3 Count: Levitating Away

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1: Dua Lipa Wins Dismissal of ‘Levitating’ Copyright Lawsuit

First off today, Blake Brittain at Reuters reports that musician Dua Lipa has emerged victorious in a lawsuit over her hit song Levitating after a judge dismissed the case, finding that the plaintiffs had not made their case.

The lawsuit was filed by the band Artikal Sound System, which claimed that Dua Lipa’s hit 2021 song Levitating was an infringement of their earlier work Live Your Life. However, that case has been dismissed, with the judge saying that the plaintiffs could not prove that Dua Lipa had access to their work.

The band attempted to argue that they had played the song at concerts and made it commercially available, but with no evidence that Dua Lipa’s writers had encountered the song, the judge decided to toss the case.

2: Japan Declares AI Training Data Fair Game and ‘Will Not Enforce Copyright’

Next up today, Matt Growcoot at PetaPixel reports that Japan’s Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has released a statement saying that using copyright-protected works to train AI is legal and that AI companies are free to use whatever information they want.

The announcement comes amidst a growth in interest in generative artificial intelligence. However, with that interest has come some debate, as most generative AIs are trained on copyright-protected works and few have asked for permission to perform that training.

However, Japan appears to make it clear that such unauthorized training is fully legal, as long as it used for “informational analysis”. This is true regardless of the method or content. As such, the country has said it will not enforce copyright against generative AIs.

3: Manga Publishers Seek Google Analytics Data to Back $14m Piracy Damages Claim

Finally today, Ernesto Van der Sasr at Torrentfreak writes that a group of Japanese manga publishers have made filings with the court seeking information from both Google and Cloudflare to obtain traffic stats on a closed pirate website.

The case involves the site Mangamura, which was once the largest manga piracy site. The publishers managed to get the site closed and the site’s operator arrested. However, they are currently seeking some 1.9 billion yen ($14 million) in damages and, as part of justification for that, are hoping to get traffic statistics from Google and Cloudflare.

Google provided Google Analytics, which tracks the number of users who go to a specific website. Cloudflare, provides a content delivery network through which the site’s traffic was routed through. As such, both services should have data on the estimated number of visitors the site received, something the publishers hope can bolster their arguments for high damages.

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