3 Count: Billion Dollar Question

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1: Record Labels Ask Court to Deny Cox’s Challenge of ‘$1 Billion’ Piracy Verdict

First off today, Ernesto Van der Sar at Torrentfreak writes that the record labels are asking an appeals court to reject a new challenge to their $1 billion judgment against Cox, saying that Cox is attempting to retry a case it already lost.

The record labels sued Cox for failing to take adequate measures to prevent piracy on its network. In 2019, a jury ruled in favor of the record labels, awarding them some $1 billion in damages. Cox appealed, and though the Appeals Court upheld the contributory copyright infringement claim, it overturned the vicarious infringement claim.

That set the stage for a possible retrial at the district court on damages alone. In the meantime, Cox is also appealing the denial of a Rule 60 motion. Cox claimed evidence, including source code for software used to track infringement, was withheld. However, the lower court denied that motion. Now, Cox has appealed that to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the record labels claim that any omitted evidence is irrelevant and that Cox is trying to retry a case it already lost.

2: When Is It Idea Theft? A Mattel TV Adaptation Trial Could Be a Case Study

Next up today, Winston Cho at The Hollywood Reporter Esquire reports that Mattel has emerged victorious against a producer who sued them, alleging they stole his idea for a TV series.

Norton Herrick filed the lawsuit, claiming he pitched an idea for a reality TV series called Playmakers to Mattel. The show would have featured inventors pitching ideas to the toy company for a chance at a contract.

Mattel didn’t go forward with the idea but later launched The Toy Box, a similar series. That prompted Herrick to file the lawsuit allegiging breach of implied contract, fraud and trade secret misappropriation. However, after a ten-week trial, the jury favored Mattel, ruling that Mattel did have an agreement with Herrick, but that the agreement was not breached.

3: GeForce Gpu Giant Has Been Data Scraping 80 Years’ Worth of Videos Every Day for AI Training to ‘unlock Various Downstream Applications Critical to Nvidia’

Finally today, Nick Evanson at PCGamer reports that leaked documents from Nvidia allege that the company has been using millions of YouTube videos as well as content from Netflix and videos from other sources to train its AI systems.

The leak includes many internal documents including spreadsheets, emails and chat logs. In those conversations, discussions about copyright were held, but always with the intent of finding a way around it. In one example, they used a Google Cloud server to download YouTube videos, since direct download is not allowed.

In other cases, the datasets were just for research and academic purposes. However, the company routinely downloaded them for commercial purposes, violating the license. The leak comes as AI companies are facing growing legal pressure over how they train their systems.

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