3 Count: AI Bypass

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Ministers Block Lords Bid to Make AI Firms Declare Use of Copyrighted Content

First off today, Rachel Hall at The Guardian reports that ministers in the UK parliament have used an “arcane” procedure to block an amendment backed by the House of Lords.

The UK parliament is considering a sweeping AI bill granting broad copyright exemptions to AI companies. However, the UK’s House of Lords passed an amendment requiring such companies to disclose what copyright-protected work they used to train AI systems.

Using its financial privilege, the House of Commons has blocked that amendment. It claimed that no budget was available for such a regulation, effectively scuttling the amendment. The bill has been widely protested by the UK creative industries, including famous musicians, actors and authors.

2: Major VPN Providers Ordered to Block Pirate Sports Streaming Sites

Next up today, Andy Maxwell at Torrentfreak writes that a French court has ordered some of the largest virtual private network (VPN) companies to block access to some 200 pirate domains.

French law allows rightsholders to request blocking measures against suspected pirate sites. Until now, the blocking order only applied to local internet service providers (ISPs). However, many in the country would use VPNs to skirt such blocks and reenable access to pirated content.

As such, the court ruled that the regulation not only applies to local ISPs but also to third-party services, including VPN providers. Those providers protested the effort, saying it represented an overreach of the law. However, the court disagreed and ordered them to block the domains.

3: Anthropic Lawyers Apologize to Court Over AI ‘Hallucination’ in Copyright Battle With Music Publishers

Finally, today, Daniel Tencer at Music Business Worldwide reports that lawyers representing the AI company Anthropic have apologized for an incorrect citation, but claim that it was not a case of their AI hallucinating a non-existent source.

Several music publishers filed the lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the company committed copyright infringement when using music they control to train various AI systems. In a recent filing in the case, Athropic cited a study that did not exist, leading to allegations that the lawyers used AI to draft the filing and that it had hallucinated the citation.

Anthropic has not denied using AI to write the filing but said that the source was an error. Specifically, they claim they got the paper’s name and authors wrong. Lawyers for Anthropic said they manually checked all the citations but missed this particular error.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.