Copyright news (Aug 21)
Social security number data breach; Europeana publishes 1,000 stories; separating AI copyright 'clickbait' from legal precedent
Data Breach
Hackers may have stolen the Social Security numbers of every American. Here’s how to protect yourself (LA Times, 13 Aug)
“According to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the hacking group USDoD claimed in April to have stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, which offers personal information to employers, private investigators, staffing agencies and others doing background checks. The group offered in a forum for hackers to sell the data, which included records from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, for $3.5 million, a cybersecurity expert said in a post on X.”
How to Check if Your Information Was Compromised in the Social Security Number Breach (Time, 17 Aug)
“Cybersecurity firm Pentester compiled a free database after the breach with the information in it—redacting social security numbers and dates of birth– and created a search tool for people to see if their information was involved. People can enter their name, state, and year of birth here, and the search will instantly look for information in the billions of records leaked online in the massive data breach.
Events
CIDOC 2024 (Rijksmuseum)
“The CIDOC 2024 conference will be hosted at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam from 11-15 November 2024. Everything is connected. The stories museum collections tell, connect people with ideas and events across the globe. Research and documentation practices are increasingly collaborations between institutions, communities, and other stakeholders. And now more than ever networks of knowledge are built in the digital space too.”
Law & Lawsuits
Disney wants a wrongful death lawsuit thrown out because the plaintiff had Disney+ (NPR, 14 Aug)
“After a doctor suffered a fatal allergic reaction at a Disney World restaurant, Disney is trying to get her widower's wrongful death lawsuit tossed by pointing to the fine print of a Disney+ trial he signed up for years earlier…
The reason it says Piccolo must be compelled to arbitrate? A clause in the terms and conditions he signed off on when he created a Disney+ account for a monthlong trial in 2019.”
Disney wrongful death lawsuit over allergy highlights danger of fine print (USA Today, 14 Aug)
“Sadly, Disney could very well have a viable argument here,” University of Buffalo law professor Christine Bartholomew said. “The Supreme Court has, time and again, treated these arbitration provisions as binding. It doesn't matter if it's in fine, teeny tiny print in the terms of conditions.”
Disney reverses course on bid to block wrongful death lawsuit by widower who had Disney+ (CNN, Aug 20)
“In a statement to CNN, Piccolo’s lawyer Brian Denney said that though Disney had withdrawn its motion to arbitrate, those legal clauses still exist across Disney’s platforms, including on its streaming services and park entrance tickets – posing a similar legal risk for other people in Piccolo’s position.”
Copyright Moderation on YouTube following the implementation of Article 17 CDSMD (Kluwer Copyright Blog, 14 Aug)
“research conducted under the HORIZON Europe project ReCreating Europe, and recently published in the Policy & Internet journal, suggests that YouTube’s disclosed figures may under represent the actual extent of copyright moderation. Our study focused on the effects of Article 17 of the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSMD) on copyright moderation practices, comparing Germany and France—two EU member states of similar size and population but differing in their timing of CDSMD implementation.
Our findings indicate a significant underreporting of copyright-related takedowns, as many removals were attributed to “unknown reasons” or “deletion of associated YouTube account,” which we argue are often indirectly related to copyright moderation.”
India’s broadcasting bill is an exercise in state control (Financial Times / Index on Censorship, 19 Aug)
”"Last week, the Indian government withdrew the broadcasting services (regulation) bill 2024 following heavy criticism. But withdrawal does not mark the end of the government’s ambition to control online speech.The broadcasting bill proposed giving the government expansive powers and included vaguely defined provisions that left individual content creators, alongside platforms, at the mercy of an untested regulatory framework.”
Shein sues Temu over copyright infringement, alleges rival loses money on every sale (CNBC, 20 Aug)
“Chinese-linked fast-fashion giant Shein is suing rival Temu, alleging the retailer stole its designs and built an empire using counterfeiting, intellectual property infringement and fraud.
The suit, filed Monday in Washington, D.C., federal court, comes as Shein itself fends off similar allegations from a wide variety of brands and independent artists, including Levi Strauss and H&M.”
Olympics
French song 'Nightcall' by Kavinsky breaks two world records after Paris Olympics closing ceremony (Euronews, 14 Aug)
“Since the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games on Sunday evening, Kavinsky’s ‘Nightcall’ has become the song to be Shazamed the most times in a single day on the famous music recognition app.
What's more, 10:50pm on Sunday 11 August was the most Shazamed minute in history.”
J.K. Rowling and Elon Musk Named in Cyberbullying Lawsuit Filed by Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif After Olympic Win (Variety, 13 Aug)
In a statement sent to Variety, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office (National Center for the Fight Against Online Hatred), confirmed it received the complaint filed by Khelif and announced that an investigation had been launched. “On Aug. 13, (The National Center for the Fight Against Online Hatred) contacted the OCLCH (Central Office for the Fight Against Crimes Against Humanity and Hate Crimes) to conduct an investigation into the counts of cyber harassment due to gender, public insult because of gender, public incitement to discrimination and public insult because of origin.”
Preservation
Celebrating 1000 stories on Europeana.eu (Europeana, 19 Aug)
“More than 300 different people or organisations have been part of this achievement. This summer, we've reached a milestone that’s exciting and significant for both us and our partners - there are now 1,000 stories on the Europeana website!…”
The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age (MIT Tech Review, 19 Aug)
“while all this data is plentiful, it’s also more ephemeral. One day in the maybe-not-so-distant future, YouTube won’t exist and its videos may be lost forever. Facebook—and your uncle’s holiday posts—will vanish. There is precedent for this. MySpace, the first largish-scale social network, deleted every photo, video, and audio file uploaded to it before 2016, seemingly inadvertently. Entire tranches of Usenet newsgroups, home to some of the internet’s earliest conversations, have gone offline forever and vanished from history. And in June this year, more than 20 years of music journalism disappeared when the MTV News archives were taken offline.”
Excellent article about how fragile data is, and the steps that are and can be taken to preserve it! - Matt
CT teen curates tech museum in his attic, showcasing historic innovations (WSHU Public radio, 12 Aug)
“Eighteen-year-old Jay Babina spends hours on end each week focused on technology. But he’s not scrolling on social media; most of the time, he’s not even using a smartphone. Instead, he’s downloading a new program onto the first-ever Mac computer or wiring two Alexander Graham Bell-style telephones together.
That work goes toward what Babina calls the Westport Tech Museum, where he amassed more than 400 pieces of technology that he’s researched, curated and displayed in his attic in Westport, Conn.”
Guy Plugs A Record-Breaking 444 Video Game Consoles Into A Single TV (Kotaku, 14 Aug)
“Al-Nasser lives in Saudi Arabia and has an enormous collection of retro gaming machines and collectibles, as well as newer hardware like the PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch. And all of it is plugged into a single, comparatively small display so that he can swap between any system at any time.”
Game Theory: Doom + Doom II is a beautiful museum of blood and guts (AV Club, 16 Aug)
“The most basic version of gaming archeology, in 2024, tends to come off in the most mercenary of ways: Studios and publishers selling the public slightly polished versions of 5-year-old games designed to be modestly “remastered” to work on new consoles, where they’ll sit in your digital library right next to three other versions of the exact same game. On the far side of capitalism, meanwhile, fan efforts to keep old video games playable and available—abandonware, emulation, fan remakes, etc.—exist permanently in a legal gray area, always just a single cease and desist letter away from vanishing into the ether. In the middle ground, though, there do exist teams working to not just re-sell old games, but to preserve and curate them…
Besides including pretty much every official id Doom title (which already includes a number of fan-made levels curated together by the studio in the years after Doom‘s initial 1993 release), [Doom + Doom II] also collects together some of the best of the best of the thousands of mods made for both games.”
Indigenous rights
Recognizing Indigenous Interests: Labeling DSI with Provenance Metadata - Policy Brief (v2, 24 Aug)
Jane Anderson, Maui Hudson, Stefany RunningHawk Johnson, KatieLee Ridde
“Indigenous lands, resources and Traditional Knowledge (TK) are regularly the source or subject of genetic research, however, information about that source is often absent, obscured or missing from source metadata. The information systems that have been built to store and share genetic material also lack the critical capacity to reflect Indigenous provenance or cultural authority. This is a significant issue, as Digital Sequence Information (DSI) can now be generated with ease, and the general expectation is that it will be deposited in open data repositories. Recognizing Indigenous provenance in metadata and establishing appropriate attribution protocols has emerged as key mechanisms for alignment with the FAIR & CARE Principles as well as protecting the rights and interests of IPLCs in relation to their genetic resources.”
Reflecting on Sustainability: My First Six Months as Local Contexts Executive Director (Stefany RunningHawk Johnson, Local Contexts,
“We’ve been thinking, talking, and planning around the theme of sustainability — how do we make Local Contexts sustainable for the multi-generational work needed to achieve our mission of Indigenous data sovereignty? What does sustainability mean in different ways and in different areas? We are focusing in on four aspects: Governance, Adoption, Team, and Funding.”
Education
Why humanities are vital, not just science (Guardian, 14 Aug)
“Molly Morgan Jones, the director of policy at the British Academy, is right to warn that Michael Gove’s legacy is undermining workforce skills (A-level students choosing narrower range of subjects after Gove changes, 14 August). To contribute at work, and in society more generally, requires capabilities such as critical thinking, imagination and communication alongside technical skills. Humanities and social science are therefore vital, along with science and engineering.”
Bilingualism under threat: structured literacy will make it harder for children to hold on to their mother tongue (The Conversation, 11 Aug)
“From the beginning of the 2025 school year, all schools [in New Zealand] will be required to use structured literacy – also known as “phonics” or the “science of reading” – to teach children how to read. But the very nature of this approach to reading could cause bilingual children to lose their second language.
Structured literacy teaches children to decode the relationships between sounds and letters. Readers use decoding to “sound out” words they don’t recognise.
But teaching children decoding in English is different from teaching reading in other languages, which have different sound systems.”
Executives functioning
Ex-Google CEO says successful AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’ (Verge, 15 Aug)
Schmidt says: “If TikTok is banned, here’s what I propose each and every one of you do: Say to your LLM the following: “Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.”
That’s the command. Boom, boom, boom, boom.”
Former Google CEO blames work-from-home policy for company lagging behind OpenAI (TechSpot, 14 Aug)
"Google decided that work-life balance and going home early, and working from home, was more important than winning," Schmidt said. "And the startups, the reason startups work is the people work like hell."…
"I'm sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you're not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups."“
Kim Dotcom is being Megauploaded to the US for trial (Verge, 15 Aug)
“Kim Dotcom is being extradited to the United States to face long-standing criminal charges relating to his defunct file-sharing service Megaupload. The order was signed by New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith, according to Reuters, which said that “Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial.”
As the founder and former CEO of Megaupload, Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz) was accused by US authorities of having cost film studios and record companies over $500 million by enabling users to share pirated content.”
AI
Clickbait arguments in AI Lawsuits (will number 3 shock you?) (Authors Alliance, 15 Aug)
“Based on current research, AI tools can actually help authors improve creativity, productivity, as well as the longevity of their career…
[However] The authors and the public have little say in how the AI models are trained, just like how we have no influence over how content is moderated on digital platforms, how much royalties authors receive from the publishers, or how much publishers and copyright aggregators can charge users. None of these crucial systematic flaws will be fixed by granting publishers a share of AI companies’ revenue.
Copyright also is not the entire story. As we’ve seen recently, there are some significant open questions about the right of publicity and somewhat related concerns about the ability of AI to churn out digital fakes for all sorts of purposes, some of which are innocent, but others are fraudulent, misleading, or exploitative.”
Judge Orrick denies in part motion to dismiss: Sarah Andersen copyright lawsuit survives on claim of copyright and Lanham Act (Chat GPT is Eating the World, 12 Aug)
“In Sarah Andersen v. Stability AI, Judge Orrick issued his order granting in part the defendants’ motion to dismiss the DMCA CMI claims, contract claims, and breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing (against DeviantArt) with prejudice and unjust enrichment claim with leave to amend, but denying the motion on the key claim of copyright infringement, as well as the Lanham Act claims against Midjourney.
All told, this is a big win for Sarah Andersen and the other artist plaintiffs. A very big win. This was the first class action copyright lawsuit filed against AI companies.”
Microsoft Is Losing a Staggering Amount of Money on AI (Futurism, 31 July)
“The tech giant revealed that during the quarter ending in June, it spent an astonishing $19 billion in cash capital expenditures and equipment, the Wall Street Journal reports — the equivalent of what it used to spend in a whole year a mere five years ago….
While tech giants have been adamant that AI is a long game, analysts are becoming increasingly wary of the losses.
Last week, The Information reported that OpenAI could end up losing $5 billion this year alone, and could run out of cash in the next 12 months without any major cash injections.”
What happened to the artificial-intelligence revolution? (The Economist, 2 July)
“So far the technology has had almost no economic impact”
Startup using blockchain to prevent copyright theft by AI is valued over $2 billion after fresh funding (CNBC, 21 Aug)
“Story acts as a blockchain network that allows creators to prove they made a piece of content and are the intellectual property owners by storing their IP on the platform.
The firm’s tech works to protect individuals and entities’ IP by embedding terms associated with it, such as licensing fees and royalty-sharing arrangements, into smart contracts.”
Authors sue Anthropic for copyright infringement over AI training (Reuters, 21 Aug)
“The complaint, filed on Monday by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, said that Anthropic used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.”
When it comes to artists using GenAI, copyright law should protect the creative partnership (Tampa Bay Times, 21 Aug)
“Moving forward, copyright law should focus on embracing a creative partnership between AI and humans, fostering a collaborative environment in which the strengths of both can be maximized. Humans bring creativity, intuition, emotional depth and contextual understanding to the artistic process. On the other hand, AI excels in processing vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, incorporating diverse fields of knowledge into creative outputs and offering new perspectives and possibilities.”