OpenAI's new Sora 2 can generate movie-quality video from a text prompt. It's a remarkable technological leap and a breathtaking moral one. Reports across Hollywood show that Sora has been trained on massive libraries of film, television and visual media. Those works were created, financed and protected under copyright law. None were offered up as free fuel for an algorithm that now threatens to replace the people who made them.
* Federal lawyers admit they falsely stated the number of agents sent to Portland - a key claim in the government's claim that protests met the statutory threshold for deploying troops. You see, they told the court that conditions required 115 agents when the most they ever had was 31. Oops! [ Oregon Live] * Anthropic settlement puts four Supreme Court justices in line for checks. [ Bloomberg Law News]
In a blogpost announcing the agreement, Spotify referred pointedly to a move-fast-and-break-things approach to copyright in some parts of the tech industry. Some voices in the tech industry believe copyright should be abolished, said Spotify. We don't. Musicians' rights matter. Copyright is essential. If the music industry doesn't lead in this moment, AI-powered innovation will happen elsewhere, without rights, consent, or compensation.
This week in Other Barks & Bites: news reports indicate that the Department of Justice's (DOJ's) Weaponization Working Group is looking into Biden-era secret review processes for pharmaceutical and AI patents at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); the Federal Circuit corrects the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board's (TTAB's) application of the DuPont factors with regards to the scope of similar goods and services; USPTO Director John Squires signals a commitment to patent eligibility for medical diagnostics and crypto patents in his first few
The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI. The UK publishing industry worth more than 11bn, part of the 126bn that our creative industries generate for the British economy has sat by while big tech has swept copyrighted material from the internet in order to train their models.
Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's chief strategy officer, stated, 'The change in traffic patterns has been rapid, and something needed to change. This is just the beginning of a new model for the internet.'