behaves like “pirates” when digitally lending books, with critics sometimes comparing the open library to illegal file-sharing networks. Instead, McSherry said that CDL provides a path to “meet readers where they are,” allowing IA to loan books that it owns to one user at a time no matter where in the world they are located.
“It’s not unlawful for a library to lend a book it owns to one patron at a time,” Gratz said IA told the court. “And the advent of digital technology doesn’t change that result. That’s lawful. And that’s what librarians do.”
In the open letter, IA fans pointed out that many IA readers were “in underserved communities where access is limited” to quality library resources. Being suddenly cut off from accessing nearly half a million books has “far-reaching implications,” they argued, removing access to otherwise inaccessible “research materials and literature that support their learning and academic growth.”
IA has argued that because copyright law is intended to provide equal access to knowledge, copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it. They’re hoping the judges will decide that CDL is fair use, reversing the lower court’s decision and restoring access to books recently removed from the open library. But Gratz said there’s no telling yet when that decision will come.
“There is no deadline for them to make a decision,” Gratz said, but it “probably won’t happen until early fall” at the earliest. After that, whichever side loses will have an opportunity to appeal the case, which has already stretched on for four years, to the Supreme Court. Since neither side seems prepared to back down, the Supreme Court eventually weighing in seems inevitable.
McSherry seemed optimistic that the judges at least understood the stakes for IA readers, noting that fair use is “designed to ensure that copyright actually serves the public interest,” not publishers’. Should the court decide otherwise, McSherry warned, the court risks allowing “a few powerful publishers” to “hijack the future of books.”
When IA first appealed, Kahle put out a statement saying IA couldn’t walk away from “a fight to keep library books available for those seeking truth in the digital age.”
IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a “devastating loss” for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.
To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court’s decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA’s controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library’s lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it.
“We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers,” Chris Freeland, IA’s director of library services, wrote in the blog. “But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing.”
IA will have an opportunity to defend its practices when oral arguments start in its appeal on June 28.
“Our position is straightforward; we just want to let our library patrons borrow and read the books we own, like any other library,” Freeland wrote, while arguing that the “potential repercussions of this lawsuit extend far beyond the Internet Archive” and publishers should just “let readers read.”
“This is a fight for the preservation of all libraries and the fundamental right to access information, a cornerstone of any democratic society,” Freeland wrote. “We believe in the right of authors to benefit from their work; and we believe that libraries must be permitted to fulfill their mission of providing access to knowledge, regardless of whether it takes physical or digital form. Doing so upholds the principle that knowledge should be equally and equitably accessible to everyone, regardless of where they live or where they learn.”
Internet Archive fans beg publishers to end takedowns
After publishers won an injunction stopping IA’s digital lending, which “limits what we can do with our digitized books,” IA’s help page said, the open library started shrinking. While “removed books are still available to patrons with print disabilities,” everyone else has been cut off, causing many books in IA’s collection to show up as “Borrow Unavailable.”
Ever since, IA has been “inundated” with inquiries from readers all over the world searching for the removed books, Freeland said. And “we get tagged in social media every day where people are like, ‘why are there so many books gone from our library’?” Freeland told Ars.
In an open letter to publishers signed by nearly 19,000 supporters, IA fans begged publishers to reconsider forcing takedowns and quickly restore access to the lost books.
Among the “far-reaching implications” of the takedowns, IA fans counted the negative educational impact of academics, students, and educators—”particularly in underserved communities where access is limited—who were suddenly cut off from “research materials and literature that support their learning and academic growth.”
They also argued that the takedowns dealt “a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others,” who may not have access to a local library or feel “safe accessing the information they need in public.”
“Your removal of these books impedes academic progress and innovation, as well as imperiling the preservation of our cultural and historical knowledge,” the letter said.
“This isn’t happening in the abstract,” Freeland told Ars. “This is real. People no longer have access to a half a million books.”
YouTube’s Content ID system—which automatically detects content registered by rightsholders—is “completely fucking broken,” a YouTuber called “Albino” declared in a rant on X (formerly Twitter) viewed more than 950,000 times.
Albino, who is also a popular Twitch streamer, complained that his YouTube video playing through Fallout was demonetized because a Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming.
Apparently, YouTube had automatically scanned Albino’s video and detected the washing machine chime as a song called “Done”—which Albino quickly saw was uploaded to YouTube by a musician known as Audego nine years ago.
But when Albino hit play on Audego’s song, the only thing that he heard was a 30-second clip of the washing machine chime. To Albino it was obvious that Audego didn’t have any rights to the jingle, which Dexerto reported actually comes from the song “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) from Austrian composer Franz Schubert.
The song was composed in 1817 and is in the public domain. Samsung has used it to signal the end of a wash cycle for years, sparking debate over whether it’s the catchiest washing machine song and inspiring at least one violinist to perform a duet with her machine. It’s been a source of delight for many Samsung customers, but for Albino, hearing the jingle appropriated on YouTube only inspired ire.
“A guy recorded his fucking washing machine and uploaded it to YouTube with Content ID,” Albino said in a video on X. “And now I’m getting copyright claims” while “my money” is “going into the toilet and being given to this fucking slime.”
Albino suggested that YouTube had potentially allowed Audego to make invalid copyright claims for years without detecting the seemingly obvious abuse.
“How is this still here?” Albino asked. “It took me one Google search to figure this out,” and “now I’m sharing revenue with this? That’s insane.”
At first, Team YouTube gave Albino a boilerplate response on X, writing, “We understand how important it is for you. From your vid, it looks like you’ve recently submitted a dispute. When you dispute a Content ID claim, the person who claimed your video (the claimant) is notified and they have 30 days to respond.”
Albino expressed deep frustration at YouTube’s response, given how “egregious” he considered the copyright abuse to be.
“Just wait for the person blatantly stealing copyrighted material to respond,” Albino responded to YouTube. “Ah okay, yes, I’m sure they did this in good faith and will make the correct call, though it would be a shame if they simply clicked ‘reject dispute,’ took all the ad revenue money and forced me to risk having my channel terminated to appeal it!! XDxXDdxD!! Thanks Team YouTube!”
Soon after, YouTube confirmed on X that Audego’s copyright claim was indeed invalid. The social platform ultimately released the claim and told Albino to expect the changes to be reflected on his channel within two business days.
Ars could not immediately reach YouTube or Albino for comment.
Widespread abuse of Content ID continues
YouTubers have complained about abuse of Content ID for years. Techdirt’s Timothy Geigner agreed with Albino’s assessment that the YouTube system is “hopelessly broken,” noting that sometimes content is flagged by mistake. But just as easily, bad actors can abuse the system to claim “content that simply isn’t theirs” and seize sometimes as much as millions in ad revenue.
In 2021, YouTube announced that it had invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” to create content management tools, of which Content ID quickly emerged as the platform’s go-to solution to detect and remove copyrighted materials.
At that time, YouTube claimed that Content ID was created as a “solution for those with the most complex rights management needs,” like movie studios and record labels whose movie clips and songs are most commonly uploaded by YouTube users. YouTube warned that without Content ID, “rightsholders could have their rights impaired and lawful expression could be inappropriately impacted.”
Since its rollout, more than 99 percent of copyright actions on YouTube have consistently been triggered automatically through Content ID.
And just as consistently, YouTube has seen widespread abuse of Content ID, terminating “tens of thousands of accounts each year that attempt to abuse our copyright tools,” YouTube said. YouTube also acknowledged in 2021 that “just one invalid reference file in Content ID can impact thousands of videos and users, stripping them of monetization or blocking them altogether.”
To help rightsholders and creators track how much copyrighted content is removed from the platform, YouTube started releasing biannual transparency reports in 2021. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital rights group, applauded YouTube’s “move towards transparency” while criticizing YouTube’s “claim that YouTube is adequately protecting its creators.”
“That rings hollow,” EFF reported in 2021, noting that “huge conglomerates have consistently pushed for more and more restrictions on the use of copyrighted material, at the expense of fair use and, as a result, free expression.” As EFF saw it then, YouTube’s Content ID system mainly served to appease record labels and movie studios, while creators felt “pressured” not to dispute Content ID claims out of “fear” that their channel might be removed if YouTube consistently sided with rights holders.
According to YouTube, “it’s impossible for matching technology to take into account complex legal considerations like fair use or fair dealing,” and that impossibility seemingly ensures that creators bear the brunt of automated actions even when it’s fair to use copyrighted materials.
At that time, YouTube described Content ID as “an entirely new revenue stream from ad-supported, user generated content” for rights holders, who made more than $5.5 billion from Content ID matches by December 2020. More recently, YouTube reported that figure climbed above $9 million, as of December 2022. With so much money at play, it’s easy to see how the system could be seen as disproportionately favoring rights holders, while creators continue to suffer from income diverted by the automated system.
A US district judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk’s X Corp’s lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and violating both X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data.
X sued Bright Data to stop the company from scraping and selling X data to academic institutes and businesses, including Fortune 500 companies.
According to Alsup, X failed to state a claim while arguing that companies like Bright Data should have to pay X to access public data posted by X users.
“To the extent the claims are based on access to systems, they fail because X Corp. has alleged no more than threadbare recitals,” parroting laws and findings in other cases without providing any supporting evidence, Alsup wrote. “To the extent the claims are based on scraping and selling of data, they fail because they are preempted by federal law,” specifically standing as an “obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of” the Copyright Act.
The judge found that X Corp’s argument exposed a tension between the platform’s desire to control user data while also enjoying the safe harbor of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which allows X to avoid liability for third-party content. If X owned the data, it could perhaps argue it has exclusive rights to control the data, but then it wouldn’t have safe harbor.
“X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbors yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wresting fees from those who wish to extract and copy X users’ content,” Alsup wrote.
If X got its way, Alsup warned, “X Corp. would entrench its own private copyright system that rivals, even conflicts with, the actual copyright system enacted by Congress” and “yank into its private domain and hold for sale information open to all, exercising a copyright owner’s right to exclude where it has no such right.”
That “would upend the careful balance Congress struck between what copyright owners own and do not own,” Alsup wrote, potentially shrinking the public domain.
“Applying general principles, this order concludes that the extent to which public data may be freely copied from social media platforms, even under the banner of scraping, should generally be governed by the Copyright Act, not by conflicting, ubiquitous terms,” Alsup wrote.
Bright Data CEO Or Lenchner said in a statement provided to Ars that Alsup’s decision had “profound implications in business, research, training of AI models, and beyond.”
“Bright Data has proven that ethical and transparent scraping practices for legitimate business use and social good initiatives are legally sound,” Lenchner said. “Companies that try to control user data intended for public consumption will not win this legal battle.”
Alsup pointed out that X’s lawsuit was “not looking to protect X users’ privacy” but rather to block Bright Data from interfering with its “own sale of its data through a tiered subscription service.”
“X Corp. is happy to allow the extraction and copying of X users’ content so long as it gets paid,” Alsup wrote.
In a sea of vague claims that scraping is “unfair,” perhaps most deficient in X’s complaint, Alsup suggested, was X’s failure to allege that Bright Data’s scraping impaired its services or that X suffered any damages.
“There are no allegations of servers harmed or identities misrepresented,” Alsup wrote. “Additionally, there are no allegations of any damage resulting from automated or unauthorized access.”
X will be allowed to amend its complaint and appeal. The case may be strengthened if X can show evidence of damages or prove that the scraping overburdened X or otherwise deprived X users of their use of the platform in a way that could damage X’s reputation.
But as it currently stands, X’s arguments in many ways appear rather “bare,” Alsup wrote, while its terms of service make crystal clear to users that “[w]hat’s yours is yours—you own your Content.”
By attempting to exclude Bright Data from accessing public X posts owned by X users, X also nearly “obliterated” the “fair use” provision of the Copyright Act, “flouting” Congress’ intent in passing the law, Alsup wrote.
“Only by receiving permission and paying X Corp. could Bright Data, its customers, and other X users freely reproduce, adapt, distribute, and display what might (or might not) be available for taking and selling as fair use,” Alsup wrote. “Thus, Bright Data, its customers, and other X users who wanted to make fair use of copyrighted content would not be able to do so.”
A win for X could have had dire consequences for the Internet, Alsup suggested. In dismissing the complaint, Alsup cited an appeals court ruling “that giving social media companies “free rein to decide, on any basis, who can collect and use data—data that the companies do not own, that they otherwise make publicly available to viewers, and that the companies themselves collect and use—risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest.”
Because that outcome was averted, Lenchner is celebrating Bright Data’s win.
“Bright Data’s victory over X makes it clear to the world that public information on the web belongs to all of us, and any attempt to deny the public access will fail,” Lenchner said.
In 2023, Bright Data won a similar lawsuit lobbed by Meta over scraping public Facebook and Instagram data. These lawsuits, Lenchner alleged, “are used as a monetary weapon to discourage collecting public data from sites, so conglomerates can hoard user-generated public data.”
“Courts recognize this and the risks it poses of information monopolies and ownership of the Internet,” Lenchner said.
