3 Count: Labor Theft

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1: Microsoft Exec Called AI Scraping the “Largest Theft of Labor in Human History”

First off today, Ashley Belanger At Ars Technica reports that a recently unsealed document in the lawsuit between news publishers and OpenAI/Microsoft revealed that a Microsoft executive referred to AI training as the “largest theft of labor in human history.”

The statement was made by Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. He said that the practice of scraping content from the web and using it as a training dataset for AI models is a “complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.'” The unsealed documents also revealed the harm to many rights holders, noting a 83-93% drop in click-through rates when offering AI-generated results.

News publishers, headed by the New York Times, is hoping that this evidence will be enough to convince a judge and/or a jury that Microsoft and OpenAI’s use of their content without permission is not fair use. The lawsuit itself is ongoing.

2: Court Upholds Belgian Pirate DNS Blocking Order, OpenDNS Exit Looms

Next up today, Ernesto Van der Sar at TorrentFreak writes that, in Belgium, a judge has upheld a broad site blocking order that will require many DNS providers to block access to suspected pirate sites.

The blocking order, which is the first in the country, was obtained by the sports streaming service DAZN. It requires Google, Cloudflare, OpenDNS and other public DNS providers to block access to several allegedly infringing sites, prompting OpenDNS to announce that it will cease providing its services in Belgium altogether.

The DNS providers challenged the order but that appeal has been denied. The order has not been published, so we don’t know what sites are part of it, However, the law requires DNS providers to not only comply with the existing order, but to block new infringing sites and domains as they are discovered. According to OpenDNS, this is impractical, prompting them to announce that they will likely depart the country.

3: Sony Music, Universal Music Group Sue Suno Over Label-Backed Model: ‘Fruit of the Same Poisoned Tree’

Finally today, Corbin Bolies at Variety reports that Sony Music and Universal Music Group have filed a new lawsuit against the AI music company Suno, this time alleging that Suno’s latest model is just as infringing as it previous ones.

The two companies are already embroiled in a lawsuit with Suno over how its previous models were trained. However, with the introduction of the new v6 model family, Suno claimed that its model had been trained on licensed and otherwise non-infringing content.

According to the music companies, Suno’s new model was trained on the outputs of the previous models, which were in turn trained on unlicensed music. The lawsuit seeks statutory damages, attorneys’ fees and injunctive relief.

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