Brandon Butler

So, you may have heard of this hot new platform called...Substack? We may be a little late to the party, but we're coming out swinging with thoughts on how maybe the boring-est part of the '76 Copyright Act is maybe having some big consequences in the AI age.

Bad Hostage is one of my favorite client projects. It's as smart, empathetic, and no-bullshit as the main character, a single mother who was taken hostage by a couple of desperate hippies but realized the police were a bigger threat to her life. youtu.be/xRxcuhbIigo...

Obviously, it’s quite difficult to opine on an opinion that hasn’t been published. But the news today that @ROSSIntel has lost its appeal in the third circuit does leave room for a couple of general observations regardless of the details.

We will see what the court’s opinion actually says by way of justification, but there is really nothing they can say that would render this outcome reasonable under current copyright doctrine, or desirable as a policy outcome.

Obviously, it’s quite difficult to opine on an opinion that hasn’t been published. But the news today that @ROSSIntel has lost its appeal in the third circuit does leave room for a couple of general observations regardless of the details.

Creating new useful tools that make public domain information more publicly accessible is the kind of thing praised by courts in cases like Feist and Google Books.

Obviously, it’s quite difficult to opine on an opinion that hasn’t been published. But the news today that @ROSSIntel has lost its appeal in the third circuit does leave room for a couple of general observations regardless of the details.

It leaves in place a toxic oligopoly of legal research titans, who have built an empire by locking up the law and selling it back to us.

Obviously, it’s quite difficult to opine on an opinion that hasn’t been published. But the news today that @ROSSIntel has lost its appeal in the third circuit does leave room for a couple of general observations regardless of the details.

The goal of headnotes is not to express anything at all, but rather to capture and reproduce as accurately as possible, already existing public domain expressions, facts and ideas.

Obviously, it’s quite difficult to opine on an opinion that hasn’t been published. But the news today that @ROSSIntel has lost its appeal in the third circuit does leave room for a couple of general observations regardless of the details.

Second, Ross should’ve won. The raw material they copied in the process of training their AI tool wasn’t really expressive content at all.

Obviously, it’s quite difficult to opine on an opinion that hasn’t been published. But the news today that @ROSSIntel has lost its appeal in the third circuit does leave room for a couple of general observations regardless of the details.

Over 300 news execs are flying to DC today to tell Congress to kneecap anonymous tools that reporters need to hold powerful people (like big news publishers) accountable. They're pushing the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act to get an AI windfall, even if it makes crucial journalism about the web illegal.

I'm not the only one saying this. Web scraping has been a key method in some of the most important accountability journalism of this century. Check out this interview with @JuliaAngwin.com and @nabi.bsky.social about their amicus brief in defense of scraping: themarkup.org/newsletter/...

Over 300 news execs are flying to DC today to tell Congress to kneecap anonymous tools that reporters need to hold powerful people (like big news publishers) accountable. They're pushing the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act to get an AI windfall, even if it makes crucial journalism about the web illegal.

According to this story, it sounds like the bill is the result of these bigwigs talking to Congress at their last fly-in, and legislators asking them to come up with legislation they could rally around to show they were 'doing something' about 'bad bots.' digiday.com/media/conde...

OpenAI’s attorneys dropped a bombshell brief yesterday informing the court that the allegedly neutral scientific study of market effects submitted by the plaintiffs in their class action suit had actually been funded by the plaintiffs’ law firm, Sussman Godfrey. (Link below)

This all comes after A. Feder Cooper, a respected researcher on AI and hardly a shill for the AI companies, leveled serious substantive critiques of the study, including a subtle reference to Chakrabarty’s funding: afedercooper.info/whack-a-mole/

OpenAI’s attorneys dropped a bombshell brief yesterday informing the court that the allegedly neutral scientific study of market effects submitted by the plaintiffs in their class action suit had actually been funded by the plaintiffs’ law firm, Sussman Godfrey. (Link below)

If you reported on that study about the alleged market effect of AI use on self-published Amazon books, you may want to update your story. @WillOremus @sashrogel @xanalter

OpenAI’s attorneys dropped a bombshell brief yesterday informing the court that the allegedly neutral scientific study of market effects submitted by the plaintiffs in their class action suit had actually been funded by the plaintiffs’ law firm, Sussman Godfrey. (Link below)

Plaintiffs tried to get this study in at the last minute by laundering it through another expert witness, and when that witness was asked whether Sussman had funded the study, he said he didn’t think so. The Sussman lawyer defending the deposition didn’t correct him.

A new essay from @RSI makes several crucial points about who really benefits if the @nytimes and vulture capitalists Alden Global Capital win their big lawsuit over AI training. Hint: it ain't local news. www.rstreet.org/commentary/...

In addition, by crushing, crippling, or driving up the cost of the AI tools already in use at many local papers, the big news oligarchs would strip them of powerful newsgathering and reporting capabilities.

A new essay from @RSI makes several crucial points about who really benefits if the @nytimes and vulture capitalists Alden Global Capital win their big lawsuit over AI training. Hint: it ain't local news. www.rstreet.org/commentary/...

The action around OpenAI's case and, uh, fretting over mass extinction or whatever, might have distracted us, but the Doe v. Github AI case had a meaningful ruling last week. It's the case about MSFT Co-Pilot code-writing AI, with claims that focus on outputs.

As @joemullin explains, the court recognized that creating a new work with genAI is not the same as making a copy. So when a genAI tool outputs code that might include a snippet that matches the training data, that output is not a "copy" that has CMI "removed" - it's a new work.

The action around OpenAI's case and, uh, fretting over mass extinction or whatever, might have distracted us, but the Doe v. Github AI case had a meaningful ruling last week. It's the case about MSFT Co-Pilot code-writing AI, with claims that focus on outputs.

As I pointed out in a recent blog post, even AI critics strip CMI as part of their textual analysis work. It's just best practice in computer analysis, whether for AI training or for other purposes. recreatecoalition.org/without-fai...

The action around OpenAI's case and, uh, fretting over mass extinction or whatever, might have distracted us, but the Doe v. Github AI case had a meaningful ruling last week. It's the case about MSFT Co-Pilot code-writing AI, with claims that focus on outputs.

As part of its package of anti-piracy measures, the DMCA includes a provision that says you can't remove CMI from a copy of a protected work. The goal was to penalize pirates who would strip out watermarks or other markings that rightsholders use to indicate their ownership.

The action around OpenAI's case and, uh, fretting over mass extinction or whatever, might have distracted us, but the Doe v. Github AI case had a meaningful ruling last week. It's the case about MSFT Co-Pilot code-writing AI, with claims that focus on outputs.