Victory! Ninth Circuit Limits Intrusive DMCA Subpoenas

The Ninth Circuit upheld an important limitation on Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoenas that other federal courts have recognized for more than two decades. The DMCA, a misguided anti-piracy law passed in the late nineties, created a bevy of powerful tools, ostensibly to help copyright holders fight online infringement. Unfortunately, the DMCA’s powerful protections […]

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President Trump’s War on “Woke AI” Is a Civil Liberties Nightmare

The White House’s recently-unveiled “AI Action Plan” wages war on so-called “woke AI”—including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration’s views on climate change, gender, and other issues. It also targets measures designed to mitigate the generation of racial and gender biased content and even hate speech. The reproduction of this […]

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The U.S. Copyright Office’s Draft Report on AI Training Errs on Fair Use

Within the next decade, generative AI could join computers and electricity as one of the most transformational technologies in history, with all of the promise and peril that implies. Governments’ responses to GenAI—including new legal precedents—need to thoughtfully address real-world harms without destroying the public benefits GenAI can offer. Unfortunately, the U.S. Copyright Office’s rushed […]

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EFF Urges Court to Avoid Fair Use Shortcuts in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms

EFF has filed an amicus brief in Kadrey v. Meta, one of the many ongoing copyright lawsuits against AI developers. Most of the AI copyright cases raise an important new issue: whether the copying necessary to train a generative AI model is a non-infringing fair use. Kadrey, however, attempts to side-step fair use. The plaintiffs—including […]

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Copyright and AI: the Cases and the Consequences

The launch of ChatGPT and other deep learning quickly led to a flurry of lawsuits against model developers. Legal theories vary, but most are rooted in copyright: plaintiffs argue that use of their works to train the models was infringement; developers counter that their training is fair use. Meanwhile developers are making as many licensing […]

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Second Circuit Rejects Record Labels’ Attempt to Rewrite the DMCA

In a major win for creator communities, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has once again handed video streaming site Vimeo a solid win in its long-running legal battle with Capitol Records and a host of other record labels. The labels claimed that Vimeo was liable for copyright infringement on its site, […]

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EFF Presses Federal Circuit To Make Patent Case Filings Public

Federal court records belong to everyone. But one federal court in Texas lets patent litigants treat courts like their own private tribunals, effectively shutting out the public. When EFF tried to intervene and push for greater access to a patent dispute earlier this year, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas rejected […]

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To Fight Surveillance Pricing, We Need Privacy First

Digital surveillance is ubiquitous. Corporate snoops collect information about everything we do, everywhere we go, and everyone we communicate with. Then they compile it, store it, and use it against us.   Increasingly, companies exploit this information to set individualized prices based on personal characteristics and behavior. This “surveillance pricing” allows retailers to charge two people […]

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