3 Count: DMCA Surge

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1: ‘Fair use’ no excuse for AI companies to pilfer news content, media advocates tell Senate

First off today, Benjamin S. Weiss at Courthouse News Service reports that, yesterday, a group of witnesses representing media organizations testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s privacy and technology subpanel and said that AI companies have been using their content without permission or compensation.

According to the witnesses, which included representatives from several organizations that represent media companies, AI systems scrape news content and provide output that summarizes their efforts and compete directly with them. Though they felt that the use is outside the bounds of fair use, they still called for Congress to clarify copyright law to make it clear that such training is unlawful.

One witness, a journalism professor from CUNY, pushed back against this, warning about the dangers of walling off the internet and noted that journalists rely on fair use as part of their work, thus narrowing the exemption at all could be a danger to free speech.

2: Google Sees DMCA Takedown Requests Surge to New Highs

Next up today, Ernesto Van der Sar at Torrentfreak writes that Google, according to their transparency reports, has seen skyrocketing DMCA notices, handling over 30 million requests per week.

Google first introduced its transparency report in 2012, at the time reporting roughly 250,000 requests per week. That number grew sharply until about 2017, when Google started devaluing pirate websites in search results. However, the number began to tick back up shortly thereafter, with Google handling its 7 billionth request last summer.

However, even that sharp uptick has, itself, seen an uptick, including 700 million requests in the last five months alone. The company is on track to break 8 billion notices shortly. This growth seems to be largely driven by a small number of copyright enforcement companies acting on behalf of large rightsholders, often sending millions of notices per week.

3: Pink Floyd Unveils Hidden Gems in Annual ‘Copyright Dump’ Strategy

Finally today, The Daily Star reports that, last month, band Pink Floyd issued a limited release of a set of 18 concert recordings in a bid to protect their copyright moving forward.

In the European Union, there is a “use it or lose it” provision that requires musicians to officially release sound recordings within 50 years of their creation or risk having the work fall into the public domain. Artists have routinely gotten around this by doing small, limited time releases of previously-unreleased material right before the time is expected to lapse.

For Pink Floyd, this included some 18 concert recordings, each featuring 16 songs and lasting about two and a half hours each. However, the quality of the recordings is uneven due to the nature of how and when they were recorded.

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