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22 Jan 2024
Jay Fink had an interesting little business.
If you lived in California, you could give him access to your email account,
he'd look through the spam folder for spam that appeared to violate the
state anti-spam law, and give you a spreadsheet and a file of PDFs.
You could then sue the spammers, and if you won,
you'd give Fink part of the money as his fee.
While the federal CAN SPAM law largely preempts state laws, it lets states
add their own penalties for fraudulent or misleading spam.
California is one of the few states with a usable law, and one of the
few that lets spam recipients sue in small claims court.
The spammers tend to pay to settle rather than going to court (because
they are pretty sure they'd lose) so this was a way to make life
more difficult for the spammers, paid for by the spammers.
Last July, the state of California shut him down, saying that the stuff
he was doing needed a Private Investigator (PI) license.
The license is quite expensive and requires 6,000 hours of training in
a field like arson investigation or insurance adjustment.
Fink thought this was ridiculous, since none of the training would have anything
to do with looking for spam, and the requirements were grossly excessive for what he did.
He sued the state, supported by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.
Last week the parties filed the first substantive exchange, in which
the state moved to dismiss the case, and Fink's lawyers said not
so fast.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/spamfink.html
08 Jan 2024
In the past few months there have been four similar suits filed in New York against OpenAI and Microsoft.
All four look superficially similar, and all are likely to be heard by the same judge, but one of them
is a lot stronger than the other three.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/openai3.html
18 Dec 2023
The Internet Archive has a program they call Controlled Digital Lending (CDL).
They have scanned a whole lot of physical books, put the books in storage, and
then lend out the scans, ensuring that each scan is lent to one person at a
time.
Publishers don't like this, sued several years ago, and the Archive lost thoroughly in April.
The judge ruled on a motion for summary judgment without a trial, which means
the judge believed there was no significant dispute about the facts.
He found that CDL was not fair use, the scans were a substitute for the paper books,
and the Archive lost.
Unsurprisingly, the Archive has appealed the ruling.
This looked to me to be a long shot.
The appeal is to the Second Circuit which decided the Google Books case.
Their decision said that Google's scanning is OK because they don't provide the
full contents of the books, but do other stuff that makes it transformative.
Since the Archive does provide the full contents of the books, they're
out of luck.
The Archive appealed in September but until recently the only activity has been
routine stuff like which lawyers will be representing whom
On Friday they filed
their brief
laying out the legal theory of the appeal, and I have to say it's surprisingly strong.
They say that the judge misunderstood what CDL is, that he got all four prongs of the fair use
analysis wrong, and that there are significant disagreements about facts that prevent summary judgment.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/pubappeal.html
14 Aug 2023
In 2020 a group of book publishers sued the Internet Archive over their Controlled Digital
Lending program, which made PDF scans of books and lent them out from the Archive's
web site.
For books still in copyright, the Archive usually limited the number of copies of a book
lent to the number of physical copies of the book they had in storage.
Several publishers sued with an argument that can be summarized as
"that's not how it works".
In late March the judge made a ruling that can be summarized
as "of course that's not how it works."
(More background here.)
After several months of quiet negotiations, on Friday the two
parties filed
a
proposed consent agreement in which the Archive promised to stop it, and pay the plaintiffs
an undisclosed but presumably not huge amount of money.
The only disagreement was exactly what they promise to stop, with letters from each
to the judge explaining their positions.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/fryingfire.html
07 May 2023
Large Language Models (LLM) like GPT-4 and its front end ChatGPT work by ingesting
gigantic amounts of text from the Internet to train the model, and then responding to prompts
with text generated from those models.
Depending on who you ask, this is either one step (or maybe no steps) from Artificial General
Intelligence, or as Ted Chiang wrote in the New Yorker,
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web.
While I have my opinions about that, at this point I'm considering what the relationship
is under copyright law between the input text and the output text.
Keeping in mind that I am not a lawyer, and no court has yet decided a LLM case, let's take a look.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Copyright_Law/llmcopy.html
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