3 Count: Copyright Pivot

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1: Tribunal Wonders if Microsoft Has Found a Legal Hero After Pivot to Copyright Gambit

First off today, Richard Speed at The Register reports that Microsoft has pivoted in a long-running case against ValueLicensing by alleging that the resale of perpetual licenses was a copyright infringement.

ValueLicensing is a company that resold licenses for Microsoft products, most notaly Microsoft Office. ValueLicensing sued Microsoft in 2021 in the UK after Microsoft added language in its customer contracts that barred the reale. ValueLicensing has argued that such resale is legal under the UsedSoft case and that Microsoft’s actions cost them £270 million ($360 million) in profits.

However, Microsoft says that Microsoft Office is a creative work and that it should be protected under the Copyright and Information Society Directive. The matter will go before the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which will have to rule whether Microsoft’s new arguments are valid.

2: Paz Lenchantin Song Scrubbed From the Internet Following Plagiarism Allegations

Next up today, Jazz Monroe at Pitchfork reports that Paz Lenchantin, the former bassist for the Pixies, is returning with a new solo ablum entitled Triste. However, the album is facing controversy as the lead single, Hang Tough, is being accused of plagiarizing an earlier work.

When the single was released, several noticed similarities between it and the Brazillian song Cálice, which was by Chico Buarque and Milton Nascimento. The song’s authors filed a notice in August alleging that Lenchantin’s was an infringement. The story also received broad coverage in Brazil.

However, Lenchantin pulled Hang Tough from the album and released Triste without the song on it. Lenchantin declined to comment on the story.

3: The Platform Exposing Exactly how Much Copyrighted Art Is Used by AI Tools

Finally today, Dan Milmo at The Guardian reports that the copmany Vermillio has created a “neural fingerprint” that can be used to track when AI uses copyright-protected work.

To demonstrate how it works, the company embedded the fingerprint into pre-existing work and then asked Google’s Veo3 tool to make similar videos. In one case, they found an 80% match ebtween the generated video and their fingerprint. In a similar test with OpenAI’s Sora, that shot up to 87%.

Google and OpenAI both acknowledge that their systems train on publicly-available works, but claim that it is fair use to do so.

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