copyright infringement

NYT to start searching deleted ChatGPT logs after beating OpenAI in court

AI, Artificial Intelligence, chatbots, chatgpt, copyright, copyright infringement, fair use, new york times, openai, Policy / Kris Guyer / July 3, 2025

What are the odds NYT will access your ChatGPT logs in OpenAI court battle?

Last week, OpenAI raised objections in court, hoping to overturn a court order requiring the AI company to retain all ChatGPT logs “indefinitely,” including deleted and temporary chats.

But Sidney Stein, the US district judge reviewing OpenAI’s request, immediately denied OpenAI’s objections. He was seemingly unmoved by the company’s claims that the order forced OpenAI to abandon “long-standing privacy norms” and weaken privacy protections that users expect based on ChatGPT’s terms of service. Rather, Stein suggested that OpenAI’s user agreement specified that their data could be retained as part of a legal process, which Stein said is exactly what is happening now.

The order was issued by magistrate judge Ona Wang just days after news organizations, led by The New York Times, requested it. The news plaintiffs claimed the order was urgently needed to preserve potential evidence in their copyright case, alleging that ChatGPT users are likely to delete chats where they attempted to use the chatbot to skirt paywalls to access news content.

A spokesperson told Ars that OpenAI plans to “keep fighting” the order, but the ChatGPT maker seems to have few options left. They could possibly petition the Second Circuit Court of Appeals for a rarely granted emergency order that could intervene to block Wang’s order, but the appeals court would have to consider Wang’s order an extraordinary abuse of discretion for OpenAI to win that fight.

OpenAI’s spokesperson declined to confirm if the company plans to pursue this extreme remedy.

In the meantime, OpenAI is negotiating a process that will allow news plaintiffs to search through the retained data. Perhaps the sooner that process begins, the sooner the data will be deleted. And that possibility puts OpenAI in the difficult position of having to choose between either caving to some data collection to stop retaining data as soon as possible or prolonging the fight over the order and potentially putting more users’ private conversations at risk of exposure through litigation or, worse, a data breach.

News orgs will soon start searching ChatGPT logs

The clock is ticking, and so far, OpenAI has not provided any official updates since a June 5 blog post detailing which ChatGPT users will be affected.

While it’s clear that OpenAI has been and will continue to retain mounds of data, it would be impossible for The New York Times or any news plaintiff to search through all that data.

Instead, only a small sample of the data will likely be accessed, based on keywords that OpenAI and news plaintiffs agree on. That data will remain on OpenAI’s servers, where it will be anonymized, and it will likely never be directly produced to plaintiffs.

Both sides are negotiating the exact process for searching through the chat logs, with both parties seemingly hoping to minimize the amount of time the chat logs will be preserved.

For OpenAI, sharing the logs risks revealing instances of infringing outputs that could further spike damages in the case. The logs could also expose how often outputs attribute misinformation to news plaintiffs.

But for news plaintiffs, accessing the logs is not considered key to their case—perhaps providing additional examples of copying—but could help news organizations argue that ChatGPT dilutes the market for their content. That could weigh against the fair use argument, as a judge opined in a recent ruling that evidence of market dilution could tip an AI copyright case in favor of plaintiffs.

Jay Edelson, a leading consumer privacy lawyer, told Ars that he’s concerned that judges don’t seem to be considering that any evidence in the ChatGPT logs wouldn’t “advance” news plaintiffs’ case “at all,” while really changing “a product that people are using on a daily basis.”

Edelson warned that OpenAI itself probably has better security than most firms to protect against a potential data breach that could expose these private chat logs. But “lawyers have notoriously been pretty bad about securing data,” Edelson suggested, so “the idea that you’ve got a bunch of lawyers who are going to be doing whatever they are” with “some of the most sensitive data on the planet” and “they’re the ones protecting it against hackers should make everyone uneasy.”

So even though odds are pretty good that the majority of users’ chats won’t end up in the sample, Edelson said the mere threat of being included might push some users to rethink how they use AI. He further warned that ChatGPT users turning to OpenAI rival services like Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini could suggest that Wang’s order is improperly influencing market forces, which also seems “crazy.”

To Edelson, the most “cynical” take could be that news plaintiffs are possibly hoping the order will threaten OpenAI’s business to the point where the AI company agrees to a settlement.

Regardless of the news plaintiffs’ motives, the order sets an alarming precedent, Edelson said. He joined critics suggesting that more AI data may be frozen in the future, potentially affecting even more users as a result of the sweeping order surviving scrutiny in this case. Imagine if litigation one day targets Google’s AI search summaries, Edelson suggested.

Lawyer slams judges for giving ChatGPT users no voice

Edelson told Ars that the order is so potentially threatening to OpenAI’s business that the company may not have a choice but to explore every path available to continue fighting it.

“They will absolutely do something to try to stop this,” Edelson predicted, calling the order “bonkers” for overlooking millions of users’ privacy concerns while “strangely” excluding enterprise customers.

From court filings, it seems possible that enterprise users were excluded to protect OpenAI’s competitiveness, but Edelson suggested there’s “no logic” to their exclusion “at all.” By excluding these ChatGPT users, the judge’s order may have removed the users best resourced to fight the order, Edelson suggested.

“What that means is the big businesses, the ones who have the power, all of their stuff remains private, and no one can touch that,” Edelson said.

Instead, the order is “only going to intrude on the privacy of the common people out there,” which Edelson said “is really offensive,” given that Wang denied two ChatGPT users’ panicked request to intervene.

“We are talking about billions of chats that are now going to be preserved when they weren’t going to be preserved before,” Edelson said, noting that he’s input information about his personal medical history into ChatGPT. “People ask for advice about their marriages, express concerns about losing jobs. They say really personal things. And one of the bargains in dealing with OpenAI is that you’re allowed to delete your chats and you’re allowed to temporary chats.”

The greatest risk to users would be a data breach, Edelson said, but that’s not the only potential privacy concern. Corynne McSherry, legal director for the digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, previously told Ars that as long as users’ data is retained, it could also be exposed through future law enforcement and private litigation requests.

Edelson pointed out that most privacy attorneys don’t consider OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to be a “privacy guy,” despite Altman recently slamming the NYT, alleging it sued OpenAI because it doesn’t “like user privacy.”

“He’s trying to protect OpenAI, and he does not give a hoot about the privacy rights of consumers,” Edelson said, echoing one ChatGPT user’s dismissed concern that OpenAI may not prioritize users’ privacy concerns in the case if it’s financially motivated to resolve the case.

“The idea that he and his lawyers are really going to be the safeguards here isn’t very compelling,” Edelson said. He criticized the judges for dismissing users’ concerns and rejecting OpenAI’s request that users get a chance to testify.

“What’s really most appalling to me is the people who are being affected have had no voice in it,” Edelson said.

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.

NYT to start searching deleted ChatGPT logs after beating OpenAI in court Read More »

Judge: Pirate libraries may have profited from Meta torrenting 80TB of books

AI, AI training, BItTorrent, copyright, copyright infringement, libgen, LLaMA, Meta, online piracy, Policy, shadow libraries, torrenting / Paul Patrick / June 27, 2025

It could certainly look worse for Meta if authors manage to present evidence supporting the second way that torrenting could be relevant to the case, Chhabaria suggested.

“Meta downloading copyrighted material from shadow libraries” would also be relevant to the character of the use, “if it benefitted those who created the libraries and thus supported and perpetuated their unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted works,” Chhabria wrote.

Counting potential strikes against Meta, Chhabria pointed out that the “vast majority of cases” involving “this sort of peer-to-peer file-sharing” are found to “constitute copyright infringement.” And it likely doesn’t help Meta’s case that “some of the libraries Meta used have themselves been found liable for infringement.”

However, Meta may overcome this argument, too, since book authors “have not submitted any evidence” that potentially shows how Meta’s downloading may perhaps be “propping up” or financially benefiting pirate libraries.

Finally, Chhabria noted that the “last issue relating to the character of Meta’s use” of books in regards to its torrenting is “the relationship between Meta’s downloading of the plaintiffs’ books and Meta’s use of the books to train Llama.”

Authors had tried to argue that these elements were distinct. But Chhabria said there’s no separating the fact that Meta downloaded the books to serve the “highly transformative” purpose of training Llama.

“Because Meta’s ultimate use of the plaintiffs’ books was transformative, so too was Meta’s downloading of those books,” Chhabria wrote.

AI training rulings may get more authors paid

Authors only learned of Meta’s torrenting through discovery in the lawsuit, and because of that, Chhabria noted that “the record on Meta’s alleged distribution is incomplete.”

It’s possible that authors may be able to show evidence that Meta “contributed to the BitTorrent network” by providing significant computing power that could’ve meaningfully assisted shadow libraries, Chhabria said in a footnote.

Judge: Pirate libraries may have profited from Meta torrenting 80TB of books Read More »

Key fair use ruling clarifies when books can be used for AI training

AI, AI models, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Claude, copyright, copyright infringement, copyright law, large language models, LLMs, Policy / Kris Guyer / June 25, 2025

“This order doubts that any accused infringer could ever meet its burden of explaining why downloading source copies from pirate sites that it could have purchased or otherwise accessed lawfully was itself reasonably necessary to any subsequent fair use,” Alsup wrote. “Such piracy of otherwise available copies is inherently, irredeemably infringing even if the pirated copies are immediately used for the transformative use and immediately discarded.”

But Alsup said that the Anthropic case may not even need to decide on that, since Anthropic’s retention of pirated books for its research library alone was not transformative. Alsup wrote that Anthropic’s argument to hold onto potential AI training material it pirated in case it ever decided to use it for AI training was an attempt to “fast glide over thin ice.”

Additionally Alsup pointed out that Anthropic’s early attempts to get permission to train on authors’ works withered, as internal messages revealed the company concluded that stealing books was considered the more cost-effective path to innovation “to avoid ‘legal/practice/business slog,’ as cofounder and chief executive officer Dario Amodei put it.”

“Anthropic is wrong to suppose that so long as you create an exciting end product, every ‘back-end step, invisible to the public,’ is excused,” Alsup wrote. “Here, piracy was the point: To build a central library that one could have paid for, just as Anthropic later did, but without paying for it.”

To avoid maximum damages in the event of a loss, Anthropic will likely continue arguing that replacing pirated books with purchased books should water down authors’ fight, Alsup’s order suggested.

“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the Internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” Alsup noted.

Key fair use ruling clarifies when books can be used for AI training Read More »

Man who stole 1,000 DVDs from employer strikes plea deal over movie leaks

anti-piracy, Blu-ray, copyright infringement, dvd rip, piracy, Policy, spiderman / Paul Patrick / May 30, 2025

An accused movie pirate who stole more than 1,000 Blu-ray discs and DVDs while working for a DVD manufacturing company struck a plea deal this week to lower his sentence after the FBI claimed the man’s piracy cost movie studios millions.

Steven Hale no longer works for the DVD company. He was arrested in March, accused of “bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying” and ripping pre-release copies of movies he could only access because his former employer was used by major movie studios. As alleged by the feds, his game was beating studios to releases to achieve the greatest possible financial gains from online leaks.

Among the popular movies that Hale is believed to have leaked between 2021 and 2022 was Spider-Man: No Way Home, which the FBI alleged was copied “tens of millions of times” at an estimated loss of “tens of millions of dollars” for just one studio on one movie. Other movies Hale ripped included animated hits like Encanto and Sing 2, as well as anticipated sequels like The Matrix: Resurrections and Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

The cops first caught wind of Hale’s scheme in March 2022. They seized about 1,160 Blu-rays and DVDs in what TorrentFreak noted were the days just “after the Spider-Man movie leaked online.” It’s unclear why it took close to three years before Hale’s arrest, but TorrentFreak suggested that Hale’s case is perhaps part of a bigger investigation into the Spider-Man leaks.

Man who stole 1,000 DVDs from employer strikes plea deal over movie leaks Read More »

Judge on Meta’s AI training: “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use”

AI training, copyright, copyright infringement, fair use, leeching, LLaMA, Meta, piracy, Policy, torrenting / Kris Guyer / May 3, 2025

Judge downplayed Meta’s “messed up” torrenting in lawsuit over AI training.

A judge who may be the first to rule on whether AI training data is fair use appeared skeptical Thursday at a hearing where Meta faced off with book authors over the social media company’s alleged copyright infringement.

Meta, like most AI companies, holds that training must be deemed fair use, or else the entire AI industry could face immense setbacks, wasting precious time negotiating data contracts while falling behind global rivals. Meta urged the court to rule that AI training is a transformative use that only references books to create an entirely new work that doesn’t replicate authors’ ideas or replace books in their markets.

At the hearing that followed after both sides requested summary judgment, however, Judge Vince Chhabria pushed back on Meta attorneys arguing that the company’s Llama AI models posed no threat to authors in their markets, Reuters reported.

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” Chhabria said. “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person.”

Declaring, “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use,” the shrewd judge apparently stoked little response from Meta’s attorney, Kannon Shanmugam, apart from a suggestion that any alleged threat to authors’ livelihoods was “just speculation,” Wired reported.

Authors may need to sharpen their case, which Chhabria warned could be “taken away by fair use” if none of the authors suing, including Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Richard Kadrey, can show “that the market for their actual copyrighted work is going to be dramatically affected.”

Determined to probe this key question, Chhabria pushed authors’ attorney, David Boies, to point to specific evidence of market harms that seemed noticeably missing from the record.

“It seems like you’re asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman’s memoir will be affected by the billions of things that Llama will ultimately be capable of producing,” Chhabria said. “And it’s just not obvious to me that that’s the case.”

But if authors can prove fears of market harms are real, Meta might struggle to win over Chhabria, and that could set a precedent impacting copyright cases challenging AI training on other kinds of content.

The judge repeatedly appeared to be sympathetic to authors, suggesting that Meta’s AI training may be a “highly unusual case” where even though “the copying is for a highly transformative purpose, the copying has the high likelihood of leading to the flooding of the markets for the copyrighted works.”

And when Shanmugam argued that copyright law doesn’t shield authors from “protection from competition in the marketplace of ideas,” Chhabria resisted the framing that authors weren’t potentially being robbed, Reuters reported.

“But if I’m going to steal things from the marketplace of ideas in order to develop my own ideas, that’s copyright infringement, right?” Chhabria responded.

Wired noted that he asked Meta’s lawyers, “What about the next Taylor Swift?” If AI made it easy to knock off a young singer’s sound, how could she ever compete if AI produced “a billion pop songs” in her style?

In a statement, Meta’s spokesperson reiterated the company’s defense that AI training is fair use.

“Meta has developed transformational open source AI models that are powering incredible innovation, productivity, and creativity for individuals and companies,” Meta’s spokesperson said. “Fair use of copyrighted materials is vital to this. We disagree with Plaintiffs’ assertions, and the full record tells a different story. We will continue to vigorously defend ourselves and to protect the development of GenAI for the benefit of all.”

Meta’s torrenting seems “messed up”

Some have pondered why Chhabria appeared so focused on market harms, instead of hammering Meta for admittedly illegally pirating books that it used for its AI training, which seems to be obvious copyright infringement. According to Wired, “Chhabria spoke emphatically about his belief that the big question is whether Meta’s AI tools will hurt book sales and otherwise cause the authors to lose money,” not whether Meta’s torrenting of books was illegal.

The torrenting “seems kind of messed up,” Chhabria said, but “the question, as the courts tell us over and over again, is not whether something is messed up but whether it’s copyright infringement.”

It’s possible that Chhabria dodged the question for procedural reasons. In a court filing, Meta argued that authors had moved for summary judgment on Meta’s alleged copying of their works, not on “unsubstantiated allegations that Meta distributed Plaintiffs’ works via torrent.”

In the court filing, Meta alleged that even if Chhabria agreed that the authors’ request for “summary judgment is warranted on the basis of Meta’s distribution, as well as Meta’s copying,” that the authors “lack evidence to show that Meta distributed any of their works.”

According to Meta, authors abandoned any claims that Meta’s seeding of the torrented files served to distribute works, leaving only claims about Meta’s leeching. Meta argued that the authors “admittedly lack evidence that Meta ever uploaded any of their works, or any identifiable part of those works, during the so-called ‘leeching’ phase,” relying instead on expert estimates based on how torrenting works.

It’s also possible that for Chhabria, the torrenting question seemed like an unnecessary distraction. Former Meta attorney Mark Lumley, who quit the case earlier this year, told Vanity Fair that the torrenting was “one of those things that sounds bad but actually shouldn’t matter at all in the law. Fair use is always about uses the plaintiff doesn’t approve of; that’s why there is a lawsuit.”

Lumley suggested that court cases mulling fair use at this current moment should focus on the outputs, rather than the training. Citing the ruling in a case where Google Books scanning books to share excerpts was deemed fair use, Lumley argued that “all search engines crawl the full Internet, including plenty of pirated content,” so there’s seemingly no reason to stop AI crawling.

But the Copyright Alliance, a nonprofit, non-partisan group supporting the authors in the case, in a court filing alleged that Meta, in its bid to get AI products viewed as transformative, is aiming to do the opposite. “When describing the purpose of generative AI,” Meta allegedly strives to convince the court to “isolate the ‘training’ process and ignore the output of generative AI,” because that’s seemingly the only way that Meta can convince the court that AI outputs serve “a manifestly different purpose from Plaintiffs’ books,” the Copyright Alliance argued.

“Meta’s motion ignores what comes after the initial ‘training’—most notably the generation of output that serves the same purpose of the ingested works,” the Copyright Alliance argued. And the torrenting question should matter, the group argued, because unlike in Google Books, Meta’s AI models are apparently training on pirated works, not “legitimate copies of books.”

Chhabria will not be making a snap decision in the case, planning to take his time and likely stressing not just Meta, but every AI company defending training as fair use the longer he delays. Understanding that the entire AI industry potentially has a stake in the ruling, Chhabria apparently sought to relieve some tension at the end of the hearing with a joke, Wired reported.

“I will issue a ruling later today,” Chhabria said. “Just kidding! I will take a lot longer to think about it.”

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.

Judge on Meta’s AI training: “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use” Read More »

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use

agi, ai action plan, copyright infringement, copyright law, Donald Trump, generative ai, national security, openai, Policy / Paul Patrick / March 14, 2025

OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity’s creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren’t substitutes for original works.

So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters’ legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times.

“OpenAI’s models are trained to not replicate works for consumption by the public. Instead, they learn from the works and extract patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights,” OpenAI claimed. “This means our AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works.”

Providing “freedom-focused” recommendations on Trump’s plan during a public comment period ending Saturday, OpenAI suggested Thursday that the US should end these court fights by shifting its copyright strategy to promote the AI industry’s “freedom to learn.” Otherwise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely continue accessing copyrighted data that US companies cannot access, supposedly giving China a leg up “while gaining little in the way of protections for the original IP creators,” OpenAI argued.

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use Read More »

Feds arrest man for sharing DVD rip of Spider-Man movie with millions online

Blu-ray, copyright infringement, copyright law, dvd, Marvel, marvel movies, online piracy, Policy, Spider-Man: no way home / Paul Patrick / March 8, 2025

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.

Feds arrest man for sharing DVD rip of Spider-Man movie with millions online Read More »

Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says

But David Seubert, who manages sound collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara library, told Ars that he frequently used the project as an archive and not just to listen to the recordings.

For Seubert, the videos that IA records of the 78 RPM albums capture more than audio of a certain era. Researchers like him want to look at the label, check out the copyright information, and note the catalogue numbers, he said.

“It has all this information there,” Seubert said. “I don’t even necessarily need to hear it,” he continued, adding, “just seeing the physicality of it, it’s like, ‘Okay, now I know more about this record.'”

Music publishers suing IA argue that all the songs included in their dispute—and likely many more, since the Great 78 Project spans 400,000 recordings—”are already available for streaming or downloading from numerous services.”

“These recordings face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed,” their filing claimed.

But Nathan Georgitis, the executive director of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), told Ars that you just don’t see 78 RPM records out in the world anymore. Even in record stores selling used vinyl, these recordings will be hidden “in a few boxes under the table behind the tablecloth,” Georgitis suggested. And in “many” cases, “the problem for libraries and archives is that those recordings aren’t necessarily commercially available for re-release.”

That “means that those recordings, those artists, the repertoire, the recorded sound history in itself—meaning the labels, the producers, the printings—all of that history kind of gets obscured from view,” Georgitis said.

Currently, libraries trying to preserve this history must control access to audio collections, Georgitis said. He sees IA’s work with the Great 78 Project as a legitimate archive in that, unlike a streaming service, where content may be inconsistently available, IA’s “mission is to preserve and provide access to content over time.”

Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says Read More »

ISP sued by record labels agrees to identify 100 users accused of piracy

altice, copyright infringement, Policy / Tim Belzer / February 20, 2025

Cable company Altice agreed to give Warner and other record labels the names and contact information of 100 broadband subscribers who were accused of pirating songs.

The subscribers “were the subject of RIAA or third party copyright notices,” said a court order that approved the agreement between Altice and the plaintiff record companies. Altice is notifying each subscriber “of Altice’s intent to disclose their name and contact information to Plaintiffs pursuant to this Order,” and telling the notified subscribers that they have 30 days to seek relief from the court.

If subscribers do not object within a month, Altice must disclose the subscribers’ names, phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. The judge’s order was issued on February 12 and reported yesterday by TorrentFreak.

The names and contact information will be classified as “highly confidential—attorneys’ eyes only.” A separate order issued in April 2024 said that documents produced in discovery “shall be used by the Parties only in the litigation of this Action and shall not be used for any other purpose.”

Altice, which operates the Optimum brand, was sued in December 2023 in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The music publishers’ complaint alleges that Altice “knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by thousands of its subscribers.”

The lawsuit said plaintiffs sent over 70,000 infringement notices to Altice from February 2020 through November 2023. At least a few subscribers were allegedly hit with hundreds of notices. The lawsuit gave three examples of IP addresses that were cited in 502, 781, and 926 infringement notices, respectively.

Altice failed to terminate repeat infringers whose IP addresses were flagged in these copyright notices, the lawsuit said. “Those notices advised Altice of its subscribers’ blatant and systematic use of Altice’s Internet service to illegally download, copy, and distribute Plaintiffs’ copyrighted music through BitTorrent and other online file-sharing services. Rather than working with Plaintiffs to curb this massive infringement, Altice did nothing, choosing to prioritize its own profits over its legal obligations,” the plaintiffs alleged.

ISPs face numerous lawsuits

This is one of numerous copyright lawsuits filed against broadband providers, and it’s not the first time an ISP handed names of subscribers to the plaintiffs. We have previously written articles about film studios trying to force Reddit to identify users who admitted torrenting in discussion forums. Reddit was able to avoid providing information in one case in part because the film studios already obtained identifying details for 118 subscribers directly from Grande, the ISP they had sued.

ISP sued by record labels agrees to identify 100 users accused of piracy Read More »

Anthropic gives court authority to intervene if chatbot spits out song lyrics

AI, Anthropic, chatbots, Claude, copyright infringement, copyright law, generative ai, music publishers, Policy, song lyrics / Kris Guyer / January 3, 2025

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.”

Anthropic said in its motion opposing the preliminary injunction that relief should be denied.

“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.

Anthropic gives court authority to intervene if chatbot spits out song lyrics Read More »

Supreme Court wants US input on whether ISPs should be liable for users’ piracy

The Supreme Court signaled it may take up a case that could determine whether Internet service providers must terminate users who are accused of copyright infringement. In an order issued today, the court invited the Department of Justice’s solicitor general to file a brief “expressing the views of the United States.”

In Sony Music Entertainment v. Cox Communications, the major record labels argue that cable provider Cox should be held liable for failing to terminate users who were repeatedly flagged for infringement based on their IP addresses being connected to torrent downloads. There was a mixed ruling at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit as the appeals court affirmed a jury’s finding that Cox was guilty of willful contributory infringement but reversed a verdict on vicarious infringement “because Cox did not profit from its subscribers’ acts of infringement.”

That ruling vacated a $1 billion damages award and ordered a new damages trial. Cox and Sony are both seeking a Supreme Court review. Cox wants to overturn the finding of willful contributory infringement, while Sony wants to reinstate the $1 billion verdict.

The Supreme Court asking for US input on Sony v. Cox could be a precursor to the high court taking up the case. For example, the court last year asked the solicitor general to weigh in on Texas and Florida laws that restricted how social media companies can moderate their platforms. The court subsequently took up the case and vacated lower-court rulings, making it clear that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment.

Supreme Court wants US input on whether ISPs should be liable for users’ piracy Read More »

Musi fans refuse to update iPhones until Apple unblocks controversial app

App Store, Apple, copyright infringement, copyright law, musi, music streaming, Policy, Spotify, youtube, youtube music / Tim Belzer / November 19, 2024

“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.

Musi fans vow loyalty

For Musi fans expressing their suffering on Reddit, Musi appears to be irreplaceable.

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!!!”

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