3 Count: AI Divide

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1: Beijing Court Awards AI Image Copyright Status

First off today, Matt Growcoot at PetaPixel reports that the Beijing Internet Court has ruled that a work of AI art not only qualifies for copyright protection, but that using an AI-generated image without permission is a copyright infringement.

The case involved a man identified only as Mr. Li, who used Stable Diffusion to create an image of a young woman and posted it to social media. That image was then used without permission by a blogger, who removed Li’s watermarks and other identifying information.

According to the court, the work not only qualifies for copyright protection, but that Li is the author of the work, not Stable Diffusion. As such, the court ordered that the blogger pay CN¥500 ($70) in damages plus costs of CN¥50 ($7) in costs. The court did note that it’s possible the deicsion could be reversed by other courts, including the country’s intellectual property court.

2: BREIN Takes Down Virtual Pirate Streaming Worlds on VRChat

Next up today, Ernesto Van der Sar at Torrentfreak writes that the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has filed takedown notices with VRChat, a platform for virtual worlds, demanding the removal of worlds that were featuring pirate streams.

According to BREIN, they were tipped off by an orderinary user that various worlds in VRChat were letting users stream pirated content. The investigated and found that many of the most popular worlds, some with thousands of simultaneous users, were doing just that.

Though not the first such takedown over virtual reality content, it is one of the most significant and, according to BREIN, is an attempt to prevent the “normalization of misuse of VR technology for the infringement of copyright.”

3: OpenAI CEO Denies Need For New York Times Data Amidst Copyright Infringement Lawsuit: ‘We Do Not Want…’

Finally today, Ananya Gairola at Benzinga reports that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has claimed that he diesn’t nead and doesn’t want training data from large publishers like the New York Times.

The statement, which happened at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, comes after the New York Times filed a high-profile lawsuit against the company over the use of their articles in training data for their ChatGPT large language model.

Among the allegations in that lawsuit, the New York Times alleges that ChatGPT reproduced articles nearly verbatim, something Altman claimed was a “rare bug” and that the intent of ChatGPT is to refer people to news sources, not regurgitate unoriginal content.

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