3 Count: Maximum Damages

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1: Jury Awards Architecture Photographer $6.3 Million in Copyright Infringement Case

First off today, Mike Kelley at Architectural Photography Almanac reports that, in California, a photographer has won a $6.3 million jury award in a copyright infringement case against a senior living center.

The case pit photographer Scott Hargis against Pacifica Senior Living. Hargis accused the center of using some 43 photographs of his without obtaining a license. The case made its way to a trial and a jury, which found that the Pacifica had willingly infringed Hargis’ work and, thus, hit them with the maximum damages per infringed work, $150,000.

That amount across the 43 works is how the jury arrived at the damages total of $6.3 million. It is unclear if Pacifica plans to appeal the verdict or the amount.

2: CBC News Analysis Finds Thousands of Canadian Authors, Books in Controversial Dataset Used to Train AI

Next up today, Valérie Ouellet, Sylvène Gilchrist and Shaki Sutharsan at CBC News reports that a CBC investigation has found at least 2,500 books written by more than 1,200 Canadian authors in a dataset that was widely used for training artificial intelligence systems.

The dataset, entitled Books3, is now defunct but featured a large number of copyright-protected books that were available without the permission of authors or publishers. All totaled, the collection had 190,000 books in it, roughly two percent of which belonged to Canadian authors.

The dataset has become well known in recent months due to the fact that various AI systems, most notably OpenAI’s ChatGPT system, were trained in part on that model, meaning the authors’ works are included in the system’s dataset, regardless of permission.

3: Copyright Office Affirms its Fourth Refusal to Register Generative AI Work

Finally today, Franklin Graves at IPWatchdog reports that the United States Copyright Office (USCO) has issued another refusal to register an AI-generated work, the fourth such rejection so far.

The artwork was submitted by Ankit Sahni. Sahni created the work by having an AI system take a photograph that he took and recreate it in the style of Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The USCO initially rejected the registration in June 2022, claiming that the final work was created by the computer program.

However, Sahni appealed that decision and now the Review Board has upheld that refusal. In addition to the work being AI generated, the board also noted that it’s an example of “derivative authorship” since it is a digital adaptation of a photograph.

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