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On Friday, Magistrate Judge Wang denied a motion to compel discovery brought by defendants Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI in an action relating to defendants’ use of plaintiff New York Times’ copyrighted works to train defendants’ large-language models.

Defendants sought to compel the production of plaintiff’s use of, and statements about, AI tools, asserting the evidence was relevant to their fair use defense. Plaintiff argued that the request was “neither relevant nor proportional to the needs of the case.”Continue Reading Magistrate Judge Wang: New York Times’ AI Use Not Relevant to Microsoft’s Fair Use Defense

On Monday, Judge Cote granted a motion to dismiss claims that George Santos, former Congressman, brought against Jimmy Kimmel, ABC, and Disney regarding “Cameo” videos by Santos that Kimmel featured on his show, Jimmy Kimmel Live! Cameo is “a website that allows fans [] to request personalized video messages from public figures and celebrities.” Defendants, using fake names, submitted a number of “ridiculous” requests to Santos for such videos, and Santos created fourteen videos in response. Kimmel subsequently used some of these videos for a segment on his show, in which he “ask[ed] his audience ‘Will Santos Say It?’ before playing the video in full.”Continue Reading Judge Cote: Jimmy Kimmel’s Segment on George Santos’s “Cameo” Videos Constitutes “Fair Use”

In an opinion last week, Judge Koeltl denied a motion to dismiss brought by NBC and Peacock, which are accused of infringing the plaintiff’s copyright to two videos in connection with a documentary about Rudy Giuliani’s infamous press conference in front of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping business—widely speculated to have been intended to take place at the Four Seasons Hotel. One video was of the press conference itself, and the other depicted confrontations between supporters of Joe Biden and supporters of Donald Trump.

Judge Koeltl rejected the defendants’ argument that using the videos as part of a documentary “forgives all copying” as fair use:Continue Reading Judge Koeltl: Producing Documentary Does Not “Forgive All Copying” as Fair Use

In two complaints filed last week, The Intercept Media, Inc, Raw Story Media, Inc. and AlterNet Media, Inc. became the latest companies to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Intercept also included Microsoft as a defendant.

Both complaints were filed by self-identified “news organizations,” and allege that those organizations’ copyrighted works were used to train OpenAI’s generative AI systems, ChatGPT, on how to mimic human speech and writing. According to the news organizations, when deciding what information to include in the training materials fed to ChatGPT: Continue Reading Copyright Infringement Lawsuits Against OpenAI and Microsoft Are Mounting

In a decision Friday, Judge Koeltl ruled that the Internet Archive (“IA”), the nonprofit entity behind the popular “Wayback Machine,” committed copyright infringement through its program of scanning and lending digital copies of copyrighted books to the public. IA advanced a type of “fair use” defense that it called “controlled digital lending,” arguing that an…

In an opinion last week, Judge Cote dismissed a copyright infringement case brought by the maker of certain “HomeGirl Hotline” TikTok videos against the comedian Michael Che, arising out of sketches on Che’s television show involving a fictional mobile app called “homegrrl.”

Both the plaintiff’s videos and Che’s sketches generally involved calling upon a “homegirl” to help in social situations, the former via phone call (the “HomeGirl Hotline”) and the latter via mobile app (“homegrrl”). In one TikTok video, for example, “the dispatched HomeGirl throws a cheating husband’s belongings out of the house,” and in one of Che’s television sketches, a “Homegrrl” is dispatched to assist a male driver who gets into a car accident with a female driver.
Continue Reading Judge Cote Concludes That the Concept of “Hiring a Homegirl” for Help in Social Situations Is Not Protectable Under Copyright Laws

In an opinion Thursday, Judge Swain granted judgement on the pleadings to the makers of the musical Vape, declaring that under the “fair use” doctrine, Vape does not infringe on the copyright in the classic theatrical work Grease.

Vape holds itself out as a parody of Grease. The copyright holders argued that rather than commenting on Grease itself, Vape merely ripped off elements of Grease in order to critique “society writ large.” Judge Swain disagreed:Continue Reading Judge Swain: Musical Parodying the Misogyny of Grease is “Fair Use”

In an important copyright ruling today, Judge Rakoff ruled that “embedding” material online — in this case, a news organization embedding in an article a video of a polar bear that the plaintiff posted on Instagram — could violate the copyright laws. He rejected the “server rule” by which there could only be infringement in cases where the defendant makes a copy of the image or video to display from its own server.  Under the server rule, merely embedding the material (essentially, displaying the material via the original source) cannot be infringement.

Judge Rakoff found that the server rule was “contrary to the text and legislative history of the Copyright Act”:
Continue Reading Judge Rakoff Finds that “Embedding” Photos and Videos Online Can Infringe Copyrights, Rejecting “Server Rule”

In an opinion today, Judge Swain concluded that it was “fair use” for to the makers of the NBA 2K video games to depict players’ tattoos (see our prior coverage here). Judge Swain had earlier concluded the fair use defense was not enough to dismiss the case on the pleadings, but, following discovery, today concluded that summary judgment was appropriate.  She found that the factors used in determining fair use all favored the video game maker.
Continue Reading Judge Swain: Depicting NBA Players’ Tattoos in Video Game Is “Fair Use”