The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in July issued a proposed policy statement “concerning the suppression of accuracy in artificial intelligence systems.” We urge the FTC to withdraw this misguided proposal and instead focus on its core strengths and mission to protect consumers. The new proposed policy builds on, and directly references, the Trump administration’s “Preventing Woke […]
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There’s a new boogeyman in the battles over AI: so-called “stealth crawlers.” We’ll admit it—the term “stealth crawlers” sound quite nefarious. In reality, they’re anything but. “Stealth crawlers” are simply automated tools to access and collect public web data—without disclosing the user’s identity. Private crawlers like these facilitate all kinds of important work that benefits […]
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The ability to access publicly available information using automated tools is a central value and benefit of a free and open internet. Automated access—often called crawling or scraping—powers important, useful tools for locating, preserving, and analyzing online information. For example, crawling and scraping helps journalists, researchers, and watchdog organizations report the news, find security flaws, […]
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We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and […]
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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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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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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 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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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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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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