{"id":229937,"date":"2025-07-01T18:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-01T18:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/229937\/"},"modified":"2025-07-01T18:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T18:12:10","slug":"ai-companies-start-winning-the-copyright-fight-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/229937\/","title":{"rendered":"AI companies start winning the copyright fight | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. If you need me after this newsletter publishes, I will be busy poring over photos from Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez\u2019s wedding, the gaudiest and most star-studded affair to disrupt technology news this year. I found it a tacky and spectacular affair. Everyone who was anyone was there, except for Charlize Theron, who, unprompted, said on Monday<\/a>: \u201cI think we might be the only people who did not get an invite to the Bezos wedding. But that\u2019s OK, because they suck and we\u2019re cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI companies start winning the copyright fight<\/p>\n

Last week, tech companies notched several victories in the fight over their use of copyrighted text to create artificial intelligence products.<\/p>\n

Anthropic: A US judge has ruled that Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, use of books to train its artificial intelligence system \u2013 without permission of the authors \u2013 did not breach copyright law. Judge William Alsup compared the Anthropic model\u2019s use of books to a \u201creader aspiring to be a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

And the next day, Meta: The US district judge Vince Chhabria, in San Francisco, said in his decision on the Meta<\/a> case that the authors had not presented enough evidence that the technology company\u2019s AI would cause \u201cmarket dilution\u201d by flooding the market with work similar to theirs.<\/p>\n

The same day that Meta received its favorable ruling, a group of writers sued Microsoft<\/a>, alleging copyright infringement in the creation of that company\u2019s Megatron text generator. Judging by the rulings in favor of Meta and Anthropic, the authors are facing an uphill battle.<\/p>\n

These three cases are skirmishes in the wider legal war over copyrighted media, which rages on. Three weeks ago, Disney and NBC Universal sued Midjourney, alleging that the company\u2019s namesake AI image generator and forthcoming video generator made illegal use of the studios\u2019 iconic characters like Darth Vader and the Simpson family. The world\u2019s biggest record labels \u2013 Sony, Universal, and Warner \u2013 have sued two companies that make AI-powered music generators, Suno and Udio. On the textual front, the New York Times\u2019 suit against OpenAI and Microsoft is ongoing.<\/p>\n

The lawsuits over AI-generated text were filed first, and, as their rulings emerge, the next question in the copyright fight is whether decisions about one type of media will apply to the next.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe specific media involved in the lawsuit \u2013 written works versus images versus videos versus audio \u2013 will certainly change the fair use analysis in each case,\u201d said John Strand, a trademark and copyright attorney with the law firm Wolf Greenfield. \u201cThe impact on the market for the copyrighted works is becoming a key factor in the fair use analysis, and the market for books is different than that for movies.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Strand, the cases over images seem more favorable to copyright holders, as the AI models are allegedly producing identical images to the copyrighted ones in the training data.<\/p>\n

A bizarre and damning fact was revealed in the Anthropic ruling, too: the company had pirated and stored some 7m books to create a training database for its AI. To remediate its wrongdoing, the company bought physical copies and scanned them, digitizing the text. Now the owner of 7 million physical books that no longer held any utility, Anthropic destroyed them. The company bought the books, diced them up, scanned the text, and threw them away, Ars Technica reports<\/a>. There are less destructive ways to digitize books, but they are slower. The AI industry is here to move fast and break things.<\/p>\n

Anthropic laying waste to millions of books presents a crude literalization of the ravenous consumption of content necessary for AI companies to create their products.<\/p>\n

AI and the environment: bad newsAn update on last week\u2019s stories: Trump\u2019s phone Composite: The Guardian\/Getty\/Trump Mobile\/Trump Watches\/Ebay<\/p>\n

Two stories I wrote about last week saw significant updates in the ensuing days.<\/p>\n

The website for Trump\u2019s gold phone, \u201cT1\u201d, has dropped its \u201cMade in America\u201d pledge in favor of \u201cproudly American\u201d and \u201cbrought to life in America\u201d, per the Verge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Trump seems to have followed the example of Apple, which skirts the issue of origin but still emphasizes the American-ness of iPhones by engraving them with \u201cDesigned in California.\u201d What is unsaid: Assembled in China or India, and sourced from many other countries. It seems Trump and his family have opted for a similar evasive tagline, though it\u2019s been thrown into much starker relief by their original promise.<\/p>\n

The third descriptor that now appears on Trump\u2019s phone site, \u201cAmerican-Proud Design\u201d, seems most obviously cued by Apple.<\/p>\n

The tagline \u201cMade in the USA\u201d carries legal weight. Companies have faced lawsuits over just how many of their products\u2019 parts were produced in the US, and the US\u2019 main trade regulator has established standards by which to judge the actions behind the slogan. It would be extremely difficult for a smartphone\u2019s manufacturing history to measure up to those benchmarks, by the vast majority of expert estimations.<\/p>\n

Though Trump intends to repatriate manufacturing in the US with his sweeping tariffs, he seems to be learning just what other phone companies already know. It is complicated and limiting to make a phone solely in the US, and doing so forces severe constraints on the final product.<\/p>\n

Read last week\u2019s newsletter<\/a> about the gold Trump phone.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2026 and online age checks Photograph: Matt Cardy\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Last week, I wrote about Pornhub\u2019s smutty return to France after a law requiring online age verification was suspended there. This week, the US supreme court ruled in favor of an age-check law passed in Texas. Pornhub has blocked access to anyone in Texas in protest for the better part of two years, as it did in France for three weeks. Clarence Thomas summed up the court\u2019s reasoning:<\/p>\n

\u201cHB 1181 simply requires adults to verify their age before they can access speech that is obscene to children,\u201d Clarence Thomas wrote in the court\u2019s 6-3 majority opinion. \u201cThe statute advances the state\u2019s important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content. And, it is appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elena Kagan dissented alongside the court\u2019s two other liberal justices.<\/p>\n

The ruling affirms not only Texas\u2019s law but the statutes of nearly two dozen states that have implemented online age checks. The tide worldwide seems to be shifting away from allowing freer access to pornography as part of a person\u2019s right to free expression and more towards curtailing<\/p>\n

Experts believe the malleable definition of obscenity \u2013 the Texas law requires an age check for any site whose content is more than a third sexual material \u2013 will be weaponized against online information on sexual health, abortion or LGBTQ identity, all in the name of child protection.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an unfortunate day for the supporters of an open internet,\u201d said GS Hans, professor at Cornell Law School. \u201cThe court has made a radical shift in free speech jurisprudence in this case, though it doesn\u2019t characterize its decision that way. By upholding the limits on minors\u2019 access to obscenity \u2013 a notoriously difficult category to define \u2013 that also creates limits on adult access, we can expect to see states take a heavier hand in regulating content.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be closely watching what happens in July when Pornhub willingly implements age checks in compliance with the Online Services Act.<\/p>\n

Read more: UK study shows 8% of children aged eight to 14 have viewed online pornography<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Read more AI newsThis week in AI: new WhatsApp summaries and Nobel winners\u2019 genomic modelThe WhatsApp logo. Photograph: Martin Meissner\/AP<\/p>\n

New features are a dime a dozen, but even a small tweak to the most popular messaging app in the world may amount to a major shift. WhatsApp will begin showing you AI-generated summaries of your unread messages, per the Verge<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Apple tried message summaries. They did not work. The company pulled them. For a firm famed for its calculated and controlled releases, the retraction of the summaries was a humiliation. The difference between Apple and Meta, though, is that Meta has consistently released AI products for multiple years now.<\/p>\n

In other AI news, I am rarely captivated by new technologies, but a recent release by Google\u2019s DeepMind AI laboratory seems promising for healthcare. Google DeepMind has released AlphaGenome<\/a>, an AI meant to \u201ccomprehensively and accurately predicts how single variants or mutations in human DNA sequences impact a wide range of biological processes regulating genes,\u201d per a press release. The creators of AlphaGenome previously won the Nobel prize in chemistry for AlphaFold, a software that predicts the structures of proteins.<\/p>\n

A major question that hovers over Crispr, another Nobel-winning innovation, is what changes in a person when a genetic sequence is modified. AlphaGenome seems poised to assist in solving that mystery.<\/p>\n

The wider TechScape<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello, and welcome to TechScape. If you need me after this newsletter publishes, I will be busy poring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-229937","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}